Lesley Riddoch: If the Homecoming can illuminate inconvenient Scottish truths, it might yet be worth its subsidy

Published on Sunday 18 October 2009 21:42

SCOTLAND'S clan chiefs are coming in for stick as the bill for amusing Americans at the Clan Gathering in Holyrood Park has finally landed.

Despite attracting 47,000 visitors from 40 countries and generating over 10 million for the Scottish economy, the centrepiece of Edinburgh's Homecoming Week somehow failed to wash its Saltire-emblazoned face, making a 600,000 loss.

The taxpaying clansmen and women of Scotland will, of course, pick up the tab – look at clan history and you may conclude it was ever thus – and the homecoming vehicle has been bailed out to allow a repeat bed-filling opportunity in 2012 or 2014 for the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn.

Before the autopilot is locked and loaded, however, prominent voices – including this newspaper – have suggested the financing arrangements at least should be reconsidered. Those voices will get louder as public spending cuts bite and the SNP's enthusiasm for all things kilted and couthy appears to be an embarrassing and expensive anachronism which should be funded directly by clan chiefs and the tourism industry.

The awkward truth is that modern Scots don't rate clans, but wealthy Americans do. Apparently two-thirds of clan chieftainships lie empty or dormant while across the Atlantic, our American and Canadian cousins are busily creating new clans from septs (or branches) of old clans and from lowland families with no formal clan tradition. Europeans are also warming to the sense of connectedness the clan offers, with 140 Scottish festivals this summer in Germany, France and Belgium. And they aren't small get-togethers. The average crowd is reportedly 15,000. As Professor Tom Devine recently observed of their untapped economic potential, "Whaur's your Irish pubs noo?"

Is that as good as it's going to get? In the certain knowledge that our tartan past sells, will we manage to hold our largely urban, lowland breath for another fortnight and pretend clans, malt whisky and golf are part of our everyday lives till the visitors go home?

The word clan engages the heads of accountants, not the hearts of patriots in Scotland, even though precisely the opposite obtains outside our borders. We are in it but believe we are not of it.

This matters. Unless native Scots connect with their own clan heritage, the grudging reaction to the relatively small Homecoming overspend will be the first of many as kilted extravaganzas proliferate in Scotland's seemingly endless roll-call of significant battle-related anniversaries.

The Global Impact conference in Inverness this week may prove pivotal. For three days prominent academics will fit together the jigsaw pieces they carry from every part of the globe and the picture they piece together may quash forever the notion that Highland clan society was a slow, regressive, ignorant place.

According to one speaker, our own Professor Tom Devine, Whig, Hanoverian, Presbyterian, Scottish and English educated opinion became hysterical in its denunciation of Highland Culture after the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Legislation smashed social structures but acclaimed Scottish enlightenment thinkers like Ferguson did the rest, suggesting the Highlands demonstrated "arrested development" and the clan system was archaic, frozen in time, geared only to war and alien within British culture.

After the famine of the 1840s, generous donations to the Highlands didn't alter its stricken nature – all of which led to one conclusion. The Highland clan system had created a society which couldn't be improved.

In fact clan society was not static, adapting to the possibility of crop failure every five years, improving soil with runrigs and lazybeds and droving cattle to create new markets. The last clan battle occurred in the 1660s, so Jacobite clansmen were not blood-crazed warriors – they had not seen battle for almost a century. And in Canada, these hopeless clansmen formed the Norwesters – a fur-trading company so ruthless it nearly competed the Hudson Bay company out of existence.

Before Culloden there was no great difference between Highland and Low-land society. Why did one modernise while the other faced destitution? According to Professor Devine, the answer is not in the inadequacy of clanship.

All of which makes some of the animosity directed against the clan-related aspects of Homecoming just a modern manifestation of a centuries-old Highland-hating tradition. And against the inadequacy of Scotland's clan chiefs.

In the absence of positive feelings about clan society, chiefs have become the only surviving living symbol, and their track record is not good.

Clan chiefs betrayed trust and sold clansmen and women short to lead unsustainable lifestyles in London. Their role in removing people to make way for sheep has left such enduring resentment in cleared Highland families like my own that none of us has visited the seat of the Duke of Sutherland, Dunrobin Castle, despite driving past it for 16 years. Instead, we had picnics in memoriam of the missing – on the empty Caithness beaches of Dunnet, Keiss, Reiss and Staxigoe or the mournfully beautiful Clearance hotspots of Bad Bea and the Whaligoe Steps.

Clan chiefs? I think it safe to say the average More, Gunn or Mackay of my acquaintance wouldn't give you tuppence for them. Even if the image of the clan can be refreshed, the role of the clan chief is harder to rehabilitate.

And yet, on Skye the head of Clan Donald is trying to do just that. The Clan Donald Lands Trust is working with the Sleat community and Sabhal Mor Ostaig to build Kilbeg, a new Highland village centred on the busy hub of the Gaelic College. A recent event questioning the role of the modern clan began with an honest question from Sir Ian: "Am I a total anachronism?"

Without a powerful gesture from other clan chiefs like land transfers or perhaps a joint Clearance Apology, the answer in Scotland is probably yes.

And yet, beyond Scotland, the pulling power of Scottish clan chiefs is enormous.

The Homecoming can be the start of a long overdue coming to terms with a series of fault-lines that still divide the Highlands from wider Scottish society. And for starting to illuminate such inconvenient truths, the Clan Gath-ering may yet be worth its subsidy.