Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey

by Madeleine Bunting

Love of Country

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Scotland, Nature, History, Memoir, Natural History

368 pages, Paperback

First published October 6, 2016

About the author

Madeleine was born in North Yorkshire, one of five children of artist parents. She studied history at Corpus Christi, Cambridge and Harvard, US. She held a number positions at the Guardian including reporter, leader writer, religious affairs editor, and for twelve years, she was a columnist. She wrote about a wide range of subjects including Islam, faith, global development, politics and social change.
She directed the Guardian’s first ever festival, Open Weekend, in 2012.
From 2012-14, she led a team as Editorial Director of Strategy, working on a project around reimagining the institution of a newspaper and its relationship with readers.
​
She has a longstanding interest in contemplative practices and in 2013 she co-founded The Mindfulness Initiative to explore the potential of mindfulness in public policy particularly health and education. The Initiative supported the All Party Parliamentary Group in their 10 month inquiry which led to a report Mindful Nation UK, published in October 2015.
She lives in East London with her family.

She has received a number of awards and prizes including an honorary fellowship from Cardiff University in 2013, the Portico Prize for The Plot in 2010, a Lambeth MA degree in 2006, The Race in the Media award in 2005 and the Imam wa Amal Special Award in 2002. She has won several One World Media awards for her journalism on global justice.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

To describe the Outer Hebrides as remote is somewhat of an understatement. Even today it can take the best part of a day to get to, but once you are there you have reached not only some of the oldest parts of our planet, but also the epicentre of one of our country’s ancient cultures. This edgeland is the very periphery of our landscape and faces the full brunt of everything that the Atlantic can throw at it; even the summer can have five days of gales a month. This tough, uncompromising landscape shapes the place and the people that inhabit it.

People belong to places, rather than place belong to people

These islands have attracted a variety of people over the millennia. There were those who sought religious solitude on Iona and whilst there created the works of art that are the Book of Kells. Jura’s simple way of life gave George Orwell the space that he needed to create the dystopian horror that is 1984. The traditional way of life on the islands is formed as much by the landscape as it is by the language, and these tough, resilient people took those qualities with them as they left the islands either by choice or enforced by landowners. It is to this landscape that Bunting returns to countless times over six years, immersing herself into it, teasing out stories of the people and history and letting the place soak into her.

‘I couldn’t conceive of living on this land without getting my hands dirty. It keeps me connected with the place.’

This is another really well written book by Bunting, she has managed to capture the very essence of the Outer Hebrides as she travels around and crosses the straits between the islands including a boat trip heads out to the Strait of Corryvreckan, the place where Orwell nearly drowned and is the location of one of the world’s most powerful whirlpools. Well worth reading.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08575fm

Jura: Journalist Madeleine Bunting explores the history and landscapes of the Hebrides and demonstrates how this chain of islands in the north west has shaped both Scotland and Britain. Her first journey takes her to Jura, the remote wilderness where George Orwell wrote 1984

Iona: Bunting visits Iona and uncovers the apparently remote island's well-connected past at the intersection of several busy sea routes.

Rum: home to rich man's folly Kinloch Castle, and is struck by the island's turbulent history of rental, ownership and clearance.

Lewis: the author learns how the Gaelic language is inseparable from the landscape.

St Kilda: the evacuated archipelago of St Kilda

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a reprise of childhood holidays that inevitably headed northwest, Bunting takes a series of journeys around the Hebrides and weaves together her contemporary travels with the religion, folklore and history of this Scottish island chain, an often sad litany of the Gaels’ poverty and displacement that culminated with the brutal Clearances. Rather than giving an exhaustive survey, she chooses seven islands to focus on and tells stories of unexpected connections – Orwell’s stay on Jura, Lord Leverhulme’s (he of Port Sunlight and Unilever) purchase of Lewis, and Bonnie Prince Charlie’s landing on Eriskay – as she asks how geography influences history and what it truly means to belong to a place.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

My knowledge of the Hebrides at the start of this book was "they are somewhere north of Scotland"....turns out even that simple little fact was wrong, They are on the North West. I also knew they were made up of loads of little islands....almost correct, yes there are lots of little islands but Lewis/Harris is the 3rd biggest Island in Great Britain, so it turns out I know nothing.

Madeleine Bunting had been planning this trip for years, she had a map on her wall of the Hebrides as inspiration and like me she has this need to travel North to escape the South of England. She fully immerses herself, talking to anybody she can, trying to get a handle on Gaelic and even going on trips in rough seas on a small boat. The history of the place is incredible, before the Government started the clearances people had been farming these small islands for 1000s of years, their survival was amazing. Bonnie Prince Charlie landed here too, to kick of his campaign against the English. Another very interesting thing raised by Madeleine was to do with maps, on a map of the UK the sea is just a border, you don't realise it's vastness until you are out on a boat looking at a map of the sea which shows the land as the border. Made me chuckle.

