Love of Country: A Journey through the Hebrides

Drawing on childhood trips to the archipelago of Scottish islands in the northwest of Britain—the furthest points of British land in that direction toward the Atlantic Ocean—The Guardian journalist and columnist Madeleine Bunting explores the geography, history, and culture of the Hebrides in her travelogue, Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey (2016). Over the course of six years, Bunting records multiple visits to the islands, describing their harsh and forbidding climate, teasing out what makes them such salient parts of the British mythos, and investigating the ways in which their position in the Atlantic made them the crossroads of cultural exchange and intersection.

The book is divided into chapters named for the islands Bunting delves into in detail. In exploring each island, she also pushes further into the history of Britain—she finds that the ways in which the native Gaelic tradition of island residents has been repressed, culled, and otherwise taken over are a microcosm of Britain’s imperial footprint throughout the world.

Because the islands were Scottish, and because of their rugged terrain and distant placement, the Hebrides have always been seen as “outside, primitive, uncivilized” in mainland Britain. At the same time, the danger inherent in any voyage toward them, a voyage that would have to traverse inhospitable landings near volcanic cliff sides and unpredictably wild currents, has made the Hebrides an image of intrepid exploration and devil-may-care adventuring—adding to the mythos of British colonizers abroad as brave civilizers facing unthinkable odds. Conquering and subduing the islands’ “savage” inhabitants and forbidding nature echoed similar British ventures in other parts of the world, glossing over any objections to the effect of this kind of sweeping conquest on native cultures and languages that were being swept away.



Early in their history, the islands were oceanic transit points. As early as during the sixth century, the way the islands are positioned allowed even small and crude boats to traverse the waters around the British Isles by relying on hugging coastlines from one island to the next.

This practical usefulness of the islands turned many of them into thriving communal farming collectives. However, at the same time, their appeal invited wealth and conquest. Slowly, the islands’ economy changed from one in which residents accounted for differences in landscape and field fertility, freely using land in common, to one of crofting. Wealthy landowners acquired more and more of the islands, portioning out parcels of land, called crofts, to serf-like farmers. This system exhausted the fertility of the soil to the point that sheep farming replaced growing food almost entirely. In order to free up increasingly more land to run huge herds of sheep, landlords swept their tenants off the land in operations called clearances. Clearances of the highlands, which happened not just in the Hebrides, but all over Scotland, meant that “tens of thousands of people were forcibly evicted from their homes and herded onto ships for Canada.” This history plays out to this day, as most of the more than 100 islands in the Hebrides chain are owned by a tiny part of the population who keep them free of inhabitants for sport hunting and shooting.

Bunting’s journeys take her first the island of Jura, a remote and peaceful wilderness famous for being the place where George Orwell holed up in order to write his famous novel 1984. She then makes her way to Iona, one of the most visited islands in the Hebrides’ history of being a sea-route intersection. Conversely, Iona has also been a place of religious seclusion and contemplation for many people throughout the centuries, and the home of the creators of the epic Book of Kells.



On the island of Staffa, Bunting delves into the complex geology of the islands, formed by volcanic eruptions. She also explores the way this island has figured in a variety of literary works—for example, as the site of Macpherson’s long lyrical Ossian poems, which used this island to punctuate their view of the sublime—and of its eventual fate, becoming the property of a US advertising executive in the 1980s.

On Rum, Bunting finds visible evidence of the economic transformation described above. Visiting Kinloch Castle, she details the island’s fraught history of suppressed communal life, parceled out ownership, and land clearance. These events are contrasted with Bunting’s personal experience there being struck by the beauty of the island’s flora.

Lewis, the largest island Bunting visits, gives her the opportunity to discuss the Gaelic culture and language that formed there, from Viking chess pieces to the literary works of Iain Crichton Smith. Bunting interviews local historians about the way Gaelic was threatened with extinction and about its existence as a pushback force to capitalism through the concept of còraichean, or the people belonging to the land. Lewis offers the rare vision of island residents coming together to fight off a takeover, as the mass refusal to work in Lord Leverhulme’s fish-canning factories resulted in this island owner shutting them down.



Bunting intends her final stop to be on the island of St. Kilda, but realizes that this remote and uninhabited spot is so central to the mythology of the Hebrides that she would be treading very well worn territory writing about it. Instead, she considers the way this island—and through it, the Hebrides in general—has reverberated in popular culture through media such as video games, tourist adventures, and academic writing. At the end, Bunting finds her own untouched spot to simulate the St. Kilda experience. On the tiny Flannan Isles, she has “a mesmerizing moment [being] astonished at the vast ocean and the natural world.”