John Prebble's Scotland by John Prebble

Author:John Prebble [Prebble, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub

… and there began to come to our ears a great sound of mourning, the people on board and those on shore crying and lamenting one to another so as to pierce the heart.

This incident is irrelevant to the narrative flow of Kidnapped. It is also set too early in history, although it is true that here, on Loch Aline, many of Morvern’s unhappy people later saw the last of their homeland, its green hills darkening to blue as their ship went out with the evening tide. Writing his novel in a yellow-brick house on a Bournemouth chine, struggling with sickness and mounting bills, Stevenson was perhaps recalling a boyhood memory, a painful experience that had long awaited relief through his creative imagination. In the year he sailed about these waters more than thirty families were evicted from the Lochaline estate by its new proprietor, the widow of a Glasgow banker. If he did not see their departure himself, as I believe he must have done, the boy undoubtedly heard about it. These were the hard days of eviction and clearance in Morvern, sadly lamented by John MacLachlan of Rahoy, a Gaelic bard and a good man who practised medicine among the people, without any formal qualifications, it would seem.

Heavy, sorrowful my heart

going through the glen …

On an April morning I no longer hear

bird-songs or the lowing of cattle on the moor.

I hear the unpleasant noise of sheep

and the English language, dogs barking

and frightening the deer.

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