This book has made me want to visit, the biggest appeal for me are the causeways between some of the islands, that would make for a great road-trip. This book is heavy on the history, politics and religion but not for one second does it get boring. A fascinating source of info on the Hebrides that I would highly recommend....plus it has maps (wooooooo).

Blog review> https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2019...

[Alison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was surprised by how little I enjoyed this. The personal narrative seemed thin and the voices of current Hebrideans too quiet in comparison to the historical sources and stories.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not your usual travel book, where the author focuses on the sights they saw, the food they ate, and the curious customs of the locals. Love of Country describes the trips Madeleine Bunting took to the Inner and Outer Hebrides, and while it lingers over the beauty of the islands, her focus is more on history and culture, and a note of sadness runs through the book as she details how a tenacious and longsuffering people were slowly ground down by rapacious landlords, forced expulsions, economic marginalization, and suppression of their native language and customs until for many emigration was the only option. Tourism is a mainstay of the economy today, where the locals ape the remnants of a past they no longer understand for the amusement of visitors who don’t care.

Cast on a larger scale, the situation in Scotland mirrors that of Britain as a whole, and the author makes a good point about how Britishness itself seems to be fraying and fading in the twenty-first century.

it became uncomfortably clear that if nations were ‘imagined communities’, according to the thinker Benedict Anderson, then Britain had been under-imagined. Its understanding of itself in story, culture and emotion was thin; without the state project of empire, Britain was limping beyond its sell-by date. Monarchy offered a focus for some, but the institutions of parliament, the NHS and army were battered in prestige and morale.

Scotland has always occupied a unique place in British imaginations, both a part of the British Isles and something Other, a place of exotic differences that was nevertheless conveniently within reach. The Hebrides have been a destination for hundreds of years, and the books Samuel Johnson and James Boswell wrote about their visit in 1773 are still read today. Since then, hundreds more have been written to try to capture the essence of the wild and storm-tossed islands. The Hebrides have always been a place to get away, without getting too far away from home. In addition to the tourists, it has attracted writers and religious devotees, as well as rich dilettantes who fancy owning their own island and playing squire.

Along the way the author introduces some statements which may be widely known in Britain but are not in the United States, such as:

- “fueling the long-running debate over reform of Scotland’s exceptionally centralized landownership (half of the land is owned by less than five hundred people).”

- “By 1838 the British were selling a massive 1,400 tons of opium a year (equivalent to a sixth of the world’s production in 2006), despite Chinese attempts to ban the trade.”

- “[The island of] Lewis had the highest proportion of its population serving in the First World War of anywhere in the British Isles. This reflected a tradition of military recruitment in Scotland, particularly amongst the Gaels, beginning in the aftermath of Culloden. A staggering 90 per cent of sons of the manse in Scotland had volunteered by 1915. Lewis also had the highest proportion of casualties: 17 per cent of those serving died in the conflict; the ratio of deaths to the general population on the island was twice the national average.”

The islands have been inhabited for a very long time. She mentions Colonsay only once, when seen from a distance across open water, but I read John McPhee’s The Crofter and the Laird, about his return to the ancestral island from which his forebears emigrated. He recounts a rich history which is mirrored across the other Inner and Outer Hebrides islands. Traces of habitation stretch back to Neolithic, with middens revealing a surprisingly complex society. Eventually the Catholic Church arrived, and Colonsay has the ruins of a monastery. Then the Vikings showed up, probably first as plunderers and then as settlers. Clan society arose, with internecine wars that swept across the islands with fire and sword. Then came the Battle of Culloden in 1745, and the breaking of the clans, followed by almost genocidal retribution on the part of the British. Since then the island has settled down to crofting (small farming or pasturage on plots of forty acres or less), and watching its children leave for better opportunities on the mainland.

The islands Madeleine Bunting visited are beautiful and sparsely populated outside of a few towns. They are places to hike and unwind, but they are not kind to the unprepared. Fierce gales can blow in any time of the year and last for days, and in the summer whenever the wind drops the visitor is beset by clouds of biting midges. Beauty comes at a price.

Bunting makes a comment about how Britain has depoliticized the history of England’s often bloody encounters with Scotland, so that now the whole subject seems anodyne, nothing but a few mixups between friends with different accents. The actual history was much more violent, although as an American I have no standing to criticize Britain’s handling of its past. When I was growing up the textbooks never mentioned the expulsion of Native Americans from their lands, and even today there is fierce and asinine political grandstanding demanding that children be shielded from potentially having their feelings hurt by learning anything about slavery and discrimination.

