Book review: The Highlands and Islands of Scotland: A New History, by Alistair Moffat - 'will both inspire curiosity and invite argument'

Taking in the whole sweep of human history north of the Highland Line, this book will both inspire curiosity and invite argument, writes Allan Massie

“In 1159 BC the Icelandic volcano known as Hekla suddenly blew itself apart… A deadly darkness descended over the mountains, glans and islands, a perpetual twilight that must have seemed to many like the evening of the world.” This dramatic passage from the first chapter of Alistair Moffat’s history of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland is a reminder that violent climate change can occur without human help. Moffat’s history goes way, way back and then comes up to the present day. It isn’t, and could not be, a continuous narrative except in the broadest of outlines. It is the work of an enthusiast with a Borderer’s passion for the north and the islands. Moffat is always asking himself how things were then – then being any point from many centuries before Scotland was Scotland right up to, more or less, last week. He ranges about like a spaniel released from a car after a long journey.

The chapters on the people who built the remarkable stone circles in the Northern Isles, built in what we may still call “prehistory” since we know nothing of the language and beliefs of the builders, are especially fascinating. “It’s like trying to piece together the medieval Catholic Mass by looking at the empty ruins of Kelso Abbey,” Moffat writes. Fair enough, yet he is sufficiently confident to write that “Orkney was the centre of Stone Age Britain, the beating heart of the culture that ultimately supplanted the old life of hunting and gathering.” Where there are few certain facts, Moffat is always happy to speculate, whetting the reader’s curiosity, inviting often his argument.

He is good on Roman Scotland, on the first footholds of Christianity associated with Columba and on the Vikings. His picture of the Viking slave market in Dublin is suitably repulsive, a chapter that should be read by the ignorant moralists who seem to believe that all slaves were unfortunate Africans, victims of European imperialism. Meanwhile, intelligent light is shed on Dark Age Scotland, though even one as devoted to the elucidation of mysteries as Moffat cannot shed much light on the Picts and the question of their language, which a brave 18th century speculator decided was “Gothic”.

Historian and author Alistair Moffat. PIC: Andrew Cawley.

Moffat is excellent on the 16th and 17th centuries, on the Highland campaign of Montrose and Alasdair Macdonald, and later on the Jacobite risings, very funny too about the terrible Hollywood film Bonnie Prince Charlie with David Niven as the prince greeting the clans with “Hello Scotsmen.” There is a brilliant passage describing how in the 18th century cattle were driven from the Highlands to market, first at Crieff, then at Falkirk. But then we come sadly to emigration, clearances and the destruction of traditional Highland culture. Not all is dark; he is amusing about Macpherson’s Ossian, the first Scottish literary work to be a great European success. Finding it turgid and all but unreadable, he wonders how Napoleon found it so marvellous that he never went on campaign without it. It may still seem good in the Italian translation by Cesarotti, in which the emperor read it.

Much of the last part of the book is concerned with Gaelic culture, its decline and attempts to arrest it. There is a connection of course, between this and the revival of the Highland economy – more accurately the creation of a new Highland economy in the last half-century. Economic recovery has brought thousands with no connection with Gaeldom, and this has meant that Gaelic is not the language of business, commerce and education. Nevertheless there is now sufficient cultural promotion of Gaelic to ensure some sort of future, more than seemed likely 70 years ago. Indeed, Scotland’s 2022 census found that 2.5 per cent of people aged three and over had some skills in Gaelic – an increase of 43,100 people since 2011, when 1.7 per cent had some skills in Gaelic. Moffat himself learned Gaelic, though he admits his is now rusty.

This is a splendid and thoroughly enjoyable book, one from which most of us can surely learn a lot. I would advise reading it straight through, then returning to dip in again and again.

The Highlands and Islands of Scotland: A New History, by Alistair Moffat, Birlinn, £25