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Location, Delocation, Relocation in 21st‑Century Scottish Wayfaring Narratives

Espace, déplacement, replacement dans la littérature viatique écossaise du xxe siècle
Camille Manfredi

Résumés

Cet article se penche sur une sélection de récits de voyage par des auteurs et historiens britanniques contemporains et prête une attention particulière à la façon dont les voyageurs se saisissent du sublime hérité du romantisme dans le contexte politique, idéologique et environnemental de l’Écosse de ce début du xxie siècle. Les pratiques des écrivains voyageurs seront abordées dans le cadre du tournant spatial des années 1980 tel que le résume Paul Smethurst — « la reconfiguration de l’espace à travers ses représentations en littérature » (Smethurst dans Kuehn & Smethurst, 2015, p. 97) — et depuis l’approche géocritique de ce que Michel de Certeau qualifie de « récits spatiaux » (Certeau, 1984, p. 115).

Le regain d’intérêt pour la littérature viatique s’inscrit dans le contexte des débats contemporains portant sur la propriété foncière, l’indépendance et les effets du tourisme de masse. Cette dynamique se manifeste dans la manière dont les auteurs du xxe siècle refusent toute posture nostalgique au profit d’une attention portée aux transformations engagées, répondant ainsi à ce que Gérard Cogez désigne comme la « fonction intentionnelle » du récit de voyage (Cogez, 2014, p. 188). À partir d’un corpus comprenant des récits de Linda Cracknell (Doubling Back. Ten Paths Trodden in Memory, 2014), David Gange (The Frayed Atlantic Edge. A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel, 2019), et Malachy Tallack (60 Degrees North. Around the World in Search of Home, 2015), ainsi que le projet Lines Lost de Stuart McAdam and Simon Yates (2013), cet article propose une analyse fondée sur l’approche rythmo-analytique de Lefebvre. Il propose l’émergence en Écosse d’une nouvelle forme de littérature de voyage dite « responsable », caractérisée par la valorisation de la lenteur comme modalité de résistance à la postmodernité, une immersion sensorielle dans un environnement post-naturel et une prise de distance vis‑à-vis de la culture technologique, dans les cadres conceptuels du « post-tourisme » (Bourdeau, 2012) et du « voyage transmoderne » (Corneloup, 2011).

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Introduction

1In 2022, Taproot Press released a collection of essays by Arctic traveller and botanist Isobel Wylie Hutchison (1889–1982). Compiled and transcribed by Hazel Buchan Cameron, Peak Beyond Peak comprises twelve accounts of Hutchison’s travels across and around Scotland, spanning the first half of the century. There, Hutchison follows the tradition of Scottish travel writing by women that includes Elizabeth Isabella Spence (1768–1832), Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) and Nan Shepherd (1893–1981), as she tells of her “strolls” from Edinburgh to London in 1948, to John O’Groats in 1952, up Ben Lomond, to the Western Isles, Shetland and Orkney. In the last essay titled “Famous Literary Shrines of Scotland”, Hutchison travels to those places that became world-wide famous thanks to Burns, Stevenson or Buchan, and keeps returning to what she terms “Scott country”, that “charming, little, gay, lovely” Scotland that was so often extolled by the Romantics:

The gardens in the charming little street of Luss were gay with roses, which hung in festoons about the windows as we drove to the little pier where lake steamers call to look at the lovely Ben, whose pointed cone was mirrored across in the dark blue water a little to the north.

Tucked away amid the hills behind Ben Lomond lies lovely Loch Katrine, celebrated by Scott in The Lady of the Lake.

     One burnished sheet of living gold,
     Loch-Katrine lay beneath him rolled.
(Wylie Hutchison, 2022 [1956], p. 224)

  • 1 “The new geographical paradigm that emerged in the late 20th century out of deconstructionism and p (...)

