The Folklore of Northern Scotland: Five Discourses on Cultural Representation

The Folklore of Northern Scotland: Five Discourses on Cultural RepresentationAuthor(s): James PorterSource: Folklore, Vol. 109 (1998), pp. 1-14Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1260565 .

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Folklore 109 (1998):1-14

SIXTEENTH KATHARINE BRIGGS MEMORIAL LECTURE, NOVEMBER 1997

The Folklore of Northern Scotland: Five Discourses on

Cultural Representation

James Porter

How is it possible to do justice, in the limits of this lecture, to the folklore of Northern Scotland, a relatively vast, unevenly populated area-roughly one sixth of the land area of the British mainland-that stretches from Iona in the west to Unst in the Shetland Isles, from the Angus and Perthshire glens to the Outer Hebrides? It would be relatively easy, I suppose, if superficial and repetitive, to summarise the folklore that has been amassed over two and a half centuries. It would be less easy, but probably more instructive, to survey the lore that has spread from this region as a result of extensive and prolonged emigration over the same period.

It would also be useful, no doubt, to discuss the work of students of the region in the past century and a half, from John Francis Campbell of Islay to John Lorne Campbell of Canna, from John Gregorson Campbell to Walter Gregor or Margaret Fay Shaw, or even the obscure Janet Henderson of Wick, who towards the end of last century wrote to the Folklore Society offering them a book on Caithness folklore.' Finally, given the need to rethink our concepts and methods from time to time, we might review, with special attention to Northern Scotland, changing notions of folklore and folklife, ethnology, material culture, oral tradition, and the like. Recent discussions have taken place on the relationship between ethnology and folklore (Fenton 1993) and between folklore and identity (Oring, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Glassie 1994). Folk- lorists still grapple with terminology as they trace the lineage and current meaning of "keywords" such as tradition, art, text, group, performance, genre, and context (Feintuch 1995). To these should certainly be added special usages of more recent vintage, such as heritage and cultural tourism (see Fladmark 1993; 1994; Brewer 1994; Wells 1996). Relating concepts of this sort to contemporary work on Northern Scottish traditions would be a daunting but not unmanageable task.2

But I prefer to do something different and set forth what I see as a set of current discourses constructed around the folklore of Northern Scotland. I use the term "discourse" because it implicitly rejects the idea of folklore as solely a product of communal imagination or individual aesthetic sense. Rather, the production of folklore is also intimately related to power relations in society, to economic factors, to public institutions and to academic disciplines (see Tilley 1991, 153). My justi- fication for this stance lies in the huge population shifts

that have taken place in Northern Scotland, not merely in the past twenty-five years but in the past two hundred and fifty years, and the abuse of the Highlands in particular by human agency such as "improvers" or absentee landowners. The first of these population displacements was due to the coming of North Sea Oil around 1965 and immigration into the North East associated with it; the second to the upheaval of the High- land Clearances, the mid-nineteenth century potato famine that is better known from Ireland, and land improvement (Devine 1988).

Older discourses on the folklore of the North of Scot- land, as elsewhere a century ago, tended to dwell on its decline due to change and progress-the "devolutionary premise" that Alan Dundes identified as explaining the supposed decline of folk traditions (1969). But certainly the declaration, in 1835, of the Cromarty stonemason and folklorist Hugh Miller was typical: "I see the stream of tradition rapidly lessening as it flows onward, and displaying ... a broader and more powerful volume as I trace it towards its source" (Quoted Dorson 1968, 31). That concept of folklore devolving or diminishing embodied a set of older discourses constructed around the notion of folklore as survivals from an earlier stage of culture, or folklore as historical source. Ultimately, I want to contrast these with a newer set of discourses and challenges as they affect the production of folklore: namely, folklore as cultural continuity and folklore as an emergent feature of contemporary life.

At the same time we cannot avoid, in this postmodern climate, a deeper critical issue that overarches any simple definition of folklore, namely that of cultural representation: who is representing whom, or what, and why? I would identify cultural representation as the primary discourse within which we can analyse and understand folklore more fully, and I would like to take the case of Northern Scotland as my central example (cf. Hall 1997).3 The cultural representation of Scotland as a whole, even in Scotland itself, is a discursive minefield, and I shall mention here only a few prominent examples as a wider context within which the folklore of Northern Scotland may be understood. These examples, which have occa- sioned considerable comment in recent years from cultural analysts, are especially relevant to the final stages of my discussion of cultural representation (e.g. Naim 1977; McArthur 1982; Beveridge and Turnbull 1989; Calder 1994; Craig 1996; McCrone 1998).



2 James Porter

1. Tartanry and Highlandism

My first example of these discourses is tartanry: the cult of tartan as a symbol of identity, which is indel- ibly linked to the Romantic movement in literature and the arts of the late-eighteenth century. Another is Highlandism: the cult of the Highlands as visual and poetic metaphor, which is involved not only with that Romantic, Ossian-influenced past but also with cultural patrimony and the vexed question of land own-

ership. Who owns Scotland? is a question that has brought forth a prolonged debate particularly on the nature of the Highlands, its people, history, economy, and culture (e.g. Hunter 1976; 1995; MacEwen 1981; Cramb 1996; Wightman 1996). Tartanry and High- landism have both been critically dissected in recent times: one writer has concluded that the tartan-

wrapped visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822-the first visit of a reigning King of Scots in a century and three-quarters-marked the ideological means by which "a Union of practical convenience became a Union of irrational love and fears, sublimated in mili- tarism, tartanry, royalism and, eventually imperialism" (Calder 1994, 103). Others have pointed out that one cannot exorcise tartanry by a dose of historical realism-as Hugh Trevor-Roper tried to do (1983)-since its significance is not historical but anthropological (McCrone 1998).

Generally speaking, historians have not distinguished carefully enough between popular (urban) culture and genuine folk traditions, and this is also true of Scotland. Appropriated by the Music Hall and Harry Lauder in the interwar period, tartanry came to represent, for Lowlanders, a garb to which they could claim allegiance only vicariously, through identification with the heroic image of the Highlanders who had once been their enemy (Clyde 1995). The early modem phase of tartanry in the twentieth century ended in a debased popular culture of sentimentality, "stage Scotchmen," and Brigadoon. Despite that, the spell of a heroic past has been woven permanently into the "in- ternational" recognition of tartan as representing the Highlands and its culture (Finlayson 1987, 65 and 229- 31).

