New Statesman Scotland - Real Scots don't only wear plaid
Last week we made it at last to Bruce's Cave, which, if you didn't know it, is situated in a small cliff face in the grounds of Cove Caravan Park near Kirkpatrick Fleming. Though the signs leading you there are little grander than those that might guide you to a B&B, and though Bruce's Caves are as common as spiders throughout Scotland, for the purposes of my son's project on Robert the Bruce, near Annan will do. Bruce was, after all, a local boy who began his campaigns here. Why shouldn't we have his cave as well?
Like Bruce's Cave, Camelot has been more rooted in metaphor than in geography, the very vagueness of its site making it seem more important as an idea transcending time and place, like Eden. Of course, there have been claims that Camelot was also situated in the south-west, at the site of the Castle of Caerlaverock, five miles from Dumfries; and that the Welsh princess Guinevere walked the walls round the Mote of Mark on the Solway coast in the then Welsh-speaking south-west.
The idea of the search - for Bruce's Cave or for Camelot - is an ancient motif in narrative fiction. But what do we make of it when the search is for an entire country? In the days of pre-election Scotland, several metropolitan and central-belt commentators set out to find the "real Scotland" as if on an anthropological expedition. "Armed only with a notebook and a bus timetable", they headed north, for that, after all, is where the real Scotland lies. As for our part of the country, perhaps they were put off by Galloway's reputation for tranquillity - "It's a dreamland here," Harry Lauder once wrote - or perhaps by an older, darker Galloway: "There are as many elephants and crocodiles in Galloway as orderly persons," wrote Claverhouse, infamous persecutor of the Covenanters. Or, I wonder . . . Glancing through a copy of Dragonquest by the fantasy writer Anne McCaffrey recently I was discomfited to note how closely the frontispiece map of the Kingdom of Pern, with its "great fire-breathing dragons", resembles the south-west of Scotland. But surely that wouldn't dissuade such intrepid journos!
So they headed north. And what did they find, arriving in small towns close to darkness? Very few people, the occasional dog, a queue at a chip shop. A string of images easy enough to knot together to patronise an entire community. Or they beheld mountains, rivers, moors - pibroch on the wind's edge. And lo! The landscape was authentic, the small towns not.
But why was the process never reversed? Why did the islander, the highlander, the townie never get the opportunity to write about their Scotland? To arrive, say, in Glasgow as Edwin Muir once did and described subsequently in his Autobiography: an infernal vision compared to his childhood Eden of Orkney. And if, as Camus commented with reference to the Spanish, there is an ease of enjoyment that typifies all truly civilised peoples, what would a stranger discover about Scotland's "ease of enjoyment" arriving down Edinburgh's Lothian Road or Glasgow's Byre's Road at chucking-out time?
And why this assumption anyway that the real Scotland lies elsewhere? Could it be because all the juicy (if often sour) plums of Scottish history appear to lie outside the cities? They have intellectual ferment, mercantile success, to be sure; but no Siege of Edinburgh, no Treaty of Glasgow, to reverberate like the words Bannockburn, Flodden and Culloden . . .
Historical maps are vital here; they cry out for exploration: "Named places have been dictionaried in/Ground's secret lexicon, its racial moan/Of etymology and cries of pain . . ." as Douglas Dunn put it in "The Harp of Renfrewshire". But the most quotidian map will tell us that wherever you stand in Scotland, is Scotland. Both journalists/commentators and MSPs need to bear in mind that Scotland is no more real or authentic north, south, east or west than wherever they are standing.
The poet and children's writer Diana Hendry, who spent a year living in Dumfries working as the first writer in residence at a cancer unit in Britain, was bemused by the sticker on a car which parked outside her window proclaiming, "I'm a real Scot". In place of this cliche, her poem "The Real and Unreal Scots" ends wisely, "I've grown a tender spot/for the wry and subtle/unreal Scot." He or she, I imagine, is one confident enough in his own identity to know it is unlikely to be found beyond the confines of the geography or the culture he daily inhabits.
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