Page 13 - Art First: Helen MacAlister: At the Foot o’ Yon Excellin’ Brae

and the vivid form handed down, as she records, in the Thus the little bank behind the kirk in Glen Urquhart
poems ‘Christ’s Kirk’, ‘The Cherrie and the Slae’ and reaching out to embrace the overflow of its congregation
‘Montgomerie’s Stanza’. Thus the poetry itself becomes a only makes more poignant the emptiness of all the other
historical landscape. In this particular symbiosis between glens in that wide compass.
poetry and landscape, she comes close to David Herd Poetry and song are a subtext in all this, but
in his Scots Songs of 1769. (Before Burns, Herd was a they do also surface directly, in the title of the show itself,
pioneer collector of Scots ballads.) In the introduction to for instance, and in the references to Hamish Henderson’s
his first collection, Herd argued that the richness of the collecting and the tinkers who were for him the conduit of
tradition of popular song in Scotland was itself symbiotic. so much music. Poetry is there directly in Standard Habbie
As though part of nature, it sprang from ‘the romantic face and in Ben Dorain, too, but it is at its most immediate in
of the country and the pastoral life of the great part of the the drawing And I bleer my een wi’ greetin. Poetry and
inhabitants.’ song have enjoyed the dualism of words and music, their
In Glen Urquhart and Glen Moriston, the link symbiosis indeed, since the time before writing. Reid’s
between language and landscape is different. It was analogy of verbal and visual language suggests a similar
because of the size of the congregation in Glen Urquhart symbiosis of the aural and the seen. In her work, Helen
that an outdoor extension to a large kirk already equipped MacAlister takes the example of that symbiosis and extends
with a gallery was necessary when all the congregation it in a new direction. In And I bleer my een wi’ greetin, she
gathered for communion. Those numbers in turn reflected makes this explicit. She refers the line from the song to
the fact that, uniquely, these two glens were spared the a remark of John Purser’s on the achievement of Burns
Clearances. Like the last fragment of the old Caledonian uniting words and music in his songs, ‘for it was a new
forest that survived hidden out of reach in nearby Glen thing, to enter so deeply into the feeling and inner mood of
Affric, until the First World War Glen Urquhart and a tune and realize it in language.’
Glen Moriston remained a viable fragment of the old The line in the drawing is from “Ay Waukin’ O,”
Gàidhealtachd. Indeed, the bank behind the kirk was still the sad song of a girl who cannot sleep for the absence of
in use in living memory and the benches until recently her lover,
still stood stacked in a little stone-built hut nearby. The
outdoor gathering of this Gaelic community was therefore a Lanely night comes on,
monument to a different, more sombre exchange between A’ the lave are sleepin,
language and landscape: the tragic correlation between I think on my bonie lad,
the Clearances and the geography of the Gàidhealtachd, And I bleer my een wi’ greetin.
their ethnic and therefore linguistic parameters. Situated in
the Great Glen and at the midpoint between Strathnaver Helen MacAlister renders the sadness with
and Argyll to north and south and Strathspey and Skye the words set against blank white, in Gaelic against bàn,
to east and west, Glen Urquhart and Glen Moriston are perhaps, the word for fair-haired as in Donnchadh Bàn
geographically just about at the centre of the Highlands. MacIntyre himself, but, as she remarks, also the word for
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