Highlandism is also a discourse that has to be con- fronted to be understood. Its roots, again like those of tartanry, lie in the Romantic era. The scenic grandeur of the Highlands led Archibald Geikie to describe them as "the Ossianic landscape," referring thereby to James Macpherson's poetic fragments of the 1760s that cap- tivated Europe and ushered in Romanticism (Geikie 1905, 114-15).4 Media people, especially filmmakers, often view Scotland in terms of an elegaic discourse derived from more historical events such as the Mas- sacre of Glencoe (1692) or the Battle of Culloden (1746). Scenes of Glencoe, for example, in films of Stevenson's Kidnapped or Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps serve as a picturesque backdrop to a terror which echoes that of the massacre. Alternatively, filmmakers see Scotland, and especially Northern Scotland, as a magical realm

which transforms the visitor, for instance in Local Hero, or Loch Ness, or even Mrs Brown (cf. MacArthur 1982; 1993). Even the rejection of this fantasy, in the gritty urban language and style of Trainspotting, is not enough to dispel the magic of the Highlands. And stereotyp- ing of "Celtic" regions is in any case a conceptual fate that besets Ireland and Wales as well as Scotland.5

Dominant views of the Highlands tend to be imposed from without, by doughty travellers like Pen- nant, Defoe, Boswell and Johnson, or Wordsworth who established the discourse of the Highlands as interest- ing enough but bleak, inhospitable, sterile. This attitude, which transferred the bleakness of the landscape into incomprehension and metaphoric dismissal of Highland culture, must be set against the more sym- pathetic, if idealised, picture of Martin Martin (1698; 1703), the description of customs by Edward Lhuyd (1699; see Campbell 1975), or the realism of Captain Edward Burt (1754). Even so, externally-constructed depictions of the Highlands as "landscape without fig- ures" continue. A distinguished historian declares that:

our view of the Highlands now (and therefore the psychological raison d'etre of the tourist trade) is a highly complex one. While it is built up of elements that origi- nate in the perceptions of the travellers of an earlier age ... it is by no means an accretion of them all. We have kept some, jettisoned some, altered some, found new ones of our own (Smout 1983, 100).

While both internal and external views of the High- lands are indeed complex for those reasons, deconstructing that "we" reveals a failure to consider the Highland view of the Highlands, the views of those who have settled there, or even to acknowledge accounts by those born into, or experienced in, High- land culture (cf. Grant 1806; Grant, 1950; MacLean 1975). The Highlands, despite the colourful constructions with which it has been invested by outsiders since the eighteenth century, maintains a distinctive sense of internal cultural pattern and identity in landscape, history and language. But a disturbing question now arises: can the Highlands continue to sustain this identity while absorbing an estimated million tourists each year?

2. Highland and Lowland

Until recently, historians have often described Scotland culturally in terms of Highland and Lowland, although this is a crude division given the recession of Gaelic as an everyday language to the Hebrides, with only a few pockets of the language remaining on the western seaboard of the mainland. How far the "Lowlands" ex- tend into the northern landscape is also a moot question: one account of the North East Lowlands perceives it as flowing from Aberdeenshire past Inverness as far as the arable lands of Easter Ross and Caithness (Allan 1974), whereas others see the Lowlands ending traditionally at the older Highland line stretching from Stonehaven on the east coast to Comrie and Aberfoyle



Folklore of Northern Scotland 3

to Helensburgh in the west (MacLean 1975, 1). His- tory, culture, economy, language and topography can easily become confused in such conceptions, and the Highlands is still a fluid idea that demands careful definition.

Ethnologists have tended to perceive Scotland as a whole somewhat differently from historians, isolating as many as a dozen regions based on settlement pat- terns, placenames, and so on. From north to south, these regions have been described by one writer as: 1. Shetland; 2. Orkney; 3. Caithness; 4. Outer Hebrides; 5. North and West Mainland, Inner Hebrides; 6. North East; 7. Grampian Mountains; 8. Southwest Highlands; 9. Fife, Angus, East Perthshire, Lothians; 10. South West; 11. South West Borders; and 12. South East Bor- ders (Aldridge 1971). Alexander Fenton divides the regions similarly, though into eight rather than twelve (1998).

One could subdivide areas further, into micro-areas by topography, dialect, placenames, subsistence poten- tial and so on; or into macro-areas, as I prefer to do here for broader identification. Some differences are ancient, some more modern, the latter stemming mainly from the great watershed of the eighteenth century when agricultural improvement began substan- tially to alter the character of the region. A further jolt was to be given by the Highland Clearances in the nineteenth century, when whole settlements were forcibly removed from their homes and radical transformation of Highland society was brought about. Population shift in the last century and a half, even in Lowland areas of the North, has been substantial if not as dra- matic as in the Highlands: to take just one example, the population of Kincardineshire fell by a quarter between 1851 and 1971, from 35,017 to 26,058. But by 1981 it had risen again to 33,725, the highest figure since 1891. This is almost entirely due to the development of North Sea oil from 1970 onwards (Smith 1988, xvi-xvii). In contrast, it has been estimated that, in the years 1989-91 alone, almost 14,000 people migrated from England into Scotland, with sizeable populations on Arran, Mull and Skye (Smith 1992, 23).

If for the moment we can concentrate on the three main subdivisions of the North that I would draw here for ease of understanding-the North East, the High- lands and Western Isles, and the Northern Isles (with Caithness)-we can see how topography and settlement established the basis for cultural life and folk tradition. The North East is cut off southwards by the Mounth, to the west by the Grampians, and to the north by the Moray Firth. The Highlands, similarly, were largely isolated until General Wade's roads of 1725- 38, and the Northern Isles, Orkney and Shetland, in- tersected a path of hegemonic struggle between Scot- land and Norway until they were ceded to the Scot- tish crown in 1472. Udal tenure of land there, by which property was divisible among heirs instead of passing by primogeniture, persisted at least until the seventeenth century and has continued to affect fishing and other rights down to the present (Donaldson and

Morpeth 1977, 220). This historical picture is complicated, again, by the

Kingdom of the Isles, stretching from the Isle of Man to Lewis, that emerged in the tenth and eleventh centuries. By the twelfth century, Norwegian overlordship in religious and secular matters had been established and this continued until the Treaty of Perth in 1266. The later claim by Donald, Lord of the Isles, to the Earldom of Ross was the reason for the Battle of Harlaw, just north of Aberdeen, in 1411, a subsequent ballad on which was interpreted by some historians, inaccurately, as a struggle for hegemony between High- land and Lowland culture when the real dispute was a family one over the Earldom of Ross (cf. Mackay 1921; Simpson 1949, 42-61). There is no question however that the North, with its mixture of feudal and clan structures and landholdings, was inevitably a "contested landscape," in which contestation often went together with appropriation of the past, either by stressing continuity or by a more brutal kind of appropriation (Bender 1992).

