I’ve written before about how influential Sorley MacLean is in my writing. Sorley was from Raasay, and the highlands and islands of Scotland were in his blood in a way which I think we, in our fast-changing, technological world, are slowly ceasing to comprehend. For him, the history and the geography and the people of his home place were indivisible. ‘The dead have been seen alive,’ he writes in Hallaig, his paean to the people who were riven from their blood homes during the Highland Clearances. He goes on:
I will go down to Hallaig,
to the Sabbath of the dead,
where the people are frequenting,
every single generation gone.
And yet they are still there, transformed. They are birch trees, hazels, a ‘straight, slender, young rowan, ‘a wood/ going up beside the stream’. Past, present and future, land and sky, history and memory, kinship, truth, love. They are all one, they are of us, in us, by us, for us. This is an intoxicating, panoptic way of viewing our humanity.
I was firmly reminded of this reading Jess Smith’s extraordinary work, Button Bog. She writes at one point: ‘Argyllshire to me was a big map of memories and campsites, all woven through each other, jut an enormous playground of my travelling days, and I loved the county more than any other.’
This same sense of connectedness, then – landscape as key to memory – encompassing currents of culture deeper than we can understand, imbues her approach to the sharing of stories from her Scottish Traveller heritage.
Jess Smith is from the last generation of Scottish Travellers to have maintained their peripatetic lifestyle. From the 1940s onwards, under pressure from local authorities, Travellers gradually began to “settle” in houses, foregoing their life on the road. I’ve written before about how sad I think it is that such a vibrant lifestyle has gone. As a child, I remember the Travellers taking over the Meadows in Crieff at tattie-howking time, dozens of caravans and vans parked up for the duration of the hairst. The world is a thinner place these days.
In her introduction, she declares Button Bog is about the power of ‘Story’ and those who keep it alive. Through her lifetime of research she has sought to answer two questions: ‘why are Travellers different from the rest of society; and where can I find our original story?’ The first question seems relatively straightforward until you consider the second, and then the complications and contradictions arise. Travellers are different because they are peripatetic, they have their own code, they are a discernible and individual grouping.
But.
From where did that difference spring? Why? How? Because, for all the differences, there are similarities between Travellers and scaldies, at least working class scaldies. My faither, for example, a countryman all his life, brilliant with his hands, with a deep and abiding knowledge of nature and the world around him, and undoubtedly a restless spirit always happiest outdoors, could claim much in common with the sensibilities Jess Smith brings out so brilliantly in her evocation of Travellers and times past.
But Travellers ever were and still are outsiders. Jess Smith writes of the attitude of the Scottish government and Historic Scotland: ‘A tiny country of five million people seemed to be ignoring a seam of gold in our culture, that existed under their noses. Why disregard such a major part of history?’
It is this history which Jess seeks to uncover in Button Bog. She is in search of the ‘elusive wanderers of the past’ who have shaped Traveller society. ‘Like the rhythms and seasons of a flowing river,’ she writes, ‘the stories and characters flow freely with their own depth and reasons’. These stories are steeped in the ways of the countryside. Nature is around us and, as Jess explains in a beautiful phrase evocative of Hamish Henderson’s ‘carrying stream’, ‘we are the carriers of her wisdom’.
The stories in the book are not only Jess’s, but come from a range of different voices, each creating a specific and beautiful present from the past, each maintaining a link to the past, connecting us to our own histories. ‘Stories live long on the tongues of country people,’ she writes, ‘time takes a slow path’.
So she brings us not only her only stories but those of Travellers now gone, or ‘the voices of my friends,’ as she describes them. Not the words of my friends, note, their voices. She hears them still, in the telling. The peerless Betsy Whyte, for example, probably the first to bring the Traveller lifestyle to a wider audience: ‘Like a lone bird in its tree,’ Jess writes, ‘Betsy sang and twittered until her voice was heard, with all its authentic song.’ A trailblazer indeed.
She quotes Duncan Williamson, storyteller (and possessor of one of the sweetest voices you’ll ever hear), describing his own kist of stories: ‘I still tell these stories today. They never change. The same stories are still alive, and it gives me a great privilege to tell the stories about people who are dead, because in our family tradition, wir [sic] Travelling people never dies.’
And so Duncan and Jess wheel us back to where I began, with Sorley and his restless search for the humanity of his people.
Button Bog is a wonderful collection of stories, reminiscences, history and folklore. It will go down as an important piece of Scottish cultural writing.