For city dwellers heading for the beach, hill or village, many are revisiting their roots
There’s nothing like living in a city to make you appreciate, even idealise the countryside. For the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, life in London in the late 1880s made him yearn for the green hills of County Sligo which he had known in his youth, and this yearning gave rise to one of his most popular poems, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”. “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree” it begins, almost as if the poet is psyching himself up to hightail it out of the big smoke with its “pavements grey” the moment he’s put down his pen. To anyone actually eking out a living from the land in the west of Ireland at the time, however, the young Yeats’s plan to build a hut “of clay and wattles made” and live an idyllic existence where “midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, / And evening full of the linnet’s wings” would probably have seemed somewhat over-optimistic. They might also have pointed out that he would probably require more food that could realistically be supplied by “nine bean-rows... and a hive for the honey bee,” poetic as that sounds.
But of course, Yeats wasn’t writing a crofting handbook or some sort of survival guide for aspiring backwoodsmen – he was doing what poets have done at least since Virgil penned his first Eclogue: dealing with the claustrophobia of urban life by imagining himself somewhere rural.
On Thursday, Edinburgh publishers Polygon released a new collection of poems by the late, great Norman Maccaig. Entitled Between Mountain and Sea – Poems from Assynt ,it contains 140-odd poems focusing on the titular chunk of northwestern Scotland, its people and its spectacular, land-that-time-forgot mountains, and it comes with a foreword by the poet’s son, Ewen Maccaig, who enjoyed many happy family holidays in Assynt as a boy,
and an introduction by the academic Roderick Watson.
Much like Yeats, Maccaig often wrote about Assynt when he wasn’t actually there. In his foreword, Ewen Maccaig writes: “Almost no poetry was written when he was in Assynt. This was partly because it was crowded out by other activities but mainly because this was a time for refuelling. The poetry came later.”
Unlike Yeats, however, Maccaig didn’t find city living unpleasant – far from it. In “Assynt and Edinburgh,” written in 1991, he describes them as “Two places I belong to as though I was born in both of them / They make every day a birthday, / giving me gifts wrapped in the ribbons of memory.”
Still, there’s definitely a sense in some of these poems that Maccaig is sitting in Edinburgh dreaming of Assynt. In “Two men at once” he reflects on how easy it is to be two people “One smiling and drinking coffee / in Leamington Terrace, Edinburgh. / The other cutting the pack of memories / and turning up ace after ace after ace.”
Maccaig worked as a primary school teacher for much of his life, and this enabled him to spend long summer holidays in the north-west, where, over the years, he made some firm friendships. Two men he became particularly close to were the crofter Donald Macleod, better known as Pollóchan, and Angus Macleod, who worked maintaining the road between Inverkirkaig and Achiltibuie. Both men feature frequently in these poems, at times as archetypes or almost mythical characters (at one point Pollóchan is referred to as “sauntering Orpheus”). Ewen Maccaig suggests his father felt that these men represented “all that was best and most characteristic about the Assynt people”. He also theorises that, due to his father’s sense of being an outsider on his mother’s native Scalpay, due to his lack of Gaelic, he was keen to be accepted in Assynt: “he was, in a sense, seeking his roots.”
And I wonder, at this time of year, as Scotland’s schools break up for the summer, and families in the nation’s towns and cities pack up their cars and their caravans and their camper vans and head for the hills and the beaches and the out of the way places: how many people involved in this annual mass migration will be returning to a favourite location? And how many of those people, consciously or otherwise, will be travelling there for the same reasons that Maccaig travelled to Assynt – not just to enjoy the peace and the beauty of it all, but also seeking their roots; not necessarily because these are their ancestral homes but because – clichés aside – home really is where the heart is.
As Maccaig says in his poem “A man in Assynt”: “Who possesses this landscape? – The man who bought it or I who am possessed by it?” Norman Maccaig: Between Mountain and Sea - Poems from Assynt, Polygon, £9.99
How many in this annual mass migration will be returning to a favourite location?