“Let me tell you that I love you, that I think about you all the time”
Dougie Maclean’s song Caledonia resonates with every Scot, especially those of the expatriate variety. I know, for I was for 35 years one of them. Not a day passed that I didn’t think of home. The visions that most often came to mind were the views from my Gourock childhood, looking across the Clyde to the majestic hills of Argyll. Often too the panorama afforded by the sunset over the Paps of Jura from the banks of the Crinan Canal; the fertile Howe o’ the Mearns, the dark and light of the Lairig Ghru, Loch Achray on a summer’s day or the long open moor between Duns and Chirnside.
The poet Norman MacCaig surely spoke for us all in his epic work, A man in Assynt.
“Who possesses this landscape?/The man who bought it or I who am possessed by it?/False questions, for this landscape is masterless/and intractable in any terms that are human.”
Do all Scots feel like me about our land and our landscapes? It is a natural thing to feel love for one’s native land, whether it be England, Argentina, Finland or Fiji. But we here in this plot called Scotland won the lottery of the ages when we were gifted a place so staggering in its beauty that time after time world travellers........