2In the mid‑20th century, the approach to Scotland’s landscapes and to travel writing is still largely characterised by an interest in quaintness and local colours, the Romantic idea that the (allegedly pristine) natural world brings aesthetic, physical and moral regeneration, and that—in Thoreauvian terms—walking returns the walker to their senses (Thoreau, 1862). With this in mind, this article offers to consider contemporary travelogues written by Scottish and English writers and historians with a view to examining how 21st‑century travellers question the Romantic sublimity inherited from their predecessors in today’s political, ideological and environmental context. Here I focus on the practices of travel writers whose investigations of Scotland will be viewed within the frame of the spatial turn of the 1980s—the “reconfiguration of place through its multi-perspectival representations in literature” (Smethurst in Kuehn & Smethurst, 2015, p. 97)—and the geo‑critical perspective in its approach to what Michel de Certeau famously termed “spatial stories” (Certeau, 1984, p. 115).1

  • 2 See H. V. Morton, In Search of Scotland, 1929, and its well-known dedication “To Scotland, wherever (...)

3Of course, the notable resurgence of interest in travel writing in devolved Scotland is bound to be informed by the local debates on land ownership, independence and the threats of mass tourism. This is perceptible in the way that the 21st‑century travel writers who are the focus of this article resist the temptation to romanticise an imagined, pre‑Clearances Scotland, instead focusing on how the land has changed over the centuries and on bearing witness to that change. Contemporary travels “in search of Scotland”2 will not only seek to promote the territory through its natural, cultural and historical heritage: they will also review or, in Lefebvre’s preferred verb, re‑“produce” a territory that, some argue, remains largely “un‑discovered” (Tallack, 2016), or worse, “unremembered” (Baker, 2020). The point for these writers is then to de‑romanticise Scotland by embracing and extolling the social nature of the land.

Emotional geographies

  • 3 See Edensor (2012) and Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (Éléments de rythmanalyse, Paris, Syllepse, 1992), (...)

4English historian David Gange’s year-long kayak journey along the coasts of Atlantic Britain and Ireland is a good example of what Philippe Bourdeau terms “post-tourism” and Jean Corneloup “transmodern wayfaring”—or seafaring for that matter: a project that values slow movement as resistance to postmodernity, deep sensory immersion in the natural environment and a clear break from technological culture.3 This is coupled in The Frayed Atlantic Edge with a proclaimed desire to “reread” the land away from the traditional, that is, Anglocentric (“not just landlocked but largely London-locked”, Gange, 2019, p. 340), view of both human and natural history. If the challenge remains to “test [his] character” (“the battle is against nature and against the over-socialized self”, p. 93), in the end it all comes down to Gange’s professional ethics and to him becoming “a more rounded and responsible historian of the British Isles” (p. 5):

[…] our historical narratives are not just incomplete stories about the British and Irish islands; they are ethically unsuited to today’s world. […] In their place can be built narratives that show the frictions: the geographical unevenness, the pain and the visceral resistance to two centuries of rapid change that were once envisaged as heroic progress but are recognised as more problematic with every year that passes. […] Recovering the voices of the small-scale fisherman, the coastal crofter and the leaders of threatened communities is among the best methods we have of building histories that aren’t triumphalist propaganda for the events that created the problems of our present. (Gange, 2019, pp. 340–341)

5He later reflects that

Coastal pasts allow us to recognise the intertwining of human and ocean worlds as well as the many trajectories that have led our communities to this fractured present. They are thus good places to start. (Gange, 2019, p. 344)

6Part history, part experience, part travel diary, The Frayed Atlantic Edge promotes a form of nomadic displacement that, to Gange, conditions the much-needed decentring of historical narratives embedded within the overarching notion of “progress”, here reduced to “triumphalist propaganda”. While bridging the gap between geo‑history, social history and natural history, and thus also between historical research and nature writing, Gange’s travelogue also seeks to review, repair, and “recover” that which has been misrepresented, damaged, or lost.

  • 4 After Glenn Albrecht, from solacium, comfort, and algos, pain: a longing for a lost home.

7In his foreword to Linda Cracknell’s collection A Wilder Vein, Robert Macfarlane contends that the renewed interest in nature writing from Scottish writers derives from a sense of loss and “delocation”, which he likens to a form of solastalgia:4

As a species we are now experiencing solastalgia as never before, and the new literature of place registers this experience, and weighs it. In this regard, unexpectedly, it can be thought of as familial with post-colonial literature—founded as it is on an awareness of displacement and dispossession. (Macfarlane in Cracknell, 2009, p. ix)

  • 5 “Where we are only truly makes sense in so far as it relates to where we have been and where we wan (...)

