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PLACES OF MEMORY So far I have been concerned with outlining some of the characteristics of the Sutherland Clearance narrative. It is not a isolated entity, exclusive to one region only, but is related to the wider narrative of the Highland Clearances, and beyond that to all narratives of eviction, emigration and exile. The notion of an objective history of the events in Sutherland in the early decades of the nineteenth century is illusory, the remembered and documented past is intrinsically plural being born out of individual subjectivity, and being constantly re-written in the light of every emerging present. This plural past is, however, defiantly consistent; this can be accounted for by a cognitive tendency to resolve contradictions through the construction of logical narratives into which we fit our disparate individual experiences. For this reason ‘history’ may be more accurately described as ‘myth’. Although certain accounts dominate, there is no single ‘authentic’ version of a myth and every new telling merely adds another layer of meaning onto an already infinitely complex matrix. As with other cultural groups whose ‘foundational myths’ may be said to revolve around the perceived injustices of the past, there is a resistance to forgetting. This gives rise to a culture of remembrance. Such an abstract state becomes tangible in practice: in the (inter)actions of individuals and groups, perhaps violently so. For example one informant told me how he had been involved in an arson attack on a lodge owned by a prominent public figure. Though he was heavily fined and nearly jailed, he admitted that he did not regret his actions, and saw it as “getting even” with the likes of those who had burnt his ancestors from their homes in Kildonan (although the Clearances were never mentioned in his family he is certain they were evicted in this violent manner). He has since conducted extensive genealogical research and has drawn up an elaborate family tree to give to his children. He told me that not a day passes without some mention of the Clearances, and believes that the preoccupation with the past in Sutherland will only end when Scotland achieves independence. As we have seen, myths—memories, histories—are transmitted in numerous ways: in the telling of personal stories, for instance, which Samuel and Thompson describe as the “currency” of social relationships (1990: 15), or else through reading the ‘memory-books’, whether histories, archival records, eye-witness accounts, novels or poetry. Discussing Nora, Hutton suggests that,
	The document was the quintessential form through which the modern historian remembered the past. But postmodern historians such as Nora place the document among the countless artifacts in which memory has been materialized. They shift the emphasis from documents themselves to the architectural places of memory in which they and other memorabilia are contained—in archives, museums, commemorative monuments (1993: 151).
Thus we may say that the ‘memory’ of the Clearances is also encountered in the jacket design of Prebble’s book, in the taped ‘recollections’ of my informants, in the postcards and wax-work dummies of a ‘visitor centre’, in the RCAHMS library, and in the many interactions of a school visit. In his study of the memorialisation of the Jewish Holocaust, Young takes Nora’s assertion a step further, he writes that
	The sites of memory are many and diverse, deliberate and accidental. They range from archives to museums, parades to moments of silence, memorial gardens to resistance monuments, ruins to commemorative feast days, national malls to a family’s Jahrzeit candle (1993: viii).
Even Young’s book may be regarded “as an extension of these spaces, part of the memory-work that animates them” (ibid.). All serve as mnemonic devices, keeping the knowledge of the Holocaust from obscurity. But more than this they also bring their different formal qualities to that recollection, generating different “textures” of remembrance, so that “every ‘memorial text’ generates a different meaning in memory” (ibid.). In the next section I focus attention on those ‘memorial texts’ manifest in the landscape itself.
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