Last updated on July 30, 2022
On the southern edge of the Highlands of Scotland, where the first high hills clad in forest rear up from the plains, lies the little city of Dunkeld. It’s a city in the old sense, because it has a cathedral; in a newer vernacular it would be but a town, lacking the scale to rub shoulders with any metropolis of the modern world. Once this was one of the great places of a medieval nation, but now, after centuries of war and depredation it has shrunk to a tiny fraction of its former importance. It remains a beautiful backwater, a relic of days past; a place where memories sleep amongst the trees and the hillsides.
Forgotten it is not, though. The broad highway of the A9 runs nearby here, one of two main motor routes through the Highlands. The railway too passes by, but a few metres away from the road. The chain of passes that cuts through the Highland hills between here and Inverness has been the principal channel for traffic between the north and the south of Scotland since before there was a Scotland, and it is for this reason that Dunkeld originally grew up here, controlling the southern mouth of the passes; the lock that bolted the gate to the north. The track of tarmac and the tracks of steel combined add up to accessibility, and today Dunkeld is less than two hours journey from both Edinburgh and Glasgow. On the eastern route through the Highlands it’s the first stop, and one of the finest.
On the western edge of Dunkeld, separated from the main body of the town by the river and the road, there exists one particular place that is the focus of this little account. It’s called the Hermitage. The place is a popular attraction for visitors, managed for the enjoyment of all by the National Trust; it was handed over to their keeping in the 1940s by the Dukes of Atholl, chiefs of the Clan Murray and the original creators of the place. It’s within walking distance of the town of Dunkeld, but can also be accessed easily directly from the road.
The popularity of the place is on account of its scenery. The River Braan cuts through the heart of the Hermitage, carving out a series of impressive waterfalls and rapids as it tumbles down towards its confluence with the river Tay. It provides a glorious walk through old woodland, surrounded by towering pine trees and moss-covered rocks. The main route is around 3 km in length, with further subsidiary paths extending out through the surrounding hills, and also along the riverbanks to and from Dunkeld. The environs were originally conceived, centuries ago, as a garden planted with assorted exotic plants; most of these are now gone, though. Nature has crept back into the garden’s ruins and reclaimed the place to good effect. Today, it feels like a wild place, all forest, falls and fog.
Buried amidst the mossy rocks are the remains of a number of follies, ornamental buildings created to no practical purpose, but simply for the aesthetic enjoyment of the wealthy Georgian aristocracy. Such things are not uncommon in Britain, resulting in a scattering of unusual structures distributed around large estates from Caithness to Cornwall. In the Hermitage, they are tied together by a common theme, and one which is very much in keeping with the spirit of the place. All are monuments to one particular story, one particular cycle of legends that have a very special place in the story of Scotland, the story of the Celtic lands more widely, and in the story of this place in particular. These are the legends of Ossian.
The very heart of the Hermitage complex sits beside the most spectacular of its falls, which also happens to be its lowest. It’s situated just beside a curving stone footbridge, coated in hanging moss and lichen, that arcs over the torrents like something out of the pages of a fairytale. Which, in a sense, it is. The building itself overlooks the falls; it’s a small, windowless stone edifice in a clearly Georgian style, with a faintly classical air to it. This place is called Ossian’s Hall of Mirrors.
The entrance is, upon approach, not entirely clear. The doorway is disguised in the wall; it’s necessary to push the right portion of the stonework for the portal to open. One inside, you emerge into a little portion of legend.
The falls are ahead, a viewing platform extending over them, providing a glorious vantage point across the foaming, crashing torrent. The sound fills the chamber, echoing off the walls – and sound is not the only thing these walls reflect back. The entire place is walled in reflective metal, which returns to the watcher a blurred version of the movement of the waters outside, and of the people who stand within. Inscribed upon the metal, their images drawn across the reflected reality in dark lines, are etchings of the Ossianic legends.
There are harps and heroes, swords and mountains, warriors and grand, epic vistas. All the panoply of the heroic era, of the romanticised image of the Celtic past is writ large on these walls in a striking form. It’s the dream of the legendary past, the mythic imagination. All the stuff of the legends of Scotland is here, but in a form that is now slightly unfamiliar. It is these legends, this dream to which whole of the Hermitage was a monument and a shrine; the legends of the Bard Ossian.
Ossian is the hermit to whom the title ‘Hermitage’ refers. He was a poet from ancient times, the son of a Celtic king and the creator of songs and stories that celebrated the achievements of his father, his brethren and their comrades. To him is attributed a sizeable chunk of the literature of Scotland and Ireland both.