8In today’s Scotland, knowing of the great trauma of the Lowland and Highland Clearances, the overlapping of environmental and post-colonial preoccupations is anything but “unexpected”. Yet the sense of dispossession that Macfarlane refers to, this pining for a lost home, whether it be personal or collective, is indeed a constant in recent Scottish wayfaring narratives. Malachy Tallack’s travel book and memoir Sixty Degrees North subtitled Around the World in Search of Home (2015), is another case in point: there, Tallack embarks on an exploration of the lands that lie along the 60th parallel, from Shetland to Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Siberia, Scandinavia and back to Shetland. A descriptive meditation on place, community, home and exile, emplacement and displacement, Sixty Degrees North starts with the author’s experience of grief and subsequent search for “home”, that is, for “an image of [his] location”, and a renewed understanding of “where [he] stands in [his] surroundings”.5 The travel book ends on a bittersweet note, with Tallack leaving Shetland and moving south to settle in Glasgow, after he realised that his journey had only brought him back to the same sense of estrangement and “homelessness” that he had felt a year before:

[…] there is another kind of homelessness […]; that is the ailment with which, from an early age, I was afflicted. For much of my life I felt myself to be exiled from a home that no longer existed, and which in some sense never really had. In her book, The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym described this feeling as ‘akin to unrequited love, only we are not sure about the identity of our lost beloved’. For me that feeling arrived with our move to Shetland, and was compounded by the loss of my father. It became a hole within which I tried, desperately, to find form. Like the north, home is defined in its absence, in the distance between longing and belonging. But, like the north, it is only through intimacy, through love, that it can come to be known. (Tallack, 2015, p. 214)

9In Doubling Back: Ten Paths Trodden in Memory (2014), Linda Cracknell also sets on a series of journeys on foot to “repair a rip” in what she calls her “mental” and “emotional geographies”: her project is also, like Tallack’s, one of self-exploration and self-healing, all in all most reminiscent of Certeau’s much-quoted claim that “to walk is to lack a place” (Certeau, 1984, p. 103). In Cracknell’s essay titled “Outlasting our Tracks”, the land aligns with the author’s emotional state: Scotland is split into two distinct territories by the Great Glen Fault, and the topography turns psychomorphic.

This rift also delineates the half of Scotland I chose, and the other half that my ex‑partner, Neil, chose. The lochs deepened and schisms grated further apart once we were entrenched on either side. We hadn’t lost touch since the final division seven years before, but we’d avoided each other’s immediate territory, and that avoidance of an area where I’d once spent a lot of time, left something not quite resolved for me in my emotional geography. This time, on foot, on a route that led directly between my door and his, it began to seem a subconscious plot, as if the walk was a line of stitching to repair a rip. (Cracknell, 2014, p. 191)

10Just as Terry J. Williams, in Walking with Cattle, identified his task as “that of the weaver” (Williams, 2017, p. 43), Cracknell’s walk as “a line of stitching” provides us with a compelling metaphor for what Rebecca Solnit termed the “conversation” and “align[ment of] the mind, the body and the world” that is considered one of the psychological correlatives of walking, and more generally of all outdoor physical activities (Solnit, 2000, p. 5).

Memory walking

  • 6 “The intrinsic temporality of the taskscape, I argue, lies in its rhythmic interrelations or patter (...)

11In 21st‑century Scotland, this realignment of the fractured self with the territory entails engaging or “reconnecting” with more than just the land, and through more than just physical exertion. However diverse their practices might be, transmodern travellers are neither able nor willing to picture “Natural Scotland”, as it is labelled by the tourist industry, as some pristine ahistorical wilderness. Rather, they enter an ecological variant of Edward Soja’s Thirdspace, where nonhuman (that is geological, elemental, and zoological) elements coexist with the forces of history (Soja, 1996). The Scotland whose trails they walk and whose coasts they sail or kayak along is never viewed as “wild” or empty: the territory is an archive, and all acknowledge the historicity of a Scotland whose coastlines, parks, reserves and wildlife areas are synthetic human-made spaces and monuments to a past that remains highly traumatic, that of the Clearances. Gange and Cracknell alike therefore pay particular attention to the traces of archaeological interest that they encounter along the way: Scotland’s built heritage, markers of coastal trade routes, ruins of summer shielings that line the shore and hills, walls, fences, burned mounts and cairns, those artefacts of Scotland’s agricultural past that are part of its social, temporal landscape—or, to quote Tim Ingold, of its “taskscape”.6

  • 7 The online Scottish Gaelic Dictionary Am Faclair Beag defines the machair, plur. machraichean as “L (...)

