Love of Country: a Hebridean journey
MADELEINE BUNTING

Madeleine Bunting has long felt the magnetic pull of the Hebrides, part of a childhood fascination with “the North”. Her family had always holidayed in the same remote Scottish village, which she loved so much it felt like home, though home was really Yorkshire. This sense of belonging rippled outward to encompass the whole of Scotland, lasting into adulthood and making her think about home and belonging and the part the islands have played in the way Britain has been imagined for centuries. And so she set out to explore the Hebrides and their history.

It is a promising start. And indeed, the ­passages about land and seascape are vivid: midges swarming over Rùm, the giddiness of the notorious Corryvreckan whirlpool, the vast bleakness of the Lewisian moor. The history too, is fascinating. The Clearances loom large, those villages across the Highlands and Islands whose inhabitants were summarily evicted by their landlords and forced into boats for Canada, leaving rural Scotland forever emptier. That episode is but the saddest chapter in the longer, wider story of wrongs inflicted on the Gaelic peoples living on this “edge”. Sometimes it was the English, more often in terrible betrayal the Scots; some ills prevail still in the form of unacknowledged cultural appropriation and neglect.