Cameron’s Country
With one of the most imposing skylines in Scotland, the mountains of Assynt represent years of geological, historical and social upheaval
Cameron McNeish considers the works of poet Norman MacCaig and finds himself dreaming of Assynt
SITTING in my garden in Badenoch, I am surrounded by birch, Scots pine and cherry trees. The air is loud with birdsong as a wren holds court, scolding others who dare to come close to the little niche in the log pile where she has her carefully woven nest.
The sun is shining from an immaculate blue sky, the third such day in a row, and it’s hot – in the mid-20s – hot enough to make sitting still uncomfortable, so I’m restless, in body and in mind. I’ve been doing something I don’t do very often – reading poetry. And the verses I’ve been reading have encouraged that restlessness because my spirit is in Assynt.
Years ago my friend Duncan Chisholm, the great composer and traditional fiddler, made a profound – and some might say profane– statement.
“In the Beginning”, he said, “God made Assynt.”
“Torn and riven by Atlantic winds and frost, bare and pockmarked by scouring glaciers
Consider the enormity of that. Tongue in cheek it may have been but there is a hint of truth to it, the suggestion of age and antiquity, a landscape relic of a time before man.
And that’s where my mind has gone this morning, to a place as far removed from the green woods and shadowed glades of Badenoch as you could imagine, torn and riven
“Who possesses this landscape? The man it?” who bought it or I who am possessed by
by Atlantic winds and frost, bare and pockmarked by scouring glaciers, as though the bare bones of the earth were peeking through a thin and flimsy layer of wet soil. A place that lies near the most north-western reach of mainland Scotland, poised on the very edge of Europe. I was invited by the Cateran Ecomuseum in Perthshire to record a poem for an exhibition they were putting on. I chose A Summer Evening in Assynt by my favourite poet, Norman Maccaig, but as I browsed his collected works it was another poem that held my attention – A Man in Assynt. This is the poem that contains the much-quoted lines, “Who possesses this landscape? The man who bought it or I who am possessed by it?” Possessed by it. A relationship that goes beyond ownership, legal agreements and formal recognition, a relationship that in this case, suggests a one-way affair: “I can’t pretend It gets sick for me in my absence, Though I get sick for it. Yet I love it with special gratitude, since it sends me no letters, is never jealous and expecting nothing
from me, gets nothing but cigarette packets and footprints.”
No matter how much we love a place, however we rhapsodise about it, our relationship is limited.
Our love is not reciprocated. Perhaps we are better to regard that relationship as a form of kinship – that everything, the mountain, the loch, the woods, the seas, ourselves – are all part of the natural world, all part of this complex web of creation.
The mayfly on the river, with only a few hours of life, and the mountain that lasts an eternity, both belong to the same web as we do. We are related.
Maccaig believed it was Assynt’s geology that was the foundation of its beauty, a complexity of low hills laid on a bedrock of Lewisian gneiss, an ancient make-up that would give some credence to Duncan Chisholm’s remark.
Maccaig was a regular visitor to Assynt and stayed in rented accommodation first in Achmelvich then in Inverkirkaig in the shadow of Suilven’s great bulbous nose. And those who knew him believe he would have been happy to spend much of his time there.
His love poems to the area suggest a deep affinity that went beyond the natural world to those who lived and worked there, folk who scraped a living from the inhospitable land or from the storm-lashed seas.
Maccaig was very aware of the human history of Assynt and particularly the devastating effects of the Clearances. A number of years ago I made a television programme about the area and interviewed one of the directors of the Assynt Crofters.
As John Mackenzie spoke passionately about his
grandparents being cleared from good fertile ground to a strip of rocky land by the foreshore he had to stop several times to compose himself. In that moment I became very aware of the passions that are still simmering in this part of Scotland where crofters were treated little better than the animals in the fields.
Maccaig, too, felt deeply about the clearances. “…men trampled under the hoofs of sheep and driven by deer to the ends of the earth – to men whose loyalty was so great it accepted their own betrayal by their own chiefs and whose descendants now are kept in their place by English businessmen and the indifference of a remote and ignorant government.”
Thanks to Land Reform, those who live and work in Assynt now have more control of their destiny.
In 2005, shortly after the successful community buy-out of Assynt, the residents in Lochinver and the surrounding area bought the Glencanisp and Drumruine Estate from the Vestey family.
The area, a total of 44,400 acres (17,968 hectares), includes spectacular mountains and beautiful lochs – an awe-inspiring, wildlife-rich world. Included in the price was Glencanisp Lodge.
The Assynt Foundation, not to be confused with the Assynt Crofter’s Trust, was born.
These changes in ownership have taken place since the poet’s death in 1996 but what has remained is the unique landscape of the region.
Gaze on it from the “ruffled foreland” of Achnahaird and see this “frieze of mountains.”
But prepare to be possessed by it.