12Although these ruins are still able to bring aesthetic pleasure to their beholder, the main feeling conveyed is one of discomfort, a sense of wrongness that is not just some form of nostalgia or melancholic yearning for a long-lost pastoral Scotland. As he kayaks along the coast of Orkney, Gange reports that “today, the sacredness of Quandale is in its emptiness. The holiest sites, perhaps, are the 19th‑century ruins: monuments to the victims of the lairds” (Gange, 2019, p. 81) and later, as he comes across coffin roads, that “when nineteenth-century landlords cleared ancient communities from the Atlantic coasts, all that remained to link the present to the past were cemeteries scattered in the machair” (p. 96).7 When in Sutherland, he observes that

[…] these are hills of remembrance, not careless ecstasy […]. Here, more than anywhere else in Scotland, the viewer is struck cold by a wholly modern emptiness. […] The modern population of Sutherland is half what it was in the early nineteenth century. […] The hardships and injustices of that period are such that when the poet Sorley MacLean’s brother, Calum, first visited Sutherland he wrote that looking on these hills is enough to ‘make any thinking Highlander feel murderous’. It requires little alertness from the traveller through large unpopulated tracts, such as Cape Wrath itself, to find evidence in stone and scarred land of the shielings, crofts and field systems from which people were gradually, violently, extirpated. (Gange, 2019, pp. 126–127)

13Like Gange, Cracknell walks through Clearance areas that are not just uninhabited but forcibly emptied of their tenants, and where she experiences “the sense at times of a haunted, abandoned landscape” (Cracknell, 2014, p. 177). Yet, when she passes the ruins of long-abandoned summer shelters in Skye, her quiet acceptance of the ghosts of previous travellers suggests a sense of cross-temporal mutual recognition and companionship between different peripatetic groups who have repeatedly walked the same trails across the same landscape over time.

Passing sheilings reduced to tumbled stone and still surrounded by an oasis of green in the high glens, I sometimes fancy I glimpse faces from the corner of an eye, or catch the murmur of voices—curious at a traveller passing. But they didn’t discomfort me as the relics left from the deliberate clearance of people from the Highlands do, perhaps because sheilings were always intended to be temporary. (Cracknell, 2014, p. 208)

14The operative word here is “temporary”: Cracknell’s relationship to place is permeated with an acute sense of loss and dispossession that is particularly palpable when she comes across ruins, but she is careful to resist museumising the outdoors or lapsing into paralysing solastalgia. There is a difference, she argues, between the ruins that are indicative of residential history and those, like shielings, that bear witness to older forms of transience and long-gone relational geographies.

  • 8 See the chapter entitled “The Memory Path”, where Baker relates his walk from Braemar to Glen Clova (...)
  • 9 “A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape, and to follow a route is (...)

15Interestingly enough, these relational geographies are at the core of many 21st‑century wayfaring narratives whose authors re‑envision the vernacular land system of rural Scotland by re‑walking its ancient roads, paths, trails and cattle-droving routes. Recent years have thus seen the re‑issue of A. R. B Harlane’s The Drove Roads of Scotland (2019 [1952]), the release of Terry J. Williams’s Walking with Cattle. In Search of the Last Drovers of Uist (2017), of Patrick Baker’s The Unremembered Places (2021),8 of Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), of Cracknell’s Doubling Back (2014)… all of these based on the principle of repetition—or rewalking as pilgrimage,9 as Cracknell has it:

our modest body of people and animals moving as one across an ancient-feeling landscape in Scotland was an ‘unnecessary’ journey but felt connected to a stream of time and legacy of working journeys with animals. I’d envisaged it being a bit like a medieval pilgrimage; a flock of us grouping and regrouping as we moved, stories told along the way, and more created. (Cracknell, 2014, p. 166)

  • 10 The collection was adapted by BBC Radio 4 in 2018.
  • 11 In July 2016, Linda Cracknell tutored a creative writing course titled “Jessie Kesson: Words in the (...)