So much for historical background. But one cannot ignore the powerful traumas in the history of the en- tire North which, though buried, rise easily, or per- haps uneasily, to the surface in narratives and songs: the battle of Harlaw (1411), Glencoe (1692), Culloden (1746), and the Clearances of the nineteenth century. In relation to Highland culture and oral tradition, each of these events has made its mark (cf. Dorson 1971). Culloden, too, was but a potent stimulus to the "epidemical fury of emigration" which had already begun and which Samuel Johnson observed in his visit to the Highlands with Boswell in 1773. The latter noted in his diary the fashion in Skye, at that very moment, for a dance called "America" that spoke to growing emigration (Quoted Hunter 1994). According to the poet Iain MacCodrum, the North of Scotland was los- ing its traditional loyalties: "Look around you and see the nobility without feeling for poor folk, without kind- ness to friends; they are of the opinion that you do not belong to the soil and, though they have left you desti- tute, they cannot see it as a loss" (Quoted Matheson 1938, 199-203). Important folklore and folksong col- lections since the mid-1800s, however, have often suc- ceeded in capturing the culture of this threatened world.

The infamous Clearances, as the consequence of agrarian "improvement" on the part of landowners, were put into action by ruthless factors such as Patrick Sellar and James Loch, and it is in Sutherland almost forty years ago that a Highland folklorist found a landscape resembling a "necropolis" (MacLean 1975, 133). The Revd Donald MacLeod, who went into exile in Canada with his evicted parishioners, wrote:

I have read from speeches delivered by Mr Loch at public dinners among his own party, [that he would] never be satisfied until the Gaelic language and the Gaelic people would be extirpated root and branch from the Sutherland estate; yes, from the Highlands of Scotland (Quoted MacLean 1975, 136).



4 James Porter

It bears repeating that the first major clearances took

place in Sutherland in 1792, Bliadhna nan Caorach [The Year of the Sheep] on land owned by Sir John Sinclair and by Lord Stafford, and people were forcibly moved to coastal settlements. In the Strath of Kildonan where there were once 2,000 people, all of it was cleared, and thousands emigrated to Canada. The bad harvests of 1835-6 and the potato blight of 1846-7 accelerated emigration. It has been estimated, for instance, that over 8,000 people were uprooted in Sutherland, and in Ed- inburgh in 1850 the appearance of people from the island of Barra "in a state of absolute starvation" caused an outburst of indignation (see Hunter 1994, 119). Clear- ances of people for sheep in Ross and Cromarty took

place in Culrain (1820), Glencalvie (1845), Coigach (1852-3), and Greenyards (1855). Sheep numbers there

grew from a few thousand in 1780 to 252,000 in 1854 and 391,000 in 1869 (Richards 1984, 170). With depopulation, language suppression, and the ambivalence of bodies such as the influential Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge throughout the nineteenth century, the subsequent decline of Gaelic in the Highlands as a whole has been a major cause for concern (Withers 1988; Mackinnon 1991; Meek 1996).6

One influential folklorist noticed all this. Hugh Miller, aware of the Clearances in the cultural borderland area of Cromarty where he grew up, was haunted by the wretchedness of the rural poor, the living and working conditions of farm labourers, fishermen and Highland crofters as the glens were emptied to make way for sheep (Rosie 1981, 62). These impressions produced some of Miller's finest, most powerful essays: "Peas- ant Properties," "The Cottages of our Hinds," "The Bothy System," "The Highlands," "The Scotch Poor Law," "Pauper Labour," "The Felons of the Country," and the scathing piece, "Sutherland as it Was and is, Or How a Country May be Ruined." This last is a sus- tained, seven-part attack on the folly and callousness of the wealthy Sutherland family on two counts: the clearing of people and the refusal of the Duke to allow the Free Church to build on any of his vast lands (Rosie 1981, 119).7

The young Miller, rooted in village fishing culture, was also part of a literary culture that mingled landscape, folktale, magic and myth, as well as autobiogra- phy. In The Old Red Sandstone (1841), which ran into twenty-six editions, Miller invoked the voice of the Romantic wanderer, making natural history a personal journey across the open landscape. Workingclass themes of labour and intellectual quest mingle within the psychological framework of his own life-story set in the northern Scottish landscape (Paradis 1996, 130- 6). The Hill of Cromarty, where Miller played as a boy, was a breeding ground and context for his interest in natural history and folklore of the region. Drawing on Gilbert White's Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) as a model, Miller's "traditional history" took its cue from White's "parochial history," although Scenes and Legends (1835) has actually more in common with

the tide of local antiquarianism than with White's natural descriptions (Paradis 1996, 133).

Miller's accounts are valuable, further, because through them we can trace the later condition of folklore in the area. New beliefs and narratives have emerged: as D.A. Mackenzie has noted (1935), the Clach Malloch (large boulder exposed at low tides and noted by Miller in one of his family stories) is more recently said to be cursed because a fisherwoman left her child there while she gathered bait, and the child was drowned by the incoming tide; curses are delivered by an individual standing or kneeling bare-kneed on Clach Malloch. Customs, too, have been revived: the Saint's Well at Navity, barely used as a rag well in Miller's day, was reportedly decked with rags in 1934; and old stories are transferred to new locations: even today, children tell of the Green Lady who haunted houses in Miller's childhood, being alive and well in the tower of the school building (Alston 1996, 224).

In a recent work on the phenomenology of landscape, Christopher Tilley reminds us that a sense of attach- ment to place is frequently derived from the stability of meanings associated with it (Tilley 1994). Place is both "internal" and "external" to the human subject, a personally embedded centre of meanings and a physical locus for action.The naming and identification of topographical features is crucial for the establishment and maintenance of their identity. Placenames are thus of vital significance because they transform the physical and geographical into something both historically and socially experienced. Naming in general bestows structure on a chaotic world, and further, placenames carry embedded within them narratives of their origin and meaning (cf. Nicolaisen 1984; Tilley 1994, 31-3).