Each of the islands has a story to tell. The Holy Isle has been a holy place for a long time, and has a rich monastic tradition, but it is now owned by a Buddhist community. Iona, where many scholars believe the Book of Kells was written, was not a place of retreat, but was actively engaged in diplomacy and missionary work for centuries. Rom, rugged and sparsely populated, was where George Orwell wrote 1984, settling at the remote northern tip as far from civilization as he could get.

Eventually the author makes it to St. Kilda. Even Ultima Thule has its own Back of Beyond, and St. Kilda fits that nicely. Difficult to reach even today, its islanders once scratched a living out of small plots of poor soil, and paid their rent by abseiling down sheer cliffs to collect seabird eggs and feathers. Once it was “discovered” by mainlanders it became a tourist attraction, which it remains today for people to gawk at the ruins of simple islanders living at the edge of the world. The last remaining inhabitants gave up and asked to be evacuated to the mainland in 1930. Today it is home to millions of seabirds and a small military base, along with boatloads of tourists, weather permitting.

There were some occasions when I questioned the objectivity of Bunting’s history. I sometimes felt that she was pressing too hard on the idea of simple, hardy people with a rich and fulfilling lifestyle living in primitive communism who were crushed by cruel modern capitalism. Certainly the historical record shows many instances of ancient communities being destroyed by landlords intent on clearing the land for grazing, but I have my doubts that the former situation was as idyllic as it is sometimes portrayed. There are no true anarchists: someone must always be in charge, and that someone always takes more than their fair share, and then uses violence or the threat of it to hold onto their position. Modern Communism may be great in theory but in practice it is just dictatorship with a fancy ideology.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book, and took a look at Bunting’s other works to see what might find a place on my reading list. A good travel book can make you imagine yourself far far away from spreadsheets and budgets and conference calls. It can make you long to lace up your hiking boots and head out to where the wild things are. This book did that, and its tales of history were interesting and informative.

[Casey Palmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this so much more, but it was just not what I expected. Three stars seems a good compromise; an average of how I would rate different sections of the book. Some parts were beautifully written travel tales with some history woven in for context and vivid descriptions of the extraordinary landscape. Other sections were heavy, less travel tales and more historic research paper weighed down by reference after reference after reference. I put the book down midway through Staffa, unable to continue what felt like wading through syrup. It was months before I picked it up again, and probably only did so because of my plans to travel to The Hebrides next year.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week:
Journalist Madeleine Bunting explores the history and landscapes of the Hebrides and demonstrates how this chain of islands in the north west has shaped both Scotland and Britain. Her first journey takes her to Jura, the remote wilderness where George Orwell wrote 1984.

Read by Doon Mackichan
Producer: Eilidh McCreadie.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08575fm

[Mindy McAdams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before traveling to Scotland's Hebrides islands, I found this book via online searching and took it with me. It was a good choice. The London-based author had heard about these islands all her life and set out to write about them by a combination of historical research and personal visits, several of which were camping trips. Four of her chapters are about Inner Hebrides islands — those close to the coast of "mainland" Scotland — and three chapters are about Outer Hebrides islands — those in the chain that lies farther west, facing the cold and harsh Atlantic Ocean. Throughout she connects the stories and myths surrounding these isles to a British concept of itself as a nation of islands, and yet, seeing as how they are Scottish islands, and remote, Britain has also viewed them as "other," outside, primitive, uncivilized. Exotic too, with their crazed volcanic cliffs, and treacherous, due to dangerous currents. They are in a sense a microcosm of the more distant lands that the British colonized, thinking it their right to do so, disregarding the cultures and languages and beliefs that already existed there.

It's a very writerly book in many ways, with references to famous past chroniclers of the islands such as Samuel Johnson (1775) and Martin Martin (1698) and a few very apt verses of poetry; the author also connects aspects of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four to the place where he wrote it, isolated Jura, a small island reached via ferry from another island. She writes of the sparse populations of these islands and shares the stories of how they came to be populated or depopulated. She mentions more than once how the Gaelic language bound the people together and cut them off from the rest of Britain, how their stories and religion and traditions enriched their lives while outsiders saw only poverty and a bitterly hard struggle against harsh seas and a brutal landscape. She talked with people in the places she visited and found out what made the islands special to them, even though so many left because making a life there could be nearly impossible.

