My heart is in the Highlands

A LISTAIR MOFFAT’S many books on Scottish history are distinctive for the way he weaves poetry and literature, language and personal experience into broad-sweeping studies of particular regions or themes. In his latest— and among his most ambitious in scope—he juxtaposes a passage from MacMhaighstir Alasdair’s great sea poem Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill with his own account of filming a replica birlinn (Hebridean galley) as it glides into the Sound of Mull, ‘larch strakes swept up to a high prow’, saffron sail billowing, water sparkling as its oars dip and splash. Familiar from medieval tomb carvings, the birlinn is a potent symbol of the power of the Lords of the Isles.

- Kate Green

The Highlands and Islands of Scotland: A New History Alistair Moffat

(Birlinn, £25)

In a book with no illustrations, Mr Moffat makes effective use of such descriptive imagery to guide us through the political, religious and social complexities that have shaped generations of Highlanders.

Geography is key to the region’s history. Its ‘press and power… is everywhere to be seen, shaping routeways, forcing communities to the edges, turning the seaways into highways, slowing down time, moulding a language to describe its features and intricacies’. Geography also made the weather and the opening chapters explore the effect of ice and thaw on the climate and life of the prehistoric landscape.

Following the dramatic ice melt that created such features as the extraordinary Parallel Roads (elevated shorelines) of Glen Roy, a primeval wildwood spread across the Highlands, its canopy of Scots pine (1% survives) augmented by birch, aspen, willow, rowan and oak as temperatures rose. The contrast of this Eden, teeming with aurochs, elk, lynx, brown bears and wolves, with the cold, wet landscape that replaced it is evocatively described. The Little Ice Age had a profound effect on the Highlands; as late as 1850, snow from the Cairngorm Plateau reached down to Braemar in August.

The book’s subtitle is justified by its vast array of information within an impressive timespan rather than any radical retelling. All the usual themes are here, arranged as a loosely chronological journey punctuated by diversions—to Para Handy, the battleship Tirpitz, oatmeal and St Duthac, to name but four. Leaping from the Battle of Inverlochy (1431) to the Normandy landings (1944) to a discourse on the Highland bagpipe in two pages may feel a little disorientating, but it makes for an absorbing read that draws out the connections between the people who ‘[have made] this story what it is’ over millennia.