16In Doubling Back,10 Cracknell “retrea[ds] former ways first with feet and then with words” (p. 215) by walking in the footsteps of others, such as Thomas Hardy (“The Opening Door”, in Cornwall), Jessie Kesson (“Dancing, Kicking up her Legs”, near Abriachan),11 the walking artist Hamish Fulton (“Stairway to Heaven?”, in Spain) or her own father (“Outlasting our Tracks”, in Switzerland). Her re‑enactments read as deliberate acts of resistance to estrangement and oblivion: the point is to “re‑learn” the land, to “reclaim” some form of place-related identity whose texture has frayed over time. In other words, to relocate herself: “by keeping the paths beaten, our feet earn the right to be here. […] We’re not contained by fences or perimeters, but share alliance to the path”, she writes (pp. 240–241).

  • 12 The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012) is the third volume of a bestselling trilogy, which also com (...)
  • 13 Refers to movement through a place in response to spatial cues and the layout of the environment.

17Likewise, five of the sixteen essays that feature in Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot12 are devoted to the author’s retracing of old routes and paths of the Outer Hebrides (“Water—South”, “Water—North”, “Peat” and “Gneiss”) and the Cairngorms (“Granite”). There, Macfarlane writes in “commemoration and recollection” (p. 185) of the old cairned shieling and work paths, of the seaways and coffin trails that once ran across the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. He places himself under the guidance of local passeurs—namely the poet and artist Ian Stephen, the natural historian and novelist Finlay MacLeod and the archaeologist and cartographer Anne Campbell. He invokes Nan Shepherd, Kenneth White, Thomas A. Clark and George Eliot; he nods to Neil Gunn, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Borrow, Matsuo Basho, William Wordsworth and many other walker-writers, “dawdlers, dreamers, striders, guides, pilgrims, wanderers, stravaigers, trespassers, cartographers” whom he has either read or met along the way (Macfarlane, 2013, p. 32). Like Gange and Cracknell, Macfarlane displays a strong personal interest in the words of the land, in “acts of verbal landscaping” through which the memory-walker can “take reading of the land” (pp. 194, 133). The Old Ways thus offers itself as a mnemonic, territorial and intellectual investigation of place along its multiple narrative paths and “ghost-lines” (p. 21). At the same time as all of these wayfaring narratives are chronotopic in the sense that they interweave space, time and narrativity, narration is here topokinetic:13 space engenders language as much as language engenders space.

Creative reclamations

18During the past decades, treading the land “in the footsteps of” or “in the shadow of” writers, poets or artists has become a most popular activity in Scotland. In 2013, Scottish poets Ken Cockburn and Alec Finlay travelled “in fellowship with” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, encountering local poets along the way, while creatively revisiting, reinterpreting and re‑enacting the two authors’ 1773 journey to the Hebrides.14 In the autumn and winter of 2013–2014, as part of the Hielan’ Ways project, walking artist, performer and producer Simone Kenyon led a group of walkers along the former trading routes of the North East of Scotland, “in the footsteps of Nan Shepherd’s sensibility”.15 The list is long of projects that have aimed at providing the general public with information about the cultural history, natural history, politics and “feel” of the landscape being walked through. What is particularly interesting about these projects is that they reconfigure the outdoors as simultaneously private (approaching nature as the writer’s “home” decor) and public (considering nature as a scene of artistic creation, production, dissemination and enjoyment) in a way that is bound to echo with issues of community engagement, access legislation, creative activism and social sustainability. By narrating and reimagining historic routes, writers and artists not only contribute to their cultural visibility and significance but also encourage preservation efforts and educational initiatives in a powerful feedback loop between literary representation and cultural promotion.

19Indeed, complementing these literary endeavours, recent interest in the research and promotion of old routes has generated a significant number of cultural projects aimed at, in the words of Heritage Paths, “revitalising Scotland’s historic paths for the future”. In 2010, with the financial support of ScotWays and SNH, Heritage Paths launched a three-year project to identify and reopen the pathways that once structured the social landscape of Scotland: pilgrimage routes, trading, shieling and miners’ paths and Roman, military, drove, coffin and turnpike roads, all later remediated via interpretive signs, topo-guides, online learning resources and interactive maps.16 During the 2015 edition of the Environmental Art Festival Scotland, Professor David Munro curated a project entitled “Walking with old maps”, a guided walk using maps from 1740 onward, looking at the patterns of landscape change. In 2014, during her residency with Deveron Arts, walking artist Gill Russell worked to map/remap both existing and imagined paths in the Hielan’ Ways area.