This is a book about landscapes and the sea channels that cut them off, a geography of cliffs and mountains, and the stories humans tell about remote places. About remoteness, and how we approach it from other places considered not to be remote. About myths of place and the people who are excluded from the myths (or who are misrepresented in them). In a way it's also about traveling to places that intrigue us because of their stories, and how the experience of such a place is always your own, separate from the stories, but always intertwined because it was the stories that brought you there.

[Penny Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read whilst on holiday on Lewis. Really fascinating and wonderful to read here. Such a beautiful place.

[Russel Henderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Part travelogue, part polemic. The author waxes between excessively florid, cloying descriptives and more measured language; the latter swaths are quite good while the former are grating. The Hebrides certainly have a checkered history and Bunting documents some actors who can justly be called villains, but her insistence on grafting an antiquated Old Labour approach to economics on her analysis politicizes things that need not be. She sentimentalizes the Gaidhealtachd, implying that communalistic agricultural practices like runrig were universal (they weren't). Far more of the enthusiasm for Gaelic revival than she lets on comes from outside, from English and Central Belt emigres interested in "going (a little) native". The Clearances were often brutal and disruptive, but a lot of the outflow from the Hebrides, then and now, owes to the economic motives of the departing rather than to rapacious landlords. Her approach to history - and of a country in which she is less a native daughter than a vacationer - comes from the insufferable Guardian school whereby little from the Act of Union on is thought of as positive. I have traveled a bit in the Hebrides and found them as beautiful, and the people as hospitable, as she relates, but her tendency to graft her own preconceptions or to accept uncritically those of the James Hunters of the world undermines what could have been a fine work.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was homesick enough before I read this, but now I am really looking forward to my trip home in July!! As a Waterstones bookseller who originally comes from the Outer Hebrides I knew I had to read what is to be our Scottish Book of the Month for July. And I am glad I did. Non-fiction is not a genre I would normally read but I really did enjoy reading this perspective of the history and stories of my home islands. Of course it does seem a tad romanticised but it's supposed to and that doesn't detract from the fact that a lot of the writing rings true and I recognise much of what the author talks about in her chapters on 'long island' or Lewis and Harris which is where I am from. It was also interesting to read the historical stories in here as, as she says in the book, learning the history of the Hebrides didn't feature in the curriculum when I was at school.

Overall a nice read which I thought was accurate and sympathetic to the Hebrides.

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well-written and often evocative book.

I don't think it brings anything new to Hebridean literature or the perception of these islands, but especially for people who don't know much about their culture and history, it's a great book to start with.

My main comment is that I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of the book was, making the chapters and their content feel somewhat arbitrary at times. Additionally, it relied heavily on the islands' past with little space devoted to current inhabitants (main exception being some writers/poets/etc. in the Lewis chapter) or the future of these islands. Because of that, it did partly fall in the pitfall of some older narratives that she refers to (and criticizes). She does end up defining the islands through the past and her own lens, rather than give more space to the islanders to do so themselves.

[Calum Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book, combining travelogue with history, geography, politics and geology. Above all Bunting is a beautiful writer, one of the best I can recall, and she glides her narrative effortlessly across time, space and theme. Her essaying on all manner of political and historical themes is poetic but truly wise, and never pretentious - an unusual feat.

There is so much in here, but Bunting is particularly brilliant and memorable on the Hebrides' location within the formation of British and Scottish identity, and within the modern UK nation-state. She deploys Saïd to discuss the Hebrides as long serving the idea of a wild, untamed, savage 'other' against which "civilised" society in Lowland Scotland and in England has contrasted itself for centuries - and which still serves as a repository of myth and romance for contemporary ideas of Scotland and of Scottish nationalism.

There were not just colonial attitudes, however, but colonial practices too. She discusses the Clearances with great empathy and insight. But she also unearths lesser-known stories and vivid characters - such as Victorian playboy George Bullough, who came to Rum to build a fairytale castle and live out an aristocratic fantasy; or Lord Leverhulme, who bought Lewis and South Harris to build a modern industrial fishing industry and to civilise the local crofters and subsistence farmers by enticing them into the values and lifestyles of capitalist modernity. Both schemes were abandoned. Bullough found the novelty wore off off Kinloch Castle and he returned to London. The locals on Lewis and Harris had the temerity to resist being civilised and improved.

Rare is Bunting's ability to combine the poetry and human insight of a literary novelist with the clear-eyed historical, economic and political analysis one might expect of a former newspaper columnist, but she does both superbly. I came away having learned a great deal about the Hebrides and about Britain, but also having my own experience of visiting (some of) these places enriched. Bunting is a superb guide, it's hard to imagine a better one.

