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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nOn my first night in Inverness, my host drove me from the train station to my digs on campus, past road signs incongruously plastered with mythical place names. Culloden<\/a>. Cawdor<\/a>. Quite a one-two punch on a single roundabout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We shall be kings hereafter<\/em>, I whispered under my breath. And then I laughed at myself. This mythic territory is, most recently, the newly-reinvented landscape of Outlander<\/em>, with twenty tourist tours available to map a Netflix-altered history and hunger for romantic kilts and castles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I have avoided the Outlander\/Sir Walter Scott version of Highland romanticism and lost cause tourism thus far. I am not out here in a Royal Mile kilt buying Stewart keychains and tea towels. But the idea of a Narnia-like gateway to the old order of the Gaels still thumps something deep in my imagination. Or my gut. I have tried very<\/em> hard to keep it in check all week. One summer, at the main Parks Canada Green Gables house<\/a> in Cavendish, I played all the characters except<\/em> Anne on the nightly walks on the red dirt laneways of the Haunted Wood. Marilla’s long skirt and apron as a top layer, Diana Barry’s swiss dot dress underneath, Gilbert’s knickers hiding under the pantaloons. A tour guide would escort throngs of visitors through the woods, with Anne & I popping up to enact vignettes from the story at various points. Scene concluded, we’d race onward, me discarding layers of clothing as I ran. Once I failed to strip down fully and did an entire scene as Gilbert, Anne’s erstwhile boyfriend, with my bright blue Diana bow stuck on the top of my head. Oopsie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet. I may have cut my teeth on disillusioning tourists, but I am an English major for whom Cawdor conjures up all the magic of the Scottish play. And I am a Stewart, a descendent of the Jacobite Stewarts of Appin<\/a>, defeated at the last battle on British soil. I grew up on Brigadoon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n The thing about Scotland is that – as a country – it’s three raccoons in a trench coat, passing as a single coherent entity. Go to the Culloden museum if you have any doubt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everybody outside Scotland loves Scotland, foreign and quaint but not too foreign, great collection of accents, progressive, bit of a witchy vibe. Of course, there’s also Trainspotting<\/a>. And I am in the territory of the G\u00e0idhealtachd<\/a>, perhaps one of the first cultures to experience the dubious ‘first oppress, then appropriate’ nature of colonial empire: bagpipes<\/a>, anyone? They were outlawed for forty years, as instruments of war. A piper was put to death. But a hundred years later, Queen Victoria decided she was into them, and now you’d think that the British military and royals – piped in and out of their official events – had fought on the other side of Culloden. (I say this all with love, Scotland. Please don’t send me home. They’re very nice raccoons. And a charming tartan trenchcoat.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes mundanity is a strange gift, in that it breaks the spell of myth and makes it easier to get your feet under you. I have had a good healthy dose of mundanity this week, living in student halls for the first time in thirty odd years. I have done my shopping, found my favourite puddings at the local TESCO: the rhubarb crumble and the chocolate ganache, both improved with clotted cream. Screw cholesterol. I dealt with a broken heater, and a COVID diagnosis that interrupted some of my travels and interviews with absolutely lovely UHI staff…though we went online so not too much work was lost. I learned many of the staff are less Highlanders than I, by heritage…but they are of<\/em> this place. The myth of the place is not the work of this school. The work of this school is an antidote to the romanticism that render the Highlands a largely empty tragic past, a place of once and future kings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is tempting, as an outsider, to imagine you understand a place. I don’t. “Well, that’s not an Inverness accent,” remarks the man pouring coffee. I am walking from campus in towards the city. I’ve stumbled into some sort of children’s fair, lured by bright bunting triangles strung about a park and a food truck emblazoned with a Coffee Roasters banner. I am staying in student residence for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[22,15,25,24,23,26],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-accents","tag-belonging","tag-culloden","tag-jacobites","tag-myth","tag-understanding"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonstewart.com\/belonging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonstewart.com\/belonging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonstewart.com\/belonging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonstewart.com\/belonging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonstewart.com\/belonging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/bonstewart.com\/belonging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":213,"href":"https:\/\/bonstewart.com\/belonging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions\/213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonstewart.com\/belonging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonstewart.com\/belonging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonstewart.com\/belonging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
I know these are actually just roads, not Narnia-like gateways to destiny and tragedy and the misty distant past. But they sound like that to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I know it’s a weird thing to live in a place that other people experience as mythical. I spent my teenage years in puffed sleeves, part of PEI’s Anne of Green Gables<\/em> tourism-industrial complex. I took pleasure in denuding innocent tourists of their belief that Anne was an historical figure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Long united with its more dominant partner in the project of Empire, Scotland left behind its Declaration of Arbroath<\/a> for Union and – like Canada to the US – gets to be the little sister who shrugs and says “it wasn’t me!” <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Purple](\"https:\/\/bonstewart.com\/belonging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Screenshot-2024-09-27-at-3.09.47\u202fPM-1-845x1024.png\")
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But I understood enough to accept the coffee man’s free coffee, his hospitality, last weekend at the park. Here’s to whatever’s next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"