  • 17 “Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects; etc., the trajectories it ‘speaks’”  (...)

20Another of these re‑walking projects was commissioned by Deveron Arts and launched during the Huntly Room to Roam Festival in August 2013. Lines Lost took groups of walkers along the former Portsoy to Huntly railway line in a series of return journeys led by Glasgow-based walking artist Stuart McAdam and English mountaineer Simon Yates. The project was designed as a peripatetic act of creative reclamation, a collaborative performance aimed at exploring the transport legacy of the North of Scotland. It sought to retrace some of the branch line routes that were cut following the 1963 Beeching Report, which caused the mass closure of railways and loss of many local services in the area. The dedicated website states that by walking the former track again and again, McAdam and Yates hoped to “reawaken a route that had been subsumed into the landscape—like remains of ghostly traces of the line that once linked communities” (McAdam, 2015)—hence the photographs of discarded rail cars and dismantled tracks displayed on the related website, video and guidebook. In addition to the straight line that prevented improvisation or “stravaiging”, McAdam and Yates were roped up as they walked, in a material metaphor of the “lifeline of outlying communities” that they sought to retrace. Lines Lost was launched in the spirit of re‑enactment and pilgrimage. The project was part of a research initiative prompting reflection on the past and present perceptions of the environment, as well as on the way communities relate to the much broader political forces that shape their social and phenomenological experience of space. As the group sometimes had to trespass into private property, issues of land access, land use and land ownership were quick to resurface. McAdam and Yates’s practice of group walking contributed to recreating a community of perception whose members were encouraged to question their own narratives of space by engaging in creative actions that would, in turn, release counter-narratives of the space (re‑)travelled through. To quote from Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life, each path is a statement and “speaks” trajectories:17

if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements. […] The walker transforms each spatial signifier into something else. (Certeau, 1984, p. 98)

21Lines Lost is then, in Richard-Long style, a line made by walking. It is also a narrative for the walkers to read—“each of these trails held a story” (Williams, 2017, p. 68)—and write over: the territory is a palimpsest.

Meshworks

22What is striking in all these wayfaring narratives and performance pieces is their common interest in the “reticular trails”, “pathways, networks, meshworks”, and “archi-textural entanglements” of the rural space (Lefebvre, 1974, p. 117), as well as in the anthropological determinants that attest to prior social practices of the land. The act of walking, rewalking, or kayaking, in Gange’s case, then becomes one of resistance against erasure, an active search for a heightened state of awareness of the presence-absence of the past, and most specifically, of the way the Clearances have shaped the land. As I have argued elsewhere, any attempt to sanctify a Scottish “wilderness” in the early 21st century is bound to appear anachronistic, if not deliberately intended to induce cultural amnesia (Manfredi, 2019).

  • 18 “Non dysphoric” in the sense that it does not generate emotional discomfort or distress.
  • 19 “Just as shifts in the structural organization of cultural production alter the form of the art com (...)

23The Romantic enjoyment of the Scottish landscape is therefore replaced by its intellection as a comprehensive, chronotopic and non‑dysphoric relational zone.18 Travel writing in 21st‑century Scotland is as much a spatial practice as it is an intellectual one. Transmodern wayfaring comprises an element of Nan Shepherd’s “journey into being”: one walks to achieve better self-knowledge, to test one’s character in the great outdoors, and/or for therapeutic purposes. But these walking cures are more often than not to be approached as collective endeavours, intent as they are on acquiring, or rather retrieving, “a geographically and historically located practical knowledge” of the land (Edensor, 2000, p. 82). The acute sense of loss that is experienced by travelling through Clearance areas leads to the cultural creation of new practices and territorialities aimed at reconfiguring the writers and artists’ sense of place (their Dùthchas) and place-attachment: their “locational identity”—in Miwon Kwon’s words, “a cultural valorization of places as the locus of authentic experience and coherent sense of historical and personal identity”.19