[Aike · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best non-fiction books I've ever read - engaging, poetic and SO interesting. Must-read for anyone wanting to know more about the Scottish islands.

[Syd P · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a wonderfully written book, and one I gave to my partner as a gift. Clearly I borrowed it afterwards (what type of a person wouldn't?!), but ai couldn't finish it because despite being lovely, it is not my type of book. Too history heavy, and exactly the reason my partner loved it.

[Lévi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Covers a wide range of topics like history, politics and religion about several islands in the Hebrides. I would have liked some more personal stories & experiences from the islanders themselves.

[Valerie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Auf sehr einfühlsame, fast schon liebevolle Weise berichtet Madeleine Bunting von ihren Reisen auf die Hebriden, die Inselgruppe westlich von Schottland. Die Bilder, die die wunderschöne Wortwahl im Kopf entstehen lassen, stehen der Neugier, die die dargestellte Geschichte der Inseln weckt, in nichts nach. Am liebsten würde ich sofort meinen Rucksack packen, loswandern und diese vielfältige Landschaft und ihre Einheimischen kennen lernen.

[Vivienne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essential reading for anyone with a love of the Hebrides or those who plan to visit the Hebrides. Beautifully written and fascinating.

[Helen Geng · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at page 128

[Chris Goodliff · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author manipulates historical facts to fit her personal political agenda. The photograph of crucified Burmese dacoits, an exhibit in Kilmuir Castle, is a case in point. Bunting uses it to argue against British colonial rule, without having bothered to find out any details about the photo. The picture title itself is problematic: 'Dacoit Sustem of Crucifixion in Burma'. It is ambiguous : would dacoits have used this form of torture, or would this have been the torture reserved for dacoits? On the original there is a comment on the reverse: 'as practiced by the villagers'.
There are no historical documents pointing to a British custom of crucfixion in Burma. Indeed, Bunting's mention of British punishments in Burma being a matter that had to be raised in parliament at the end of the 19th century [used to substantiate her claim about the cruelty of British crucifixions] is misleading as the historical documents themselves do not mention crucifixions.
Felice Beato, a commercial photographer, was furthermore known to stage crucification scenes [when he worked in Japan].
The truth of the matter is, the current title can be interpreted in a myriad of ways, opening up opportunities for misrepresenting the photo for all sorts of political agendas. It amazes me that none of the reviewers have picked up on Bunting's lack of research and misuse of historical documents.

[Pedro L. Fragoso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scotland has, for as long as I can remember, a hold in my imagination, and these islands, which include Jura, where Orwell wrote 1984 before dying, were always a mystery, accentuated by my reading of Ian R. MacLeod's "The Summer Isles". I'm also a fan of Ronald D. Moore's take on Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, whose generic includes a song that mentions Skye.

Nice primer on the islands, their history and their peoples, full of heartbreaking tragedy. Britain may well be defined by England's relation with Scotland, but on the basis on this book, it is easy to understand that the Scottish may want out (and difficult to grasp that they are actually still in). Maybe Brexit will finally be the instrument that sets the historical balance right.

[Marija · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written and yet it's a book about Hebrides written by a Londoner to fellow Londoners.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perched on the edge of Europe, the Hebrides have long been wrapped up in an aura of mystery, romance, exoticism, distance, contempt and the obsessions of Empire. The geological product of a cluster of millennia old volcanoes making up what is now the north-east Atlantic (with a trace remaining in geothermal Iceland) these are held to be the rugged, wild homes of rugged, wild peoples, stuck in the old ways of farming and fishing, believing and making sense of their world. From afar we look in wonder at the ferocious weather and the ferocious belief that sees them suffer the blows of the north Atlantic’s most intense storms and in many of the places a vigorous Sabbatarianism that sees them close down for Sunday’s multiple church going, even as some of Protestantism’s most fractions of denominations wrangle over saving souls. It is, in the tiny island of Iona, the home of Christianity in Britain’s eastern islands (Ireland predated and supplied that evangelism). It is also my paternal heritage – my grandfather having been born and raised in Mull, one of the more inland and southern of the islands.

My approach to this travelogue meets history meets historical anthropology meets biography bundled together into an engaging, in places amusing, in other gob-smacking, in others alarming, narrative of a journey spread over several years is shaped by this heritage – my Presbyterian minister grandfather, who I never met and exists through my father’s family stories. It is also shaped by a knowledge of the history of clearances, a long interest in peasant economies, by friends and colleagues whose work takes them into the islands and one brief visit to the area.

