LOVE OF COUNTRY: A HEBRIDEAN JOURNEY
MADELINE BUNTING, GRANTA, £18.99
“As early as the 1800s visitors were already complaining of sharing their visit,” with others in search of “wilderness, solitude and contemplation”, writes Madeline Bunting of the island of Staffa. It’s sort of comforting to know that even then people were trying and failing to escape each other. This Hebridean journey is both a personal one, to recapture the islands of Bunting’s childhood holidays, and a historical one, tracing the islander identity.
Bunting finds rewards from braving the inhospitable conditions and shorelines, “no friend to boats or people”, borrowing from Virginia Woolf or George Orwell to evoke the feeling of going ‘north’, to the edge of the continent.
By the 18th-century’s end, the Hebrides were drawn into Britain’s impulse to map itself, of people’s desire to know the country and themselves, opening it up to an influx of visitors, writers and artists who recorded their emotional responses to its landscapes and isolation. Keats lamented in a poem that his fellow visitors could “Unweave/All the magic of the place”.
With increasing commerce and industry came the transfer of the islands from its people to landowners, leading to the ruthless eviction of their inhabitants, the repercussions of which are still felt today.
Bunting weaves together the islands’ rich culture with her own experience of feeling “both at home and abroad” on these uninviting but welcoming islands.