The placenames of the North reveal its human landscape. Celts, Vikings, Picts, Flemings and others im- printed their idioms on an historical region that yields a particularly rich set of placenames (Watson 1926; Nicolaisen 1976b). These often provide alternative etiologies: Loch Ness, for instance, may get its name from the expression "Tha loch anna nis" (There is a loch in it-the glen-now); or from the Irish hero Nysus, who was the first to sail on it (Nicolaisen 1976a, 156). The creature is known by Gaelic speakers today as an neasaidh [female of the Ness]. Scandinavian placenames introduced through Norse occupation (900-1100 A.D.) are found mainly in the Northern and Western isles and in Caithness and Easter Ross on the mainland; in Aberdeenshire they are remarkably absent. Besides some Brythonic or Pictish names, the two main toponymic strata there are Gaelic and "Scoto-English," the former extending over the whole county from the coast inwards and increasing as one moves southwest (Alexander 1952). Gaelic itself was taught in Alford parish, twenty-five miles west of Aberdeen, until the late-eighteenth century, and was recorded in Braemar, despite the clearance of forty families from Glen Ey in the 1840s, as late as 1981 (Watson and Clement 1983; Mitchell 1994).8




But from the eighteenth century, clearance and emigration was augmented by a steady drift of Gaelic- speaking Highlanders from the eastern seaboard of the North into Aberdeen, one result of emerging economic magnets such as the granite industry (Withers 1989). This drift has continued into all the major cities of Scot- land up to the present. The last prominent movement of Gaelic-speaking people occurred when the population of St Kilda (or Hirta, to give it its proper name), a hundred miles west of the Hebrides, was evacuated on 29 August 1930 to Larachbeg on LochAline in Morvern, where the people were inexplicably separated from any view of the sea and employed as forestry workers in an utterly different way of life (MacLean 1975, 77). A number of traditions have been recorded from St Kilda emigrants.9

In contrast to the depopulation of the Highlands and the recession of Gaelic the speech of the North East Lowlands, as a regional dialect of vernacular Scots, is still rich and vigorous, and has been reinforced by the founding of a Scots Language Resource Centre as part of a drive to recognise Scots as a language distinct from English although both have the same parentage, rather like Norwegian and Danish (Fladmark 1994, 37). But the vigour of North East traditions outside language can be deceptive: as in other parts of the Lowlands, Highland culture-or what Lowlanders conceive to be Highland culture-has been appropriated in various ways: Highland Games, for example, or conventional wearing of the kilt on formal occasions such as wed- dings, and cultivation of the bagpipe. Although High- land Games are supposed to have existed from the eleventh century, when Malcolm III held something of the sort at or near Braemar, the reinvention of Games was introduced by Lord Gwydir at Strathfillan in Perthshire for his tenantry in 1826 (Grant 1961, 345). By attending the Braemar Gathering in 1848, Queen Victoria conferred a respectability on them that has guaranteed their popularity ever since. According to various estimates, games are held in as many as one hundred locations throughout Scotland each summer, and increasingly abroad as'their appeal widens. The first Highland Games in the USA in the modern period appear to been organised as a "sportive event" by the Highland Soci- ety of New York as early as 1836 (Young 1971, 253). Lowland and foreign constructions of Highland culture are thus enshrined in the Victorian-inspired contexts of the Games with their contests in which piping and solo dancing complement physical feats.

"Legendary" characters emerged from these nineteenth-century events in Scotland, such as Donald Dinnie (d. London, 1916), who broke records on the Highland Games circuit for tossing the caber, putting the shot, throwing the hammer, weightlifting, and dancing. One of his famous feats was to carry two huge stones weighing 785 pounds across the River Dee at Potarch Bridge, a feat never repeated despite efforts by others (Urquhart 1996). Such achievements were pri- marily trials of male strength, though under North

American influence women are now contesting traditional male territory. The military colouration of the North East psyche, both male and female-derived in part from conservative clan loyalty to families such as the Forbeses or Gordons-emerges in the devotion to the Gordon Highlanders, the regiment raised in 1794 by Jean, Duchess of Gordon, who encouraged conscrip- tion by offering to kiss individual recruits (Donaldson and Morpeth 1977, 87). We have no reports as to how successful this particular strategy was.

But the relationship between Lowlanders, both those in the North East and elsewhere, and Highland culture is complex because the influx of Highlanders from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, mainly for economic reasons, helped shape Lowland perception of Highland traditions. Language has remained the single dividing force in the hegemony of English or Doric over Gaelic in the North East. Religious and political traditions have complicated the region's character even further: since the Reformation, Catholics in the inland glens or Epis- copalians and Presbyterians in the cities have lived side by side with coastal Baptists, Open and Close Breth- ren, city-based Quakers, or more recent charismatic sects (Porter 1998b, forthcoming).

Politically, the North East was a hotbed of Jacobitism in the eighteenth century, conservative during British imperial expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries until two World Wars, the decline of farming, and the coming of North Sea oil. Widespread interest in Doric, however, and in the songs of bothy culture (through re-enactment of traditional "meal and ales"), celebrate an energetic speech community that is still alive in the streets of northeastern towns-even if the agricultural world in which the language found its most characteristic expression has disappeared. This was a world, just before the Great War, which yielded the splendid Greig-Duncan song collection, an exuberant expression of local self-confidence (Shuldham-Shaw et al. 1981-97), as well as the bothy songs with their critical underpinnings (Ord 1930). With the decline of that nineteenth-century ethos after World War II there van- ished, too, the sentimental literary genre of "kailyardism," in which small-town or country characters were represented as myopically parochial (Shep- herd 1988). In contrast, much late-Victorian popular fic- tion had represented ordinary life, including urbanisa- tion, with realism and vigour (Donaldson 1986).

3. Fishing and Farming

The main economic distinction in Northern Scotland has been between agriculture and fishing. In representing this distinction, however, we should not overem- phasise it. We might note as exceptions Orkney and Shetland (and parts of the West Highlands; see Gray 1972), where in Orkney there are farmers who happen to fish while in Shetland there are fishermen who are also crofters (Fenton 1978). Both of these occupations on the North East mainland, for instance, now but a



6 James Porter

shadow of two generations ago, have produced a rich oral tradition in such genres as the bothy ballads and fishermen's beliefs (Anson 1965; Cameron 1978; Ord 1990; see also Carter 1979; Devine 1984; Buchan 1996; Anthony 1997). These two worlds in the North East, coastal and hinterland, were utterly different in their worldview, reflecting on the one hand a relatively stable environment of hard-won fertile landscape and, on the other, the turbulence of unpredictable tides and hostile seas.

In inland culture, ceremonies such as The Horse- man's Word initiated youthful ploughmen into the world of men, at least until World War II; the Word has been found in Orkney as well as the North East (Marwick 1975). Initiations were usually at Martinmas, 11 November. The initiate had to appear at the barn, between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. on a dark night, taking with him a candle, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of whisky. At the door he was blindfolded and led before the secret court-an older ploughman, a master of ceremonies, at an altar made by inverting a bushel measure over a sack of corn. The youth was then subjected to ques- tioning and made to repeat a certain form of words. At the climax of initiation he got a shake of the Devil's hand-usually a stick covered with a hairy skin. He was then given the Word-"Both in One," meaning complete harmony between man and beast-which conferred power over horses, making them stand still when no one else could move them, or come to their handler from a distance (Macpherson 1929, 291). This power was sexual too, and represented power over women. Until the initiation, the young man would have problems with his horses, caused by older ploughmen tainting the horse collar with pig dung, or a tack embedded in the collar (Allan 1974, 188-9; Cameron 1984, 194-205).

