I am convinced that I may have been very close to MacCaig during his sojourns to Assynt; our family holidays overlapped in time and we share the same locations.
Assynt and Sutherland is where one half of my family originate from and where my Father was born. The origins of my family cut a swathe across the Northern Highlands, from eastern Ross-shire to Sutherland in the north. All of my childhood holidays were spent there. I have been to many funerals for the folk on the West but no weddings and nowadays very few of my family still live in the North.
Looking out over the micro-environment we’ve created at our home in Stonehaven, the garden resembles more the West coast landscape in miniature than it ever takes from the East coast. The prevailing wind on the coast here seems harsher, colder- containing little. The wind on the West however strong, on the contrary seems pregnant with possibilities, a certain warmth and latency. It carries with it exotic flotsam and jetsam. Further south in Glasgow and Liverpool it carried exciting musical discoveries during the 50’s and 60’s via the ships that docked from the west, Rock ‘n’ Roll, Blues and Jazz records introduced by the merchant seamen; cultural dynamite.
The landscape in Assynt is scoured, spare and mostly, monochrome. Yet, it has colour; the deep treacle brown, peat froth in a river pool, one sure to hold resting salmon, the radiant turquoise blue of the sea within a sandy inlet which looks so inviting but would cut you in half with it’s cold intensity or the jade green of a moorland frog no longer than a thumbnail. I recall some one selling local gemstones (or coals to Newcastle you could say) from a small hut on the road into Clachtol beach near Lochinver in the early Seventies, quartz of smoky grey, soft pink and pale blue hues. Something called Tiger’s Eye too. My sister’s birthstone, I was told, but now it mimics the colouring of my brindle lurcher.
MacCaig was a battery; storing stuff up during his time within the Assynt landscape and it’s local society, slowly releasing the fuel for winter poetry writing back in Edinburgh over the dark months. I’ve always been a bit of a winter worker– really I don’t do much during the summer apart from gathering, collecting and assimilating bits and pieces until the teaching semester begins; my teaching activity then feeds into aspects of the creative activity in my studio. That’s when I start to answer those same questions I ask my students to consider when they make artwork. Who are you? What are you trying to say? Why would I want to know the answers to those questions?
Norman MacCaig doesn’t merely describe landscape, relationships or local society, he describes what it is to be deeply immersed in a landscape which leaches into your very being and influences your view of the world as a whole and your relationships with the folk you share that environment with, wherever that may be.
(Amongst the images which accompany this post is one of Ledmore Junction north of Ullapool which denotes the point at which the road splits to the North, into Sutherland or East into Ross-hire. This is my iconic Route 66 and you can stuff the tourist orientated fabrication that is the North 500).