Despite her visits being spread over several years, and despite building on childhood engagements with the highlands and islands, Bunting builds a clear narrative of movement from the south east, in the Firth of Clyde, to the north west, finishing at St Kilda – 70 or so kilometres west of Lewis, deserted by the last permanent residents in 1930. She avoids many of the biggest islands (Mull rates barely a mention, en route to Iona and Staffa) although Harris & Lewis (two islands sharing a land border) also attract the longest of the chapters. Bunting has a good eye for the telling story, encapsulating circumstances, injustices, resistance and defence in a well-told personal narrative, be it the returning grandson who revives his grandfather’s weaving or the southern (is)landowner (many seemed to be engaging in vanity projects) building the folly/castle from limestone, unsuited to the ferocious local weather conditions, be it the insistence that new houses resemble workers cottages instead of the low, circular dwellings ideally designed to deal with storms or the opportune commercial developments that pragmatically supply tourists while resenting their presence.

Bunting has a clear preference for the dispossessed, for the struggles for social justice – those developing community land trusts in Lewis – or the young men who went off to war and whose deaths deprived the fragile local economies of their most essential item, their future labour. She celebrates those who struggled and struggle against injustice and the orientalism of the mainlander and southerner, who see in the Hebrides the ‘primitivism’ of empire and who fail to recognise historic and continuing impacts of their presence and all too often their pillage.

She paints a picture of people deeply embedded in their place – she returns, regularly, to the notion that a greeting in Gaelic can be a version of ‘where do you belong?’. In contrast to the outlander perception that this is a barren and desolate place, she outlines a place full of those who were there before, and the things those people did as remembered in local histories, local place names and the landscape. At the same time, she is awed by the geological features she experiences, from whirlpools to sea caves, and the ways humans came to live in them, cutting steps up rock faces or wintering over in store houses when the sea is too rough to cross the six miles to home, for eight months.

This is history brought to life and travel writing as it should be – and given to me before my one, brief, trip that far north: I should have read it before I went, and will be well informed on the next adventure.

[Ape · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a thing about islands, and have an ambition to visit all the islands around and in Great Britain. It's a kind of lifetime goal, and certainly nothing to rush through, as places are to be enjoyed and appreciated slowly.

I was lent this book as I have a particular thing for Scotland. Most of the islands she visits I have not yet made it to, but the book has made for fascinating and inspiring reading. I am all the more revved up for travelling. Yes, this is a book written by someone who lives in London, so there isn't that much about what it's like to be an islander today living in these places - I've seen people complaining about this. But she is a Londoner and a tourist and a bit of an island junkie, and that's the perspective she's writing from. It's also pondering on the question of our connection to the land, and the appeal that the Hebrides have for people - people who are from the same country, ie. GB, but not from that corner. I'm from Yorkshire, so I'm a long way from the Scottish islands as well, and yet I find them fascinating. I am from the same nation at the Hebrides. This is a wonderful thing about GB. Relatively speaking, in land mass we are a tiny nation, and yet we have such a massive variety of landscapes, geology and environments. It's a lifetime of exploring.

It's an account of a number of trips up north, spanning over several islands, starting strictly speaking not in the Hebrides with Arran and Holy Island, then coming around to Jura, Iona and Staffa off Mull, Rum, and then hopping over to the Outer Hebrides and working her way up that chain of islands. And finishing off with St Kilda and the Flannan Islands - the ultimate in uninhabited remoteness perhaps.

As well as her own experiences and memories of these places, there is also some history, which has been quite interesting. Also how people experience the land, and can get a bit overly romanticised. Visitors over the last three hundred years or so didn't always really see the locals or the land, but had a romantic view of what it all meant and what ought to be done with the land. And in some places, with the large estates, it's become more of an idealised country playground for the intensely rich, rather than a landscape for all. Which I am a wee bit uncomfortable with. Originally the community belonged to the land, and farmed and subsisted how they could. Then there were the clearances, which have been romanticised into an English v Scottish thing, even though it was often Scottish landlords clearing their tennants off so they could go into sheep farming to make a tidy profit. Which was fine until all the goodness was nibbled away, the big profits disappeared and they were forced to sell up. And then it was the English industrialists who moved in to buy their private playgrounds and in some cases try to set up modal villages and patronisingly try to force the locals to live a life they thought was suitable. Which never bodes well. I remember reading a book about St Kilda, and it seemed as though the arrival of the strict and dowr ministers and Sundays full of church going and no music was the beginning of the end and sucked the life and joy out of the place. Not that we should get rose tinted over the past. I wouldn't have wanted to live there. It was a tough life and whilst the councils of local men making all the decisions and running the island may sound grand, it was the men, whilst the women didn't get a say and did a massive amount of the work.

