PART TWO: LANDSCAPES a journey among monuments
	From the Gleann Mor to Beinn a’ Bhragaidh the bare hills tell their own story of unfinished business (Gibson 1996a: 2).
Whereas one tends to accept and enjoy the wide empty expanses of the Scottish Highlands unquestioningly—one forgets that this landscape is, as Frank Fraser Darling dubbed it, “a man-made wilderness” (quoted in Gibson 1996a: 2)—the ubiquitous presence of ruined croft houses and cairn-like remains of old settlement clusters demands an explanation. Such a demand cannot be ignored and therefore has a consciousness-raising effect. For Rob Gibson, SNP-Councillor and polemicist of Highland heritage issues, the landscape was instrumental in provoking his interest in the Clearances:
	“It’s not something that has come down as a folk memory to me. I have an interest as a historian of the Highlands. I mean, fundamentally, having walked the hills as a youngster and throughout my life, at various times I started to ask the questions about why there was so many empty houses when you’re walking out through glens. Why did this come about?” (Gibson pers. comm.).
a man-made wilderness... The site of Wester Badanloch
The question can be satisfied by ‘placing’ the ruins within a narrative: that of the Clearances. It is a process of emplotment. The ruins make sense in terms of stories told elsewhere: in history books, school visits, heritage centres, in a myriad other ‘places of memory’. The place and its memory have a dialectical relationship, each creating the other. The ruin is a metaphor for the Clearances: the whole of the Clearance story is written in every ruin. A SENSE OF PLACE Places do much more than merely arouse curiosity. “The deserted place ‘remembers’ and grows lonely,” writes Kathleen Stewart (1996: 156). It is as if the landscape itself ‘holds’ the memory of its past and tells its own story separate from, and even indifferent to, the subject who perceives it. It is a phenomenon Magritte alluded to when he said, “This is how we see the world…we see it as being outside ourselves even though it is only a representation of what we experience on the inside” (quoted in Schama 1995: 12). The thing signified becomes confused with its signifier, and we forget that it is within us that the memory-narrative dwells. “Once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referents” (Schama 1995: 61). We may experience a ‘sense of place’ as if it is emitted from or dwells in the place itself, an animus loci, but such a sense derives from ourselves, or rather from the juxtaposition of ourselves and that place together with the circumstances of the encounter. Place is what we invest in it and what it inspires in us.
	As vibrantly felt as it is vividly imagined, sense of place asserts itself at varying levels of mental and emotional intensity. Whether lived in memory or experienced on the spot, the strength of its impact is commensurate with the richness of its contents, with the range and diversity of symbolic associations that swim within its reach and move on its course (Basso 1996: 85).
We do not encounter ‘place’ naïvely. If we sense it, it is because we consciously or unconsciously know it—or know something of it—already. “Knowledge of place is not…subsequent to perception…but is ingredient in perception itself” (Casey 1996: 18). The landscape is never inert, never a material tabula rasa awaiting inscription, but is always already embedded within webs of personal and cultural narratives, memories and associations. The same informant who was responsible for the burning of the shooting lodge told me that he walks in the hills around Kildonan nearly every day. That he feels very much a part of them. He believes that the hills and old settlements are inhabited with spirits and he consequently never feels alone on his excursions. It is a feeling others share. Another informant, a crofter whose ancestors had also been evicted from the Strath of Kildonan, told me that he, too, often walks the hills, and that whenever entering the ruins of an old dwelling he says aloud, “Biannachdan bitheach an seo,” one of the few Gaelic phrase he has known since childhood, a salutation which translates as “Blessed be here.” Even if the walls of such dwellings are now no more than low mounds under the turf, he always enters through their doorways. The Scots Magazine article quoted earlier attests to the fact that the sites of cleared or abandoned settlements in the Highlands may be regarded as places of pilgrimage. Indeed the heritage centres that dot the Highlands are frequently visited by ‘tourist-pilgrims’ from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa who have come in search of the sites of their ancestors’ homes. A couple from Arizona visited while I was at the Dunbeath Heritage Centre in Caithness. One of the Centre’s researchers was able to take them to the very place where their ancestors had lived. It was an emotional and very gratifying experience for all, made especially profound when they located the settlement’s old well, still full of crystal-clear water—a true source. Young describes how place may become infused with significance:
	By themselves, monuments are of little value, mere stones in the landscape. But as part of a nation’s rites or the object of a people’s national pilgrimage, they are invested with national soul and memory (1993: 2).
What is true of ‘national’ pilgrimages is also true of ‘personal’ pilgrimages. Indeed Berger has elaborated on the ontological import of such homelands and the significance of their loss—what it means to be exiled.
	Originally home meant the center of the world—not in a geographical, but an ontological sense. Mircea Eliade has demonstrated how home was the place from which the world could be founded. A home was established, as he says, “at the heart of the real.” In traditional societies, everything that made sense of the world was real; the surrounding chaos existed and was threatening, but it was threatening because it was unreal. Without a home at the center of the real, one was not only shelterless, but also lost in non-being, in unreality. Without a home everything was fragmentation (1984: 55-6).
The importance of knowing where one’s ‘roots’ lie is deeply felt, especially by those who feel they have in some way become distant from them. It is a sentiment expressed in many of the responses to the questionnaire, for instance:
	“I am deeply interested in my origins and roots. Without this interest I would consider myself an eternal refugee.” “Family history is a great help to orientate oneself in the world.” “I am the product of all my ancestors. Knowing about them helps me understand myself.”
One Californian respondent summed up his feelings towards the Highland landscape in the following terms:
	“I’m an American and proud to be one, but my roots are in Scotland and I’m very proud of that too. It is always highly emotional for me to visit Scotland, especially the Highlands, Caithness in particular. I have been moved to tears in Kildonan. Being in that part of the world makes me feel close to my ancestors and the country is like no other that I have visited.”
Through their pilgrimages to perceived ‘points of origin’ such people—local crofters as much as American tourists—connect their personal narratives to cultural narratives. “The consequence,” say Bruner and Gorfain,
	is to align individual biography with tradition…Meaning is individualised; culture becomes autobiography (1988: 73).
“Place acts dialectically so as to create the people who are of that place” (Tilley 1994: 26). By venturing there physically and mentally, we become a part of that place-story, it becomes part of us. A sense of place, of course, is not exclusive to those who have ancestral connections with the places concerned. Whilst my own experience of the landscapes of the Clearances is bound up in the stories I have read or have been told, it is also affected by my experience of other places, my own biography, the circumstances of my visit—the accessibility of the site and weather conditions for instance—and by my attempts to contextualise the experience within my research. For example, on a particularly wet and dismal afternoon I felt troubled as I moved around the remote and extensive remains of Achadh an Eas, cleared in 1821, where one of the key witnesses of the Sutherland evictions, Rev Donald Sage, lived and preached. Conscious that in the collusion of circumstances my imagination was getting the better of me I scribbled in my notebook as I walked:
	The effect of weather on the experience of place Achadh an Eas - a truly desolate spot Experience of place bound up in the snippets of stories one knows… Achadh an Eas - the remote place where Sage was sent as a missionary Birds like girls’ screams & sheep as shouting/groaning men - muffled by the wind and rain The lonely eyes of a derelict cottage - one doesn’t look into them lest they look back The imagination takes over - the desolate tree, the hanging man Writing these notes is comforting
Achadh an Eas, field of the waterfall
Reflected in my encounter with Achadh an Eas is the knowledge I have gleaned from my research, but such knowledge is dominated by a fantasy born from my sense of isolation and vulnerability (the eyes of the cottage, the hanging man!).
Next