The fishing village culture, on the other hand, was distinctive for its pattern of beliefs still to be found. In Nairn for instance, innumerable taboos existed in pre- venting a fisherman going to sea: it was unlucky to shoot nets on the port side, to taste food before any fish were caught, to leave a creel uppermost, not to draw blood from the first fish caught. No Morayshire fisherman would ever be induced to carry a parcel for a friend, go to sea at the beginning of the season, before blood had been shed. Sometimes a free fight would be started to get the desired result. No fisherman's wife, again, would comb her hair after sunset when her hus- band was at sea, and if she dreamed of a white sea, he would have good luck (Anson 1930).

These older habits existed side by side with, or came to be overlaid by, a later set of religious beliefs. The fishing communities, more so than the landward folk, were hugely affected by the religious revivals of the nineteenth century, especially the 1858 Revival when, on 17 August, a covered wagon entered Kaysie by the Banff Road proclaiming the slogan: "Ezekiel Fleming, Man of God. Ye Generations of Vipers, How Can Ye Escape the Damnation of Hell? Friends, Come to Je-

sus." And the driver, Mr Fleming, would raise his hat and announce from time to time in flat tones, "Nightly at 8 pm in the school" (Paterson 1981, 35). In Peterhead the leader of the Revival, James Turner, a cooper and herring curer, converted more than 8,000 people in two years along the North East coast. The Revival of 1921, which originated in Lowestoft and Yarmouth, had a similar effect. Groups of fishermen could be found gathered round a street lamp-post, singing hymns or listen- ing to some recent convert tell of spiritual experiences. The number of meeting-houses found in the villages today, and the religious spirit still to be found there in the Close and Open Brethren, is testimony to this fervour in the coastal communities of the North East (Anson 1981, 40). A significant change in local attitude to the loss of life at sea has come about with the recent raising of the Sapphire and its crew; formerly, given the community's strongly held biblical beliefs and its lack of present-day technology, the dead were left to the deep.

A different kind of community, and fervour, is evi- dent at Findhorn, just along the coast from the old Pictish capital of Burghead where the well-known Clavie is still burned on 11 January (Macpherson 1929, 19-20; Shepherd et al. 1992); along with the reinvented Up-Helly-Aa festival in Shetland, the Burning of the Clavie marks the turning of the year in the North (see Newall 1978). The Findhorn Foundation was started in 1962 by Eileen and Peter Caddy and Dorothy Maclean, combining ideals of humanity, community, whole earth, and spiritual experience through arts, music, dance, crafts, gardening and self analysis (McKean 1987, 80). This utopian development may well have been moti- vated by the passion for wholeness-partly influenced by Volkskunde [folklore] and partly by an empirical awareness of power in the local landscape-recently described by the German ethnologist Konrad Kbstlin (1997).

4. Landscape and Mindscape As Christopher Tilley has noted, landscape is a signify- ing system through which the social is reproduced and transformed. Unlike the concept of place, which privi- leges difference and singularity, landscape is a more holistic notion that encompasses rather than excludes (Tlley 1994, 34). Beliefs, rituals, and their accompany- ing narratives have flourished in the northern landscape: stones, with wells and caves, are enduring sym- bols of praeternatural power, their atemporality embedded in an imposing or inviting present. J.M. Mackinlay, in Folklore of Scottish Lochs and Springs (1893), notes that in 1656 the Dingwall Presbytery sought to suppress reverence for stones that were consulted for future events. Many of these were known as Druid's Circles or Stones. John Aubrey, who is best known for using the term, appears to have derived the name from James Garden, Professor of Divinity at Aberdeen Uni- versity from 1680, in a letter of 15 June 1692. But the




name was in use before Garden's time: there is a circle at Druidstone, Premnay; two pillar-stones near Montgarrie, Alford, are Druid's Stones, and their site Druidsfield. Potterton Farm, five miles north of Aber- deen, known locally as Druid Temple, lies in Temple Field. The term "Auld Kirk" is sometimes applied to these structures (Ritchie 1925-6, 307).

Walter Gregor mentions Clach-na-bhan, a huge granite rock on top of Meall-na-gaineimh [sandy hill], on the east side of Glenavon (Gregor 1881, 42). Clach-na- bhan is shaped like an armchair. Women about to be mothers climbed the hill and seated themselves in the hollow believing this ensured them an easy delivery (McPherson 1929, 79). In 1836 a report described the chairing of as many as "twelve full-bodied women who had that morning come from Speyside, over twenty miles, to undergo the operation" (Smith 1875, 1:514). The rock was said also to have the power to bring hus- bands to single women. In the River Dee at Dinnet, a standing stone with a hole in it about eighteen inches in diameter had the power to transform a childless wife, who passed through the eye of the stone, into a mother (Allan 1974, 194-5). The Dinnet stone was known as the "Deil's Needle," and had the efficacy of curing ste- rility (Rorie 1994, 67). Even in the recent film Rob Roy, a standing stone is the scene for lovemaking between Rob and his wife.

The idea that these stones are under special care of the spirit-world was widely prevalent. River stones believed to possess remarkable powers were often black- ened in the fire and used with incantations to bring harm (Ross 1976, 78f). Other uses of stones incurred difficulties: the stone circle at Mains of Hatton, Auchterless, was removed to form gateposts. But horses found it difficult to pass through the gate and the farmer thereupon decided to replace the stones on the original site. Two horses with difficulty dragged each stone downhill to the gate, but one horse only found it easy to pull a stone uphill to the circle. Again, a stone at Old Noth, near Gartly, was taken to the farm to make a lin- tel over a doorway to the steading, but the door was often found open, with the animals wandering about. When the stone was put back again the trouble ceased (Ritchie 1925-6, 305).

Narratives relating to stones and landscape features such as wells and caves emerge even now in the tales of travelling folk such as Stanley Robertson, who in his book Exodus to Alford (1988, 79-82) relates the legend of the Maiden Stone, an elaborately carved cross-and- symbol stone west of Chapel of Garioch. A young woman at Colpy, near the hill of Bennachie, is chal- lenged by a handsome stranger (for whom she has fallen) to bake 101 scones before he builds a road over Bennachie. If she wins, he will give her gold and marry her. Suddenly, while baking furiously she sees her absent fianc6 returning and pauses, allowing the Devil-- for that is who the stranger was-to win the wager. She is immediately turned to stone. The stone's name may well be a version of St Medan, to whom several

sites in Aberdeenshire were dedicated (Ritchie 1925-6, 311).

