Westward Ho!
By The Unreliable Narrator
The first Scottish — or rather, Caledonian — literary character is Calgacus, who
turns up in Tacitus’s The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola prior to the battle of Mons
Graupius to add a touch of nobility to a doomed barbarian horde. In a ringing
speech, Calgacus condemns the greed and slavery that marches with the Roman
Empire: ‘they make a desert and they call it peace.’ The stirring words, of course,
are entirely Tacitus’s own: he builds up Agricola’s opponent to boost Agricola.
He’s not above getting a few digs in about the morals and mores of Roman
culture, either. But Calgacus goes on to say, ‘there are no lands beyond us […]
who dwell on the uttermost confines of the earth […] there are no tribes beyond
us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks […]’.
To a Roman, living at the empire’s heart, Britain — and in particular the wild and
woolly mountain’d wilderness on that island’s northern end — is the back of
beyond, the very edge of nowhere. To a Caledonian, surely, though, it is home,
hearth and heartland, and Rome is the distant dangling appendage. Could an
inhabitant of these lands make such a statement? Every spring the geese fly north
and west to distant shores, and every autumn they return again. Scotland, washed
and warmed by waters streaming up from the Gulf of Mexico, has been welcoming
curious and accidental travellers for millennia, from molucca beans and coconuts
to turtles and tourists. But when you watch the Atlantic rollers heave in from over
the horizon in infinite procession, and see the sun sink down into that oceanic
edge, it’s hard not to feel, deep in your bones, that we’re perched on the very lip
of eternity. Scotland stands at the centre, and at the ends, of the earth.
We’ve been visiting the Atlantic lands since the Ice Age ended, one way or
another, in person or in imagination, from giving Greek hitch-hikers a hurl up to
Thule in a boat made of skins, to dancing a dance called America. For most of
recorded history the sea has been the world’s highway: while Europeans slogged
out a few weary miles on foot, lost within a continent, the liminal people of the
Highlands and Islands were far-travelled, and suffered no great anxiety about
their position in relation to the rest of humanity. Every day, a herald would blow a
trumpet from the battlements of Kisimul Castle on the Hebridean island of Barra,