24“Natural” or rural Scotland is re‑travelled and re‑trodden as a territory that is anything but unwritten, undocumented, “unremembered” or undifferentiated, “a surface to be traversed” or overcome, and a land whose occupants have no agency over. Rather, it is spatially, culturally, socially rich and diverse, lined with dynamic pathways for all to “bind together” and thus reclaim. In the words of Tim Ingold, “a tangled mesh of interwoven and complexly knotted strands”. In Walking with Cattle, Terry Williams contends that “the Highlands of the eighteenth century would have been a land in motion” (Williams, 2017, p. 25). Transmodern wayfarers would contend that in the 21st century, they are a meshwork in the making, after Ingold’s conception of wayfaring, wherein he asserts that

To the wayfarer, […] the world is not presented as a surface to be traversed. In his movements he threads his way through this world rather than routing across it from point to point. Of course the wayfarer is a terrestrial being, and must perforce travel over the land. The surfaces of the land, however, are in and not of the world, woven from the lines of growth and movement of inhabitants […]. What they form, as we have already seen, is not a network of point‑to-point connections, but a tangled mesh of interwoven and complexly knotted strands. Every strand is a way of life, and every knot a place. Indeed the mesh is something like a net in its original sense of an open-work fabric of interlaced or knotted cords. But through its metaphorical extension to the realms of modern transport and communications, and especially information technology, the meaning of ‘the net’ has changed. We are now more inclined to think of it as a complex of interconnected points than of interwoven lines. For this reason I have found it necessary to distinguish between the network of transport and the meshwork of wayfaring. The key to this distinction is the recognition that the lines of the meshwork are not connectors. They are the paths along which life is lived. And it is in the binding together of lines, not in the connecting of points, that the mesh is constituted. (Ingold, 2011, pp. 151–152)

25The contemporary re‑engagements with rural Scotland examined in this article do not trace or retrace routes across neutral ground. Instead, they participate in the healing of landscapes that remain deeply scarred by colonial history. To return to the spatial turn and its “reconfiguration of place through its multi-perspectival representations in literature” (Smethurst in Kuehn & Smethurst, 2015, p. 97), these endeavours are a way of resisting erasure of the trauma of the Clearances, and a means of threading new lines through a meshwork that binds history into the present, allowing place, memory, and most of all movement to converge in a living, dynamic geography.

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Bibliographie

Baker Patrick, 2021, The Unremembered Places: Exploring Scotland’s Wild Histories, Edinburgh, Birlinn.

Blaton Casey, 2002, Travel Writing. The Self and the World [1997], London / New York, Routledge.

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Notes

1 “The new geographical paradigm that emerged in the late 20th century out of deconstructionism and postmodernism is characterised by its theoretical pluralism and, in particular, by its interest in the poetics of interaction between literature and space(s), that is, in ‘spatial stories’§. Geography is now thought of as combining spatial referentiality and textuality, with the latter encompassing both fiction and nonfiction. Contemporary geographers and geocritics such as Jacques Lévy and Bertrand Westphal contend that space and geography are to be approached as discourses and hence as cognitive constructs divided into ‘genres’ that can be either verbal or non‑verbal, sequential or non-sequential, and that pertain to distinct identifiable operations and communication strategies ranging from the interpretative to the argumentative or reconstructive (Lévy, 1999, p. 187)” (Manfredi, 2019, p. 2).

2 See H. V. Morton, In Search of Scotland, 1929, and its well-known dedication “To Scotland, wherever it may be”.

3 See Edensor (2012) and Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (Éléments de rythmanalyse, Paris, Syllepse, 1992), on rhythm and improvisation in the production of space.

4 After Glenn Albrecht, from solacium, comfort, and algos, pain: a longing for a lost home.

5 “Where we are only truly makes sense in so far as it relates to where we have been and where we want to be. In order to move in a purposeful way, to avoid wasting our time and endangering our lives, we must build an image of our location, and where we stand in our surroundings. We must make maps” (Tallack, 2015, p. 14).

6 “The intrinsic temporality of the taskscape, I argue, lies in its rhythmic interrelations or patterns of resonance. At first glance the opposition between landscape and taskscape seems to mirror that, in the field of art, between painting and music. However, by considering how taskscape relates to landscape, the distinction between them is ultimately dissolved, and the landscape itself is shown to be fundamentally temporal” (Ingold, 2000, p. 154).