Early Christian holy men are often associated with standing stones in the North East: at Bankhead Farm, Banff, there are remains of a circle called St Brennan's Stanes, after the patron saint of Boyndie. Of two standing stones which are all that remains of a circle, the taller is known as St Marnan's Chair, Marnoch being a seventh century missionary said to have died at his church here in 625. The old church of Logie-Coldstone has, close against its outside wall, an upright standing stone known as St Walloch's Stone. The parish church at Midmar, dedicated to St Nidan, occupies part of the area of a stone circle, the recumbent stone and pillars of which are still standing (ibid., 308). Further north, in Orkney, the Ladykirk Stone at St Mary's Church, Burwick, South Ronaldsay has two footprints taken to be those of martyred St Magnus (c. 1076-1116), killed by his cousin Haakon. The Saint is said to have sailed across Pentland Firth on the Ladykirk Stone. The Stones of Stenness, a stone circle on the south shore of Loch of Harray, and the Ring of Brodgar, northeast of Stenness were, according to the eighteenth-century antiquary Robert Henry, the reputed scene of courting and heal- ing rituals that looked to pre-Christian gods such as Odin (Marwick 1975, 60; cf. archaeological discussion in MacKie 1975, 233-5; Ritchie 1981, 47-52).

Standing stones do not just connote history or legend; they also anthropomorphise the landscape. The grander mass of northern mountains, traditionally peo- pled by spirit phenomena, have stimulated legends such as those recorded by Affleck Gray (b. Boat of Garten 1906), who learned many tales in Gaelic from his grand- father, Domhall Grudaire, such as that of Am Fear Liath M6r, the Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui. Gray has in- corporated a number of them into his books on legends relating to the Cairngorms (Gray 1970; 1987; Leitch 1995).10 Another legend is attached to the Forest of Gaick near Blair Atholl, that of the sinister "Black Officer," An t-Othaichear Dubh, Captain John Macpherson of Ballachroan, a recruiting agent of the Hanoverian government around 1800 and a reputed hireling of the Devil. It is widespread in Badenoch, Lochaber, Glenurquhart, Moidart, and even in Skye, South Uist and Benbecula. Reports of the Officer's grisly end, with that of companions at Gaick as an avalanche carried them away, have been found right across the Highlands (MacLean 1975, 91-4).

A continuous stream of lore surrounding land- and sea-scape in Northern Scotland, and deeply embedded in both, involves the faculty of second sight, believed in Highland tradition to pass from father to son for several generations (Campbell 1975, 36). "Second sight" as a denotative category actually involves a range of paranormal phenomena, among them clairvoyance, telepathy, and pre- and retrocognition (Sutherland 1985, 33). The concept is especially attached to the prophe- cies of the seventeenth-century Brahan Seer, Coinnich Odhar Fiosaiche, Sallow Kenneth the Seer (Ross 1976,



8 James Porter

35-8). Over 125 of his predictions are known today, though many which were ascribed to him may simply have been drawn into his legendary orbit (Matheson 1971). Numerous of his predictions have come true; some are still to be realised. He prophesied, for example, of a prominent stone near Strathpeffer, Clach an Tiompain [Stone of the Lyre], that the day would come when ships would ride with cables attached to it. Does this imply the building of another canal, or the removal of the stone to Dingwall? (Ross 1976, 38). Another pre- diction ascribed to the Seer involved oil-rig workers on Loch Kishorn, and seems to refer to the central platform built there: it was that the one-legged monster would go twice below the water breathing fire and the third time would spell disaster in the German ocean. The monolithic structure of the Ninian Central Platform (most rigs have four or more legs) was submerged twice before its final positioning, and does indeed breathe fire from its flare stack (Sutherland 1985, 332).

The term odhar used to describe the Brahan Seer possibly refers to the sallow complexion brought about by his outdoor occupation; but it may indicate the darker complexion associated with Gypsy or traveller males (Sutherland 1984, 243). Even now, travellers are reputed to have second sight: Jeannie Robertson, the renowned North East singer, for one, often expressed how deeply she regretted possessing the "gift" (Porter and Gower 1995, 62). Second sight was widespread in the North, as were associated visions brought about, possibly, by deprivation and stress. We might think of Gunner John Thomson of the Seaforth Highlanders who, in July 1918, fell asleep exhausted after a heavy shelling on the Ypres front. Then, he claimed, an apparition clad in black appeared and told him not to worry: he would survive. More than that, the figure said, the War would end on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. When he awoke that July, months before the end of the con- flict, he confided in the men of his battery. They did not take him too seriously, and some laid bets, just for a laugh, on this "prophecy" But Gunner Thomson believed in his dream, and wrote home, where again no one took him seriously. The Armistice came, however, with even greater precision than the apparition prom- ised, at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918 (Weintraub 1985, 8-9).

Earlier, Hugh Miller himself was dogged by visions: on the day his father was lost at sea he had mysteri- ously "seen" the hand of a dead female (Miller 1893, 12). The praeternatural, in the form of such visions, ghosts and witches, was a vital part of Miller's internal world. His friend Samuel Smiles tells how, one day on the rocks by Holborn Head, Hugh exclaimed, "The fair- ies have got hold of my trousers," and sitting down, continued to rub his legs for a long time (Smiles 1878, 235). Miller's life came to a tragic end as he wrestled with the dreams and visions that had beset him all his days (Rosie 1981, 15). On the day he killed himself, nearly two hundred miles away in Cromarty his mother, granddaughter of the Gaelic seer Donald "Roy" Ross,

sat up in bed to watch a ball of bright light float around her room. According to her the ball hovered over different items of furniture as if looking for somewhere to alight. It then began to fade and was suddenly extin- guished, "leaving utter blackness behind, and in her frame, the thrilling effect of a sudden and awful calam- ity" (Rosie 1981, 82).11 The climate, configuration and cultural history of the Northern landscape provided a ready context for Hugh Miller or the Brahan Seer, who are only the better known cases. The widespread nature of "paranormal" phenomena in the North reflects the interaction of natural and anthropogenic processes. Furthermore the frequency of such experiences, as well as their typological range, demands different levels of explanation (Sutherland 1985; MacNeill and MacQueen 1996, 23).

