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A Sense of Place
Novelist and presenter of the Writing Scotland television series, Carl MacDougall,
introduces an online learning journey on the power of place in Scottish literature.
This is my country
The land that begat me.
These windy spaces
Are surely my own.
And those who here toil
In the sweat of their faces
Are flesh of my flesh
And bone of my bone.
From Scotland by Sir Alexander Gray
Scotland has a wealth of writers who are so closely identified with a particular place it is impossible to imagine their work being set elsewhere, even in another part of Scotland. From George MacKay Brown's Orkney, Sorley MacLean's Hallaig, the Mearns of Lewis Grassic Gibbon or Edwin Morgan's Glasgow, place has given Scottish writers a badge of identity as recognisable as their voice.
From the Kilmartin standing stones, lovingly celebrated by Neal Ascherson, or Orkney's prehistory, which informed and inspired George Mackay Brown, we look at the changes man has made to the land and how a place can characterise its inhabitants.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song sprang from the Mearns he both loved and hated; and the clearance of Hallaig on the Island of Raasay, where 120 families were transported in a single day, which energised Sorley MacLean's extraordinary poem, introduces earlier migrants. We ask what made their journeys necessary and note the changes their arrival and industry made to the expanding city of Glasgow.
The modernist redevelopment dream of the 1960s, which was initially celebrated by Edwin Morgan, collapsed into a failure reflected in the work of Andrew O'Hagan and other contemporary writers. When Denise Mina used the city as a setting for her detective fiction she chose an older, clearly identifiable place.
Though landscape has played a dominant role in Scottish literature, its function has changed. Sir Walter Scott saw the Highlands as a place where people were challenged. It was wilder and stranger than they had known. This came from a desire to create a new history. By freeing the landscape of its history, by making it less subjective, emancipated from religion, war, strife and political ideals, it became a place where adventure thrived, a romantic place where free spirited men lived simple, untamed lives. It became more attractive and therefore more communitarian. People wanted to identify with the ideals the landscape appeared to embody.
Yet Highland reality has made the place a running political sore for centuries. Attempts to emulsify the power of landlords and the crimes of the Clearances have meant city dwellers see the Highland hills as home. And the changing perspective is reflected in the work of Sorley MacLean and other Gaelic writers as surely as the grimy optimism of the industrial revolution was placed by Morgan's hope and O'Hagan's new beginnings.
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