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Edinburgh: An education in Highlands history

IN Edinburgh recently as a guide for summer school students, I struck up a conversation with a museum guard. For a moment, I wondered if I’d made a serious mistake: His Scottish brogue was so thick I had to work to understand the words. As it turned out, the struggle was worth it.

Perking up when he heard my own accent, the guard said he’d been to America before. In fact, he’d been married in Toronto. Is your wife Canadian, I asked? “No,” he said, “but ’er granny was.”

It turned out that she’d left Scotland for Canada in the early 1900s, a victim of the English endeavor to buy out land for sheep-grazing and send the inhabitants, well, anywhere else. The “Highland Clearances,” which often involved forcibly evicting inhabitants from their homes, are notorious among the Scottish. Today, they help account for the wild, deserted look of the Highlands. They also explain how there are more Highlands descendants in North America and Australasia than in Scotland itself.

Even today, the guard said, nearly everyone in the Highlands knows someone—a friend, a relative—who was sent from their land and across the sea.

“It’s awful, tha’,” he said. “But then much of Scaw-land’s ’istory has been tha’ way. An’ yet ‘ere we’re one o’ the most literary nations in the world. It’s because it’s ’ere.” He thumped his breast with his right hand. “Bein’ Scaw-ish is in ’ere. They can’t take tha’ away.”

All around me, explanations of the museum’s exhibits were written in clear English. But it was there, talking to the guard, that I learned the most. His emotions needed no translation.