5. Representation, Negotiation, Interpretation

Landscape, then, provides Northern Scotland with a rich vein of lore that continues to imprint itself on beliefs, visions, and associated narrative forms: a continuity of mindscape. In Gaelic tradition, ancient monuments were associated with Celtic heroes: for example, the Iron Age hill fort, Dun da Lamh, in Badenoch was regarded as the work of Fingal and his men as late as 1863 (Macpherson 1893, 99-100; Campbell 1975, 46-8). In the Nordic cultural orbit, Orkney has a number of Cubbie Roo stones flung by a giant of that name (Kolbein Hruga, a Norse chieftain who lived on the island of Wyre. Marwick 1975, 31). Archaeology, on the other hand, until recently has endeavoured to locate and identify important aspects of prehistory through measurement, and to provide a very different contrast- ing story in explaining, for instance, megalithic remains (e.g. Thom 1980; 1990).12 But the premises of the New Archaeology, which in the 1970s and '80s prided itself on having left behind its debt to cultural history and espoused "objectivity," has lately come under attack. Rethinking archaeology as a "discipline" reveals how subjective its interpretations have always been (Shennan 1989, xii; Tilley 1991). The subsequent closer linkage among archaeology, material culture, dialectology, cus- tom and belief, narrative, and folk life creates a context, and a discourse, in which the traditions of North- ern Scotland can be better understood at the end of the twentieth century. But this context is incomplete without an environmental and indeed political dimension, as one commentator has noted (McCrone 1998). New strategies that are evolving to meet the challenges of land ownership, crofting communities, and cultural tourism demand careful and willing co-operation between academics, politicians, and local councils if the goals of environmental sustainability, social diversity, and cultural representation are to be achieved. Here, then, we begin to encounter the newer challenges of heritage interpretation and its critical core, cultural representation (Fladmark 1993).

David Lowenthal has observed that, in heritage




terms, the concept of landscape involves three ideas: first, nature as fundamental heritage; second, the environment as setting of human action; and third, the sense of place as the locus for awareness of local difference and appreciation of ancestral roots (Lowenthal 1993, 4). The more recent emphasis on heritage in Britain has been, of course, driven by both government concerns for historical buildings and the built heritage in general, and by the availability of funding for rehabilita- tion of such structures through the Heritage Lottery Fund. This development has been accompanied in Scot- land, and the Highlands in particular, by deep concern over land ownership and land use as well as cultural factors such as language and oral tradition (Hunter 1976). The North of Scotland, as elsewhere in Britain, is peppered with "heritage centres" of one sort or another. Let me take one prominent example of heritage management, and the challenges it raises.

The Highland Regional Council has developed a plan to develop a Highland Folk Park at Newtonmore, described as "... a flagship project aimed at creating a 'leisure and learning' experience for a new millennium, embracing such concepts as sustainable tourism, learning by participation, and the integration of a living environment with living history" (McDermott and Noble 1994, 254f). The description continues:

All the environmental management principles are involved: detailed research and planning by the provider, strong community links and well thought out interpretation strategies for visitors ... the concept is firmly rooted in the "open-air museum" tradition which began in Scandinavia a century ago and in the more recent eco-museum concepts of Georges-Henri Riviere.

Pragmatically, it has developed out of the changing role of the Highland Folk Museum in Kingussie, Brit- ain's first specialist folk and open-air museum opened in 1935, which has evolved from being a last sanctuary for the material remains of traditional Highland culture to a focus for the integration of traditional lore and skills into modem Highland life (ibid., 257).

The term "Folk Park" was chosen to distinguish it from an open-air museum.

But there is a fundamental difference in concept ... the buildings and other man-made objects intended to provide a setting which raises one's awareness of the experience.

This experience is brought about by a series of im- aginative reconstructions of historic Highland settlements enhanced by displays, live demonstrations and visitor participation in traditional practices ... to focus the visitor's mind on the interpretive experience, the reception building will take the form of an 18th century inn. Here the visitor takes the role of traveller and is encouraged to explore, in time as well as space, reconstructions ranging from the Stone Age to the twentieth century (ibid., 255).

The real problem with this, it seems to me, is not just that of attempting to contain a vast sweep of "history as heritage" within the limitations of time and space

for a visitor, but the selectivity which provides faulty or partial overviews, and when conflicting or contest- able notions of heritage begin to replace a negotiated historical reality (cf. Jenkins 1986-7; Harvey 1996).

Commenting on this ambitious project, which sees reconstruction of the past as some kind of authentic representation of that reality, a critic has asked: where does the oral tradition figure in all of this? where are the people, their cultural interaction, and the production of folklore either as cultural continuity or an emergent feature of everyday life? There is a pressing need, he believes, in this representation of heritage through dedicated "cultural centres," to distinguish between the real and the counterfeit. One such centre in the High- lands has elaborate video displays with Gaelic sound- tracks. But the Gaelic is not of the region, and there is no sign of it. Pride of place has been given to the local saint, about whom little is known. In contrast, the una- dorned taigh dubh [black house] in Skye also has no in- habitants, but is a more atmospheric representation of traditional context. Even here, in such examples, heritage in the sense of oral tradition is hidden and neglected when there is a real need to make it available through access and participation for both in-dwellers and visitors (Meek 1998).

In many Highland communities new mechanisms for the identification and transmission of traditional knowledge have been developed, such as the comunn eachdraidh, the local history society devoted to assem- bling and making accessible significant aspects of the history and self understanding of the community (Mackay 1996). The growth of frisean-local, non-competitive music festivals begun by a parish priest, Colin Macinnes, in Barra in the 1980s, or Blasad den lar (interpretive locally based tourist shows)-have supplemented the Gaelic Revival in language driven by Communn na Gaidhlig with government support (Pedersen 1995). Even the conservative An Comunn Gaidhealach, founded in 1891, has now, in 1997, begun to introduce rock band competitions into its annual Mod (equivalent of Welsh eisteddfod). Such mechanisms help to counterbalance external, mandarin views of heritage and history, and the results are presented in local museums or public centres. Even though the idea of comuinn eachdraidh (Island Association of Historical Societies) is a more modest project, it arguably provides a better model for the future of Gaelic in linking it to the classroom on the one hand, and to cultural tourism on the other. It has been supplemented by other strategies: by the Muinntir an Eachdraidh ("History Folk"), the name given by village people to young unemployed who visited their houses collecting historical artifacts and recording elderly people's reminiscences (Mackay 1996, 6). In other words, the newer challenge is one of access and participation: if cultural representation is to involve intervention it must involve discussion and consultation at the level of the local language community. Cultural empowerment, in other words, can be encouraged but not imposed from outside. A dialogue



10 James Porter

between the local communities, local councils, and government culture brokers is a necessity in any scenario aimed at cultural representation.

And what of the folklorist in this? The challenge to the folklorist in contributing to the dialogue is to en- sure that cultural representation, like cultural identity itself, is seen as a process and not as a reified, idealised view of the past. Even allowing that the representation of material culture involves buildings and object-ori- ented displays, these must be complemented by a concern for oral traditions and language. This process involves negotiation between and among all of the con- cerned parties. Opting for such negotiation (rather than, say, for intervention by mandarin sources) and for shared decision-making has important cultural conse-

quences. Within this process it is essential that the mo- tivation, prescription, and implementation come from within local groups which see continuity with the past existing alongside new and vital forms of expression. The imprinting of the landscape and its meanings on the mind of incomers to the North is also a vital part of this process. Adaptation through dialogue, through attention to local history and language and their significance must be part of the prescriptive process. In this way the Highlands, and the North of Scotland in general, can look backwards and forwards with a sense of cultural purpose in creating the contexts that allow folklore to emerge naturally as a product of everyday life.