7 The online Scottish Gaelic Dictionary Am Faclair Beag defines the machair, plur. machraichean as “Long ranges of sandy plains fringing the Atlantic side of the Outer Hebrides […] closely covered with short green grass, thickly studded with herbs of fragrant odours and plants of lovely hues” (Am Faclair Beag, available on <www.faclair.com>).

8 See the chapter entitled “The Memory Path”, where Baker relates his walk from Braemar to Glen Clova along Jack’s Road, the old droving road along which cattle were brought from Highland pastures to the Lowland markets.

9 “A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape, and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation, or to stalk your predecessors on it as scholars and trackers and pilgrims do. To walk the same way is to reiterate something deep; to move through the same space the same way is a means of becoming the same person, thinking the same thoughts. It’s a form of spatial theater, but also spiritual theater, since one is emulating saints and gods in the hope of coming closer to them oneself, not just impersonating them for others. It’s this that makes pilgrimage, with its emphasis on repetition and imitation, distinct amid all the modes of walking” (Solnit, 2000, p. 68).

10 The collection was adapted by BBC Radio 4 in 2018.

11 In July 2016, Linda Cracknell tutored a creative writing course titled “Jessie Kesson: Words in the Landscape” at Moniack Mhor Creative Writing Centre, near Beauly. This “place-inspired” workshop replicated the project that was at the core of Doubling Back; it included a walk through the landscape of Abriachan “tracing the footsteps of Jessie Kesson” and was followed by a writing session.

12 The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012) is the third volume of a bestselling trilogy, which also comprised Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination and The Wild Places, published in 2003 and 2007, respectively.

13 Refers to movement through a place in response to spatial cues and the layout of the environment.

14 In 2010, Finlay and Cockburn set out on a journey through Scotland that was to be a modern day and Scotland-based actualisation of Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North.

15 Available on <www.deveron-projects.com/Simone-Kenyon/> (accessed 2 March 2026).

16 Available on <https://scotways.com/heritage-paths/> (accessed 2 March 2026).

17 “Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects; etc., the trajectories it ‘speaks’” (Certeau, 1984, p. 99).

18 “Non dysphoric” in the sense that it does not generate emotional discomfort or distress.

19 “Just as shifts in the structural organization of cultural production alter the form of the art commodity (as service) and the authority of the artist (as primary narrator and protagonist), values like originality, authenticity, and singularity are also reworked in site-oriented art—evacuated from the art work and attributed to the site—reinforcing a general cultural valorization of places as the locus of authentic experience and coherent sense of historical and personal identity” (Kwon, 2002, p. 52).

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Camille Manfredi, « Location, Delocation, Relocation in 21st‑Century Scottish Wayfaring Narratives »Études écossaises [En ligne], 25 | 2026, mis en ligne le 09 avril 2026, consulté le 11 juin 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises/7312 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/161mo

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Auteur

Camille Manfredi

Université de Brest, HCTI, F‑29200 Brest, France
camille.manfredi@univ-brest.fr
 
Camille Manfredi is a professor of Scottish literature and visual arts at the University of Brest in Western Brittany. Her published work includes the monographs Alasdair Gray : le faiseur d’Écosse (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012) and Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), as well as the edited volumes Alasdair Gray: Ink for Worlds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Brittany-Scotland: Contacts, Transfers and Dissonances (CRBC, 2017). She is the co‑editor, with Marie‑Odile Pittin‑Hédon and Scott Hames, of Scottish Writing after Devolution: Edges of the New (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), and, with Lindsay Blair, of Intermedial Art Practices as Cultural Resilience (Routledge, 2024).

Camille Manfredi est professeure de littérature et arts visuels écossais à l’Université de Bretagne Occidentale. Parmi ses publications figurent les monographies Alasdair Gray : Le faiseur d’Écosse (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012) et Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), ainsi que les volumes collectifs Alasdair Gray: Ink for Worlds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) et Bretagne-Écosse : contacts, transferts et dissonances (CRBC, 2017). Elle a également co‑dirigé les volumes Scottish Writing After Devolution: Edges of the New avec Marie-Odile Pittin-Hédon et Scott Hames (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) et Intermedial Art Practices as Cultural Resilience avec Lindsay Blair (Routlege, 2024).

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