North of the Border

Directions #1: Early adventures into Scotland

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There it is, on the map, the direction on top with a big fat arrow pointing out how important it is. I've always loved maps, which spark my imagination for adventures, give me a certain sense of place. And yet, although Mzansi is a place that is far Deeper South than what the Americanised North thinks of when it hears the term 'Deep South'... here north still seems to be in pole position.

This isn't what I learned in physics. Magnetism needs both poles, but in truth our planet feels very top-heavy, most land is "up there", and getting on for 90% of the people. So we "down here" tend to find ourselves facing our midday sun and being aware of the masses of human life lying beyond it.

It wasn't always like that for me: directions are always relative to starting point. And growing up on an already over-influential island (so far north that the equivalent southern latitude would be in the middle of the ocean surrounding Antarctica), I knew early on that any further north was no longer the centre of modern power, but a place of history, cold, mists, frost giants, and mountains, and when the wind blew from up there, it chilled the bones of my ancestors. I've never made it to Scandinavia, but for a while even Scotland was a remote land of monsters.

I was twelve years old when I finally crossed the Scottish border, filled with the kind of Romantic Walter Scott twaddle that would get me spat upon in the wrong Dundee pub. This younger self hoped to claim a more enticing heritage than that of the Yarrows of Fenland Stretham, a small Cambridgeshire village where every gravestone is a Yarrow, some kind of a clan moved down south en masse by authorities when the border was sealed and the Fens were drained. But it was all centuries ago, the kind of Celtic background many Sassenachs could lean into, and when I later dated a genuinely Scottish lass she quite rightly laughed in my face about it in an endearingly frank manner. Those of the vast majority of modern Scots who grew up in the central belt (perhaps best known for its grey council estates, such as those close to what were once the Yarrow shipyards on the Clyde), have a wholly different Scots experience to the minority living in the beautiful bits. A friend who taught in inner Glasgow swore that taking poor city kids on a first outing to the hills beyond the city limits, one of them called out "Sir, look! A woolly pig!" That may of course have just been the lazy exaggeration of an irony-educated twenty-something.

Along the way on my own first trip towards the sign on the A1 saying “Welcome to Scotland”, we stopped in the far north of England, at my father's friends in Durham, a very small cathedral university city in the heart of a region that was being smashed at the time by Thacher's crackdown on coal miners. I knew little of that; instead I remember the thrill of reading a graphic novel version of Macbeth, in a third floor room there: one of those very British multistorey townhouses where magic could be squeezed out of the chimneys. The mists awaited, as well as a book about the real King Macbeth which I bought north of the border (nothing like as wicked as the Bard's brilliant propaganda made out, just from the wrong lineage for Shakespeare's Stuart patrons). Thus it was in the North that my twin love for Shakespeare, and, perhaps paradoxically, historical truths, was born.

The Yarrow ancestors probably lived mostly around the Yarrow Water, a minor Scottish river that would be an impressive torrent in the Western Cape. We camped there, cooled down juice cartons in the river, and climbed Broad Law, a decent Corbett (the official term for medium high Scottish peaks a little under 3000 feet high), a good way west of Selkirk. A relatively prosperous, self-interested part of the country, but a perfect place to land, and to imagine Roman sentries at the ruins wondering what the hell they were doing so far from Rome. The heather might have answered them, or it might have ignored them. The brooks ran freely, and old Robbie Burns would have sat here once upon a time. The general emptiness of the Borders was something very new for me. On another trip, to Carlisle (one of those English towns that just squeezes to the north of some of Scotland), we discovered that the Yarrows were also one of the Reiver families, who showed little consideration to either crown. Before the Kingdoms were United the borders were full of proto-libertarians: a liminal zone between feudal states, as distant from metropolitan power as the Wild West. We get words like 'bereaved' ("you've been Reived") and 'blackmailed' from their charming raiding activities.

We did venture a little further north of course, tasting one day of the Edinburgh festival. I went back frequently at the end of my teenage years and my early twenties, to take in loads of culture and loads of 70 shilling brew. But somehow what sticks is the feeling I got when climbing Arthur's Seat: layers of mythical untold history, layers of sleeping goddesses and giants, when you felt them in your roots. How could the power there be so inaccessible that there were Trainspotting locals for whom heroin felt a better option? Not enough to say the hills are a place for the privileged, for it costs nothing to walk up Arthur's Seat or any other hill you can reach, but clearly that's not enough to break the stranglehold of a detached society. In medieval times Scottish monks and peasants made it through lean times with the aid of a wild herb that suppressed appetite, foraging in the glens, and grew other crops in times of plenty. Those were times when we all lived closer to the land, and the wrenching of men from felt connection to their families' territories, and into labouring on the lairds' estates or in the factories, is at the heart of modern disconnection even as we've gained in modern supermarket comforts. Amidst the beauty of Scotland it's all the more obvious - a psychological and spiritual dispossession accompanying the physical one of 'The Clearances'.