The Elphinstone Institute University of Aberdeen

Notes

'The book proposal was rejected by the Council of the Society. The Henderson correspondence and the Council's reply are noted in the Minutes of 11 January 1898. Janet Henderson (b. Wick, 1840) was the daughter of John Henderson, W.S. of Thurso (1800-3), author of Caithness Fam- ily History (Edinburgh 1884). I am indebted to John Ashton for bringing this item to my attention.

2Folklore, ethnology, history, archaeology and sociology, of course, sit uneasily at the same scholarly table. But inter- disciplinary co-operation has become a fact of intellectual life as disciplines re-assess not only their traditional limits but also their limitations.

3As Director of The Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen and holder of the Chair of Scottish Ethnology my remit is to study the traditions of Northern Scotland, the area covered by Bishop Elphinstone's vision of the university when he founded it in 1495. Defining "Northern Scot- land" in any case is not a simple task in cultural terms, or even in geographical terms given variable interpretations of where its southern limit begins (see Withrington 1972). Broadly speaking the uplands of Perthshire, Angus and Stirlingshire mark the traditional boundary between the Cen- tral Lowlands and the North. But I want to emphasise that to me, at least, this means the study of "folklore in Northern Scotland" rather than just "Northern Scottish folklore"-a significant distinction that involves culture-change resulting

from forces such as emigration and immigration (see the earlier argument in the 1970s on "American folklore" vs "folklore in America," in Dorson 1978; Bronner and Stern 1980).

4Macpherson himself is a figure of some complexity and cannot be readily dismissed as a "forger" (Stafford 1988, 4). His seminal place in the formation of European Romanti- cism has come to be re-assessed in recent years (cf. Gaskill 1991; 1996). Ossianic tales continue to be recorded in Gaelic, however, some of them considered superior to those in J.E Campbell's classic Popular Tales of the West Highlands. See the tales recorded from the fine storyteller of Sutherland traveller stock, Alasdair "Brian" Stewart, in Tocher 29 (1978).

5Countless films, from The Quiet Man (1952) to The Eng- lishman Who Went Up a Hill, But Came Down a Mountain (1995), by and large depict their Irish or Welsh characters as whim- sical, fey representations set in an idealised bucolic landscape.

6Some have argued that the Clearances were necessary because of overcrowding: between 1801-51 the population of Sutherland increased by over 2,000, with a similar increase in other Highland counties. Poverty accelerated as the best land was taken from the people and leased to sheepfarmers and tacksmen. The rental of one sheep farm was often greater than the combined rental of fifty smallholdings, and instead of alleviating poverty and hardship, the Clearances exacer- bated both (MacLean 1975, 139-40). The "crofters' wars" of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, as a struggle for reclaiming the land by indigenous Highlanders, has been well documented (e.g. Devine 1994; Cameron 1996). But Highland emigrants in Manitoba, Cape Breton Island, or North Carolina, who often perished in great numbers having disembarked from disease-ridden ships, created the sort of communities that their landlords were destroying back home (Craig 1990). Gaelic too has persisted in Cape Breton Island which, physically and economically, is a closer paral- lel to the Highland landscape than the plains of Manitoba or North Carolina, where Gaelic did not survive (cf. Mackinnon 1983). Cape Breton has lately developed the idea of feisean, based on the Hebridean model recently begun in Barra.

7Nevertheless, these Highlanders, loyal, conservative, pres- ervationist and not by nature imperialist, were constrained to play a central role in the expansion of British imperial ambitions (Finlayson 1987, 42; Clyde 1995).

8The name Alford itself, like a number of others in the North East, is still pronounced following its Gaelic form (Athphort).

9As, for example, in Tocher 36-7 (1982):447-50.

1oAt 4296 feet, Ben Macdhui is the highest peak in the Cairn- gorms. The mountain range has been the focus of intensive attempts at conservation (cf. Conroy, Watson and Gunson 1990). For the country as a whole The Scottish Land Com- mission, set up under the chairmanship of Professor Allan Macinnes of the University of Aberdeen in 1995, has now recommended greater controls on absentee landlords and the abolition of the feudal power of the Crown Estates Commis- sion, as well as the eventual breakup of massive blocks of single ownership and the passing of control of rural grants to new community land councils (Cairns 1997).

"Miller told his doctor of his conviction of being abroad in the night wind, and dragged through places as if by some




invisible power: "Last night I felt as if I had been ridden by a witch for fifty miles, and rose more wearied in mind and body than when I lay down." The doctors diagnosed his condition as being due to "overwork" (Rosie 1981, 81). Miller's friend Smiles, a journalist from Haddington, East Lothian, penned a book, Self-Help (1859), in which his extolling of the virtues of honesty, self-denial, justice and truthfulness is wed- ded to a romantic vision of free and united peoples in Eu- rope who would throw off "the shackles of want and toil" and reap in leisure "the fruits of hard-won culture" (see Calder 1994, 131-2 and 263-4). This book was recommended by such diverse personalities as Harry Lauder and Keith Joseph (who wrote an Introduction to the 1986 "abridged" edition).

12Alexander Thom (b. 1894), Professor of Engineering Sci- ence at Oxford from 1945-61, while on a sailing holiday in 1934 dropped anchor by Callanish and was struck by the great stones standing outlined against the moon. He noticed the north-south alignment, with the pole star shining above (in former times there would have been no pole star since its constellation had not reached today's position). Thom first identified the megalithic yard (2,72 feet) as a basic construc- tion measurement from the evidence of Scottish sites, and later in Brittany from 1970. Such megalithic sites, and their possible connection with other ancient sites in Britain, had earlier inspired Alfred Watkins (b. 1855) to investigate the contested area of ley lines, and to write his The Old Straight Track (1924, 1971), which has been both venerated and vili- fied.

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FORGETTING FROLIC: MARRIAGE TRADITIONS IN IRELAND

BY

LINDA-MAY BALLARD

Published by the Institute of Irish Studies, The Queen's University of Belfast in Association with the Folklore Society

Available from March 1998. 172pp. 18 B&W illustrations. ?9.50. ISBN 0 85389 666 6

Forgetting Frolic considers the traditions and customs of marriage, with the associated material culture, set in an historical context. Its main focus is on the North of Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but evidence for earlier periods and other regions is also presented.

Linda-May Ballard is Curator of Textiles at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, and has written widely on rites of passage, and especially on women's r6les in birth and death.

Cheques should be made payable to The Queen's University of Belfast and sent to: The Institute of Irish Studies, 8 Fitzwilliam Street, Belfast BT9 6AW



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The Folklore of Northern Scotland: Five Discourses on Cultural Representation

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