The Hermitage itself is a wonderful thing. As a place, a simple site to visit, it has everything to commend it; scenery, atmosphere, a palpable history. Its soul, though, is the story; it’s the beating heart of the place, its inspiration and the seed from which this beautiful piece of forest grew. And with an understanding of this story comes an understanding of the soul not just of this place, but of that of Scotland also, and of the Highland country that lies at its heart. It’s a tale that contains a few unexpected twists. It runs thus…
***
In the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion, Highland Scotland was on its knees. The victorious forces of the British crown set about pacifying the lands that had produced Prince Charlie’s army. It was a brutal kind of peace they brought. Highland dress was banned, and whisky along with it; the use of the Gaelic language was suppressed, rebel chiefs stripped of their titles, and their clansmen deprived of their weapons. The legal basis of clan society was shattered, with the collective ownership of clan lands being replaced by a ‘modern’ system of property that made them the private property of one landowner – a change that left them vulnerable to confiscation and to sale. As the infrastructure of the old society was broken, the ties that bound people to chief and to land severed, so a new infrastructure was imposed to take their place. Military roads spread along the mountain valleys and garrison forts rose up above the towns; shackles of cobble and stone laid over the earth. In their ever-tightening grip, the ancient way of life of the Scottish clans was slowly to be throttled from existence.
And then, something remarkable happened. It began when a man called James Macpherson announced that he had discovered a story.
Macpherson was a Highlander, born and bred. The Macpherson clan inhabited Badenoch, in the heart of the central Highlands; James had grown up in the little village of Ruthven by the Spey River, in the core of their territory. The clan chief, Cluny Macpherson, had fought for Prince Charlie during the rebellion and then suffered for it after, spending the years following the final Jacobite defeat at Culloden Moor hiding in caves on the slopes of Ben Alder mountain. James had been nine in 1745, and in his childhood had witnessed both the rise and fall of the Jacobite cause. In his teenage years he witnessed its aftermath; the destruction of the world he had grown up in. It is a hard thing indeed for a person to lose so early his childhood heroes.
In 1752, he went to Aberdeen to study, also spending a year in Edinburgh. On graduation he returned to his native place of Ruthven, to become a teacher to the children of the clansfolk among who he had grown up. He retained contacts, though, with members of learned society in the far away cities; he had a taste for literature, and corresponded with writers from far corners of the country on a range of literary themes.
In the pursuit of this interest, Macpherson began to gather stories from his native Highlands. Some he was familiar with already, having grown up among them; others he travelled further to hear, visiting the last of the bards and storytellers of the old clan society while they remained alive.
They told to him stories in Gaelic, stories from the old world, and Macpherson took the task upon himself to translate them into English. He wished that they might reach a wider audience, and become accessible to the literate society further south. He wished also to win for himself some prosperity in the process.
In 1760 he commenced publishing his tales. Those he chose to deliver were the works of Ossian; a blind poet bard like Homer, guessed to have lived around the 3rd century AD. Ossian’s tales were, like Homer’s, epic poems; and they depicted a grand, epic world of misty mountains, ancient battles, tragic heroines, myth and mystery. This was the era of poetry, when verse dominated the world of words; Ossian’s words, in Macpherson’s translation, slotted in perfectly to the spirit of the age. Full of storm and drama, thees and thous, the sublime and the grandiose, they gave the late 18th century something that it found it had hungered for; a taste of the heroic, the magical, the ancient as an antidote to the disenchantment increasingly woven by reason. As science sent magic and religion chasing to the shadows, Ossian in turn raised up ghosts and made them inhabit the landscape once more. The mountains came alive with the splendour of an imagined past. The response was immense.
It is not in the slightest an exaggeration to say that the works of Ossian changed the world. They kick-started the Romantic movement in literature and the arts. They inspired Byron, Blake, Thoreau, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Goethe and Chateaubriand; the leading literary lights of Britain and Europe for a hundred years after. Operas and symphonies were composed on their themes; their style and methods emulated incessantly. They were the favourite works of figures as diverse as Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon Bonaparte, the latter even going so far as to have his palace decorated with scenes from the Ossianic epics.
Macpherson had done something that would have been considered, heretofore, impossible. He had brought the ways of his fathers back from the dead. Less than two decades after Culloden Moor had promised the destruction of Highland culture, that very culture had suddenly been transformed into the most fashionable in Europe. The transformation was swift, but was no flash-in-the-pan. This was to prove lasting. The fire Ossian lit was taken up by others, and over the coming years the literature of Scotland grew to be one of the most famous in the world, its old culture one of the most admired and romanticised. By the 1820s the Hannoverian monarch of Britain was paraded through the streets of Edinburgh in Highland dress, tailored in the tartan costume of the Jacobites. He had come north to celebrate his love for a culture that his immediate forefathers had attempted to destroy. A generation after, his niece Queen Victoria was similarly enthused. She toured the Highlands, purchased the Balmoral Estate and became a generous patron of traditional culture. Her descendants remain so to this day. The one-time enemy had become the convert.