Of course there's something about those hardy northern types from the past that also drove the British Empire. When we walk in the Cape we still pass 'cairns' that keep us on track. The highest point on Table Mountain is Maclear's Beacon. In the dry Eastern Cape we find the dry town of Aberdeen; the Western Cape has Clanwilliam, McGregor, Elgin; KwaZulu Natal has Dundee and Glencoe; and the coldest settlement in the country is of course Sutherland. I've just spent a weekend on one of many Cape mountain passes built by Scotsman Andrew Bain or his son, at McBain's, with its huge fireplace reminiscent of highland lodges. (Bain’s whisky is also the South African version of the drink). And so the list goes on, like in other former crown possessions.

Climbing Ben Macdui in the fog of the Cairngorms, during another adolescent summer adventure, we had a sense of those recent generations marching out to find somewhere new, somewhere beyond misty border zones, leaving Gaelic hints here behind them - a language too land-drenched for industrial times. The world beyond Britain of course consisted of other people's loved places, in the time of those tartan-sporting Victorians. But a mix of overly intellectual Edinburgh rationalists, and ordinary Scots being told by Londoners and the Gordonstoun-educated that they needed to find somewhere new for themselves no matter the cost, made the case for taking the world in the name of ‘Great Britain’. Although Scottish involvement in such a project of trampling was always a little double-edged. Some of the Scots in the Cape took up the cause of the Afrikaans language instead, as seen in the statue of Andrew Murray outside Cape Town's Groot Kerk (the firebrand preacher not the tennis player), another way to get back at the Auld Enemy from the pulpit and the schoolroom.

Meanwhile Scottish womanhood seemed to have passed through a tragic phase, Shakespeare's witches and Mary Queen of Scots a last pathetic outburst before things became temporarily too thoroughly and headily masculine, and the goddesses under the heather were forgotten for a while. Down here in South Africa, somebody had the vicious humour to label Port Elizabeth’s historic township ‘Motherwell’, a name originally given to one of Glasgow's saddest industrial satellite towns, the holy well to Mary long buried under abandoned steelworks. At least back when I frequented Motherwell SA it could boast Joe's Jazz Bar and a proud struggle history, and a lot more sunshine than the original.

Back in my early twenties, my Aberdeen-based friend drove me all around the north coast in a crazy twenty four hour adventure (one driver, no sleep), and the A9 north of Inverness was even emptier than the Borders; I would only have a similar experience a couple of years later after moving to South Africa, where the general lack of human presence is still often the rule rather than the exception. Pristine northern Scottish beaches, with evocative names like Cape Wrath; and fish and chips next to a surf shop for the bravehearts, facing right into the Arctic Ocean. Back in Aberdeen in the nineties I met a prosperous, hard drinking oil city: and it still had bars opening at dawn where ladies were banned. The buildings were just as hard, granite that was too perfect for such old constructions. And everything was grey. Except on a rare sunny day, when people flocked to the windy sands and we passed a game of cricket, remarkably enough. Aberdeen was dry enough to largely escape the midges that attack campers in the north west. A few short hours from Macbeth's supposed home, Cawdor Castle, where a planned garden kept out the blasted heath; and the field of Culloden, where Romantics still drink uisce and praise lost causes.

Things were changing fast north of the border again when I returned at the end of the last millennium. A foreign lass walking around noticed that Scotsmen were confident enough to make eye contact, which she rather appreciated after weeks of the bashful southern English male public; and by then Celtic female sass was definitely back too (perhaps its departure always a myth). Hogwarts was on the verge of redefining Scottish enchantment on the big screen: rather more important internationally, I would hazard, than the symbolic new Parliament; there was a new kind of national confidence, back then, just like in the New South Africa of twenty years ago.

I dreamed as a teenager of living in some remote bothy, high up a glen, or on one of the islands, far from the pressures of civilization. I was probably one of those appetite-suppressing monks in a previous life. And of course it's the true highlands, across the lochs, that attracts tourists as much as midges. On my last big trip of the nineties we found castle keeps holding nothing but flowers, crossed the old routes of a Celtic church that still knew about land wisdom, and stood between standing stones that vibrated with mystery if you gave them time. Crossed on CalMac ferries surviving on Marmite sandwiches, and walked past puffin rocks at the edge of the north Atlantic. Slept on a deserted beach with sheep, swam with an otter, felt the sun begin to rise just after it had set. I'd found South Africa's wildness by then; it was surprising to find so much of it also in the land of tweed, and it took a South African friend (working at the top of the Kintyre peninsula) to point us in the right direction.

I still have never made it to Findhorn, just to the entrance sign: but somehow the existence of such a magically-born community made perfect sense up there. And for me Scotland was always a place of music and dance. I've sung Findhorn sacred songs with children and adults, but I've also always loved the intense syncopation and vibrant melodies of traditional Scottish ballads. They were always my favourite numbers to sing to my small children when brushing their teeth, as well as to teach to my primary school class. Songs about stepping out, finding the next bend in the road, smelling the heather.

My last trip that far north was in the first February of the new millennium. The water fell from the sky in four different formats over the course of the same wintry day. The Aga was warm, the nights long. We were huddled round a fire when a guy walked in wearing shorts: a Canadian proving a point. Perhaps that was when I finally decided to give my quest for the far north a break; I would never conquer the Pole or all the hills and islands, and I didn't need to try. Since then, from my very southern vantage point, North has been a direction to feel the heat. I might be preparing once more to head up and over the equator, but for all their raw beauty, Scottish quests can wait for now. I know the heather's going nowhere.

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