Paul Basu - Narratives in a Landscape - Part Two

FURTHER EXAMPLES

Three final examples—a museum and two settlement sites—serve to further illustrate the complexity of the memorial texts of the Sutherland Clearances. Strathnaver Museum is situated in what was the Parish Church of St. Columba, Farr, itself one of the “focal points” of the Clearances. It was here in 1883, for instance, that Angus Mackay gave his testimony to the Napier Commission (see previous section). Having become derelict, the church was eventually re-opened as a museum in 1976. The “mission” of the museum, outlined in its constitution, is to “maintain and preserve for future generations a collection of the knowledge and material remains of the past way of life of the area and to ensure that this knowledge and its associated artifacts are available to the general public in the form of exhibitions or by any other means which the Trustees of the Museum find suitable” (Rudie 1994: 1). Unofficially it was established to tell the story of the Clearances at a time when few people outside the areas concerned had heard of them (Rudie pers. comm.). Grimble was one of the founding trustees of the museum, and like his The Trial of Patrick Sellar the displays have a veneer of plurality, but one which does not conceal the familiar (dominant) Clearance narrative. The walls of the museum are decorated with posters made by local school-children, one’s eye is drawn particularly to a picture of Chisholm’s house in flames, his mother-in-law (Sellar’s “old witch”) recumbent outside (see photograph opposite page 13). As well as recently reprinting Macleod’s Gloomy Memories, the museum produce a series of informative ‘fact sheets’ on different themes linked to the Clearances.

Achinlochy, a clearance settlement in Lower Strathnaver, can almost be seen as an extension of Strathnaver Museum. As well as an informative fact sheet, the museum have on display a scale model of the site as it may have appeared before the Clearances. The experience of Achinlochy itself, however, is summarised in Lowenthal’s statement that “the marked antiquity becomes an exhibit contrived for our attention” (1995: 265). It is devoid of any real sense of place. In the case of Achinlochy, we can agree with Lowenthal and say that the “paraphernalia of display” tends not only to orchestrate, but also to “dominate the view” (273). This is especially true of the recently installed name-plaque/cairn which could be described as a monument to a monument. Indeed, even though Achinlochy is a settlement site, it seems more like an intentional monument insofar as it has been remade to commemorate a specific set of events. Because of the obtrusive interpretive strategy employed, Achinlochy seems “monologic” in character.

Unlike Achinlochy, Badbae, near Ousdale, Caithness, remains inherently “dialogic” despite the paraphernalia of its display. It is a complex in itself, juxtaposing intentional and unintentional monuments and a somewhat dubious interpretation. Perched on poor, steep land on the top of sheer cliffs, Badbae was a coastal township built by families evicted during the Clearances. Because of its spectacular location and the fact that it is well-signposted on the main A9 road, it is frequently visited by local people and tourists alike. Whenever the name Badbae is mentioned one hears the story of how children and animals had to be tethered to posts in the ground to stop them from rolling down the hill and falling off the cliffs! Although the village is spread out along the cliff top, the visitor’s experience is focused on a large ‘intentional’ monument at its centre. This was erected in 1911 by New Zealander David Sutherland, from the stones of the cottage where his orphaned father had been brought up, to commemorate the residents who had lived at Badbae at the time. Unfortunately Sutherland was not able to supervise the inscription of its four plaques and when he returned to see the finished monument he was shocked to find many errors in the lists of names: some had been omitted, others had been inserted who had never lived there (Roydhouse 1977).

Thus the unintentional monument of the ruined cottage is appropriated and made into an intentional monument in the most literal of ways. But here is an intentional monument which unintentionally commemorates the wrong people! Yet even if one has no knowledge of the inaccuracies of the names on the plaques, there is an interesting contradiction in the nature of what is commemorated in the site. Whereas the interpretive boards emphasise the hardship and unpleasantness of life at Badbae, the monument itself is a celebration of its community. A member of the Caithness Field Club found further fault with the interpretive plaques and copied me a letter he had sent to Historic Scotland recommending an alternative text.

The present notice at the Badbae site…states that the initial occupants were from Sutherland. They actually came from Langwell Estate in Caithness. The notice implies that the settlement dates from 1840. It was actually started 47 years earlier! The phrase “many of them emigrating to New Zealand” is probably incorrect, only Alexander Sutherland with his new Brora wife appears to have gone from Badbae. These errors should be corrected.

However, at Badbae, the sense of place is still strong. Having glanced at the interpretive boards and gazed for a while at the names—any names—on the monument’s plaques, it is to the surviving ruins of the settlement that one wanders. The demands that these memorial texts make of us are each of a different quality. The monument and interpretive boards are designed for our attention, they ‘shout’ to us, asserting that they have something to tell us. The ruins, however, are indifferent. They are simply there and are even reluctant to give up their secrets. They make no claims. It is we who must approach them, and not without a certain reverence. Unaware or perhaps simply uncaring of the complications and contentions that exist at the site, a local lady summed up the aura of Badbae when she wrote to me,

This week I visited ‘Badbae’ (do so regularly), it is a site where people were sent to live because of the clearances. From there the majority went to New Zealand. There is a monument with the names of the people recorded on it. Such a bleak, rocky, steep site. One cannot imagine any one trying to scrape a living—yet I counted 10 houses in a small area. I should say ruins. For some reason this area draws me to it.

Perhaps it is better to leave the narrative intact rather than to cast aspersions in the name of ‘truth’, replacing “vivid simplicities”—certainties—with “academic ifs and buts,” a good story with a rather poor one.

…the fact that they may have a different version of history to ours does not make their version any less correct. Until we understand the nature of their version, how that past is a part of their present, we cannot dump our professional histories on their doorstep. There are many truths and there are many histories (Mackay 1990: 197).

In this section I have attempted to demonstrate, using a variety of memorial texts, how stories are told in, by and about place. Landscapes and narratives are inextricably embedded within each other. Places recall stories, stories recall places. But more than this they create and recreate each other. Beresford, in one of his classic studies of the deserted villages of England, describes his almost ritual peregrination between landscapes and archives, “the intellectual journey is always triangular: from field to archives, from archives to libraries and from libraries to the field” (1957: 19), this is necessary because place only becomes meaningful through its emplotment within a narrative. Whether we first hear of a place on our grandmother’s knee—as part of an oral tradition—or through delving into the records of the Royal Commission of Ancient & Historical Monuments of Scotland, for instance, we first come to know a place—and I mean come to recognise it as a place—by virtue of such narratives.

When I visited Grummore, Grumbeg, Rosal, and so on in Strathnaver, I did so because I had previously read of them or been told about them. By visiting them I sought something ‘concrete’ to attach the narrative: to make it ‘real’. The opposite was true of other sites, the Crofts of Benachielt, for example. For these, the journey began in the landscape and the destination I sought was the narrative in which to ‘place’ them and with which to make sense of them. Such narratives need not necessarily be ‘cultural’—we may invent our own stories and give place a purely personal meaning—but, more often than not, especially in adulthood, our personal stories are derived from a culturally constituted matrix of alternatives.

Places may be said to have biographies. Rosal was once a settlement, now it is a monument. It might become something else. By visiting a place we become part of its biography and the place becomes part of ours. Young suggests that by visiting a monument we become part of its memorial “performance” (1993: xii), but the experience is as crucial to our own ‘performance’ of ourselves, our self-creation, our identity.