[Christel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just two quotes to illustrate what i loved about Love of Country :

On the beach at Harris in Rum I tried to imagine what had been lost over those decades of the nineteenth century. For hundreds, probably thousands of years, countless lives had been lived entirely within the circumference of this bay and the Minch's wide horizon. Everything that was needed - food, shelter, clothing and transport - had to be found and fashioned from this landscape. Imports would have been few and far between, and it would have been a life of ceaseless labour. Anyone visiting the Hebrides and the north-west coast of Scotland is haunted by the disturbing pathos of this history. As Neil Gunn wrote in Off in a Boat in 1938, 'wherever we went in the West we encountered it, until at last we hated the burden of thinking about it.' The Scottish Atlantic coastline is an often inhospitable place and yet people had found a way to survive on the rocky slopes and thin soils, and had developed a rich tradition of poetry, song and music, from which they drew dignity and independence of spirit. The history of the Gaels has always been a source of unease in Britain, challenging its cherished, self-serving ideals of progress, civilization and a just order.

[...]

Later, driving back to my tent in the dunes at Horgabost on Harris, I pulled over and walked across a field to lie down on the rocks by the sea, to try and ground this dizzy euphoria. The rock was warm from the heat of the sun, and above me the oystercatchers and terns were circling, shrieking with alarm at my presence. The sun caught the white wings of the elegant tern as it swooped and dived. Deep into that blue sky I thought of my children, who were crossing the Atlantic high in the air above to attend a wedding. I thought of them sitting in their cramped airline seats, watching films, eating their little containers of airline food, perhaps catching a brief glimpse of the ocean below, not giving it a thought. I have done it myself many times, but in our flattening and shrinking of the world we have short-changed ourselves, and reduced our capacity for wonder rather than cultivated it. I was struck by the power of that urge to share, out of which both children were created, and out of which they were now finding their own lives. I was acutely aware that their wellbeing and safety was entirely dependent on thousands of people whose names I would never know, on the millions of small decisions and interactions of millions of other human beings. At this particular moment, their lives rested on the actions of ordinary people going about their day's work: bagage handlers, airport security, air-traffic control, cooks, cleaners, taxi drivers. We live in the trust of others. 'On the pilgrimage route, as in life, all we can do is trust,' wrote the American philosopher William James. I was overwhelmed by the sheer wonder of it all, and grateful for the astonishing moment of benediction.

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Many people travel in search of the exotic and the unfamiliar. I was travelling in search of home, in the hope of knowing and understanding where I could call home. Some look for novelty in their travels but I was looking for intimacy. Some look for distance and space of other continents but I suspected there was plenty of complexity and astonishment under my feet in the damp Atlantic archipelago of the British Isles. This is my home country and it seemed to offer worlds far bigger than one lifetime could ever discover, but I wanted to try to know a few of them.”
So Bunting, who has spent time in the Western Isles of Scotland as a child, sets out to go right to the edge of Great Britain to Hebridean isles which are, as she puts it, “tiny specks far to the west, the last volcanic remnant before we tip off the Continental shelf, leave Europe and head out into the open ocean for the Americas.” In a series of journeys over several years sometimes with family or friends but more often alone Bunting goes from island to island spending time trying understand what makes somewhere home to you by spending time finding out what homes means to these often isolated and small communities.
Bunting digs deep into the history of that area which was very enlightening for me. Before roads motor-driven ships and vehicles made the mainland passable, as early as the sixth century and possibly before island the chains of islands acted as a sea highway as the short hops between the islands in even the most primitive of crafts allowed for practical travel around the British Isles via its coasts. Who knew the quickest route to Norfolk could be via the north of Scotland? As a result immigration, conquest, raids, missions, settlements, wealthy absentee landlords, immigration and emigration have all shaped the island communities which in their turns have shaped those flows of people.
As Bunting travels from island to island starting with Jura and then Iona and on to Staffa, site of Fingal’s cave, Rum, Eriskay and Lewis, Bunting’s desired endpoint is St.Kilda. On these journeys she stays close to the land and the people. She absorbs the history and takes the time to listen and learn what makes these islands home to the current inhabitants and what has made people in the past try and fail to make it home usually because they brought an idea of home with them and tried to impose it on a very different place.
Bunting’s boat is forced to turn back from St. Kilda because of the rough seas, a normal condition there. “Surrounded by so many wonders, it seemed greedy to hanker after one missed. St. Kilda it turned out, had given me the journey. She had nothing left to give, but she hadn’t fooled me.”
I will be visiting the Hebrides this summer and I had bought this book thinking it would be a sort of travel guide, but it is so much more than that. As well as being a memoir of Bunting’s search, it is a book about how to travel rather than just visit. It tells the importance of understanding how the past resonates in the present, of taking in the wildness but not trying to shape it or master it. It’s about the importance of people past and present to the existence of place now and in the future.
Bunting ends the book by telling what she has learned. “It had indeed proved to be a pilgrimage. I had arrived at the north-west, and it had so much to tell. Of empires, of appropriation and resistance, and how, within these politics, we may inherit or make a home, and (if we are lucky) a narrative of belonging and loyalty.”
This is such a rich book well worth all the accolades it has received.