Now, this is not to say that this marked the salvation of clan society, by any means. It did not. This was the era also of the Highland Clearances, when the people of northern Scotland were forced from their ancestral lands in favour of sheep and deer, and scattered to the four corners of the globe. The revival of Gaelic culture didn’t do a whole lot to benefit much of Gaeldom – but it did benefit some, and much of their ancient culture was, nonetheless, saved. This, it should be clear, is better than the alternative! In the years following the publication of Macpherson’s work, great efforts were made to collect and record the remnants of Highland folklore, and these efforts were to spread far beyond the borders of the Highlands. Antiquaries, writers, poets and collectors all over Europe, inspired by this work, sought out and recorded the traditional literatures of the continent, thereby saving them from disappearance. The echoes of Ossian’s words were loud and many, and they reverberate still.
You might think James Macpherson would be a hero in Scotland today. A son of the clan society who came good, transformed the world of literature and saved the culture of his native land would sound like a prime candidate for a national icon. Scotland, though, has high standards – and James Macpherson was guilty of something that posterity has found hard to forgive. The stories he collected were based on ancient Gaelic tradition, and versions of them are to be found throughout Ireland and Scotland; they are the tales of Fionn and the Fianna, most prominent today in Ireland and, in fact, one of the inspirations of the Irish independence movement. Macpherson’s versions of them, however, contained a little less of Ossian and a little more of Macpherson than he gave out. While built on traditional tales, they were very much Macpherson’s own versions of those tales. Many of the plotlines, some of the characters and almost the entirety of the vocabulary were his invention, not Ossian’s. They didn’t resemble what we would today consider translations, but might be better compared to the ‘re-boots’ we find in modern movie franchises; the re-telling of the tale of familiar characters and stories in a new fashion, updated to suit the tastes and values of the contemporary era.
Re-boots, today, are a common occurrence. In the 18th century, however, the concept hadn’t yet been invented, and a less charitable description was applied – forgery. It was an accusation that had some merits, and an accusation that was to stick. Macpherson has gone down in history as a fraud, a charlatan and a general cad of the worst order, someone who committed the cardinal sin of corrupting the very tradition that he purported to preserve. He himself cared little, going on as he did to become considerably prosperous. He lived for a few years in Florida as secretary to the governor, became British agent to an Indian princeling, and was, in the fullness of time, elected an MP – bizarrely, for a town in Cornwall rather than one in Scotland. On his death he was buried in Westminster Abbey, among the great and the good of the land.
Generations of academics and commentators who have followed after, however, have seen the Ossian material as a crude deception, and one which might have obscured the genuine Highland traditions that were collected in their aftermath. Their analysis has come to dominate over that of the writers he inspired; analysis trumping inspiration, fact fantasy. By the start of the 20th century, the dream of Ossian had faded and, today, the whole saga is a byword for forgery and sharp literary practice.
This analysis is a little too unkind, in my view. Macpherson committed a deception, no doubt; but without Macpherson’s great deception, where would the culture of Scotland be today? Sometimes an action must be judged on its consequences, and by this criterion, Ossian was one of the greatest triumphs in the history of Scotland. Against the charge of corrupting the tradition, it might be answered that without Macpherson’s example that tradition might never have been preserved.
It is also worth pointing out that all traditional stories will, on some level, represent a form of ‘re-boot’; a succession of versions of a particular narrative tradition reimagined to a greater or lesser extent as they passed from one generation to another, transformed either by intention or by inevitable evolution to suit the beliefs, vocabulary and understanding of each new head that housed them. No storyteller ever presented a tale on which their own personal and familial heritage was not on some level imprinted – and it is on the collection of such tales that all ‘genuine’ tradition is based. The crime of Macpherson will have been repeated more times than we know, intentionally or not.
Macpherson’s sin, judged in this light, may perhaps be seen to have heretofore been judged a little too harshly. Homer’s tales were once believed as history, after all, and yet none suggest that the Iliad and the Odyssey should be discarded from the canon of Greek national literature on account of it. Stories remain stories, great literature great literature, whenever and however it is conjured up – and as an example of a revival of Highland culture, a reimagining of the past that changed the future, Macpherson’s stories stand head and shoulders above most others. They gave us the mist, the magic, the Celtic culture, the connection to the past and the connection to the wild heart of our country that has stamped itself profoundly on the spirit of the Scottish people. Yet we deny this portion of our origin, one of the greatest gifts of our country to the literature of the world – and we repudiate one of those among us whose legacy casts the longest shadow.
There is an injustice here. It would do our nation no harm at all, in my opinion, to reclaim a little of the dream that was Ossian.
© William Young and Inter-Celtic, 2020. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to William Young and Inter-Celtic with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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