[False · Rating 3 out of 5]

I approached this book already sold by the subject matter: the inner and outer Hebrides in the northwest of Scotland, and the collection of furthermost islands 45 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean--St. Kilda's. I was disappointed for the most part in that it felt the author had entered these wild spaces and not been touched by them. I found a book of personal biography and memory, history of the islands, politics of the islands, a little on the geography and a few entries on the British aristocratic eccentrics who had bought entire islands, created elaborate burial vaults, moved castles, now crumbling, and half a million tons of top soil for the gardens. Every man's pet project or Eden. All failed.

It wasn't until the last chapter where the author visits the four islands that compromise St. Kilda's where I felt she finally was cut loose from her moorings and felt with deep emotion and spirituality what these wild spaces hold in the hearts of many. Having spent time in some of those spaces, I kept thinking, "What can she learn by leaving London for the weekend and day tripping off to Scotland?" It could take months living in this world for you to even begin to understand your place in the world and it's history. Try being evacuated one time from such a spot, where you life is in true danger and you have minutes in deciding what to do to survive another day. When she finally arrives at St. Kilda, a rough sea journey with no guarantees of landing that day, uninhabited since 1930, that the essence of what she's been searching for, finally surfaces.

"The view was exhilarating, demanding so much of the imagination and offering a pregnant sense of the possibilities of life. It had indeed proved a pilgrimage. I had arrived at the north-west, and it had had much to tell. Of empires, of appropriation and resistance and how, within these politics, we may inherit or make a home, and (if we are lucky) a narrative of belonging and loyalty. These histories have formed the dense weave of attachments across the British archipelago from which we now search for new definitions of nation to express and inspire human solidarity. On this edge, I see that whwere the weave of relationship and story frays, the filaments are exposed as fragile, whisper-thin." Well. That's a mouthful, but it's a start.

[Paul Tubb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was sceptical about this one when I started reading it. Was Madeleine Bunting going to be the female equivalent of the earnest young writer alighting from the London sleeper and so despised by Kathleen Jamie? The author takes a while to get into her stride with the early chapters on Jura and Iona having little new to say. However from Rum onwards the book hits its stride and pursues an insightful, intelligent, articulate and deftly-handled multi-stranded narrative which combines into a densely woven narrative. I learnt a lot from this book and it has opened other avenues of enquiry for me.

It isn't perfect; Bunting is guilty of hugely downplaying the social disruption of the various enclosure movements in England. The massive social upheaval of the 15th and 16th centuries, "Sheep Eat Men", with forced evictions, Poor Laws, and popular rebellions such as the Pilgrimage of Grace and Kett's Rebellion is furthered evidence by the thousands of deserted medieval villages present in southern England to this day. This was a forced eviction on a scale comparable to the Highland Clearances and we haven't even considered the impact of Parliamentary Enclosure in the 18th century.

Overall, however, an outstanding contribution to modern travel literature and the historiography of the Western Isles

[Pete daPixie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was in 1976 as a ship's radio officer after sailing for over a month in the White Sea. A period of perpetual night, freezing temperatures, icebergs and mountainous seas. It was during the homeward voyage that disaster struck. Our ship ran out of tea! We made a radio telephone call to our agents on the Hebridean island of Lewis for a resupply of the sacred brew. Approaching Stornoway on a crystal clear flat sea morning, clearing the headland, a small boat with an outboard approached, drew alongside and passed aboard a brown parcel. Like a relay runner passing the baton we then made full ahead and put the kettle on. Many times have I sailed through the islands of the Scottish west coast and Shetland. I have since visited some of the Hebridean isles in campervans, so I can say I am a lover of these places, prior to finding Madeleine Bunting's 'Love of Country'.
Published in 2016 and a BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' here is a very unusual and engaging travelogue through Holy Isle, Jura, Iona, Staffa, Rum, Eriskay, Harris, Lewis to St. Kilda and the Flannen Isles. A fascinating journey through Gaelic and Viking history and culture with a backdrop of wild untamed nature. Well written and researched.