Civic MacBough Goes To Town
Issie MacPhail1
Honorary Research Fellow, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences
University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK.
consultancy@arcinfo.co.uk
Introduction: Mackay Country
The ‘assets’ over which social movements in the Scottish Highlands and
Islands have most famously acted in the past two hundred years are usually
summed up in one word: land. In recent years however this conceptualisation has
been broadened to include concern over ‘intangible’ assets too. These are things
which cannot be bought and sold such as language, poetry, the aesthetics of land
and sea, stories, histories, songs and even ‘heritage’ (Braunholtz-Speight et al.
2011)2. This intervention provides a brief history of one social movement which
emerged a decade ago in the north west mainland of Scotland: The Mackay
Country Community Trust Ltd (MCCT). Their events sub-group is called Family
MacBough. I begin by describing MCCT’s emergence and purpose, and then
develop a vignette of the cultural and economic conditions which these people are
confronting. This serves to tell the story of how and why Family MacBough went
‘to town’ to participate in the Civic Geographies session, and what that meant to
Mackay Country activists.
Mackay Country, or Dùthaich Mhic Aoidh, comprises the communities in the
north west corner of Sutherland in mainland Scotland, encompassing the civil
parishes of Eddrachilles, Durness, Tongue and Farr. Historically the boundaries
have varied and at times reached as far south as Lairg. In 1828 the remnants of the
Reay Estate, comprising the last of the lands owned by the Mackay Clan Chief,
1
Published under Creative Commons licence: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works
It is clear that these other kinds of assets, described by practitioners as ‘intangible assets’, have been the
subject of protest and activism in the past several hundred years. A good example is the Gaelic language itself.
2
Civic MacBough Goes To Town
402
Lord Reay, were sold to George Granville Leveson-Gower, Marquis of Stafford,
and Elizabeth, Duchess of Sutherland, proprietors of The Sutherland Estates.
Figure 1a illustrates historic boundary shifts and the current civil parish boundaries.
Figure 1b indicates what is known about the extent of land owned by Clan Mackay
today3. The contrast is striking.
Mackay Country today has a population of 2,600 people and, at less than one
person per square kilometre, one of the lowest population densities in Western
Europe. In ‘development industry’ terms, this area is defined as ‘fragile’. The
average household size is 2.2 persons; 48.7% of the population is aged 45 years
and over; population and school rolls are falling and household incomes are 17%
below the Scottish average4. The name Mackay Country comes from the Gaelic
placename which is still used by older generations and Gaelic speakers of any age
– Dùthaich ‘Ic Aoidh. This translates in English as Mackay Country but
translations are always approximate and naming is never simple, given the naming
of places in relation to neoliberalist accumulation by dispossession (see Berg
2011). MCCT’s aspiration is to resist such dispossession on behalf of the
collective, by means conventional and abstract, including taking virtual possession.
Figure 1a. A sketch summary of Mackay Country boundaries past and present
(MacPhail 2006).
3
The hereditary peerage of ‘Lord Reay’ persists but has no current connection to Mackay Country. The 14th
Lord Reay died on 10th May 2013. His obituary is informative in terms of historical circuits of colony and
capital - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10057082/Lord-Reay.html
4
Based on 2001 Census figures: population fell by 121 people (4.4%) 1991-2001.
ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2015, 14(2), 401-412
403
Figure 1b. Land currently understood to be owned by Clan Mackay. This sketch is
from the Mackay Country website, supplied by an individual who researched Clan
Mackay land. The ‘little parcel’ is beside the village of Reay on the Caithness
border5.
Resisting the Highlandism which has negatively constructed a people and
their place as undeveloped and undevelopable, the object is to offer alternatives,
through what Spivak calls multiple ‘speech acts’ (Butler and Spivak 2007; Pittock
1997). While these attempted speech acts generate many words, their principal
medium is non-representational embodied activity. Travellers' histories,
geographies of song, arts, crafts, routes and stories, old and immediate: all of these
indicate the new sorts of paths to travel. Ingold (2011: 147) proposes that
5
See http://www.mackaycountry.com/. For information on Clan Mackay, contact Strathnaver Museum where
there is a Clan Mackay Room: www.strathnavermuseum.org.uk
Civic MacBough Goes To Town
404
‘traditional knowledge’ does not derive from a memory time-capsule: instead, from
“a relational perspective, by contrast, knowledge subsists in practical activities
themselves, including activities of speaking”. Such is the spur for the civic
interventions under the project of Mackay Country. The group’s formal aim as
described in The Memorandum and Articles of Association is “To provide a
structure to allow the development of partnership between the communities and
community groups operating in and comprising Mackay Country”. They are
concerned with everyone who lives in Mackay Country today, and in Clan Mackay
only in instances where that pertains to local and global histories (Grimble 1993).
This article draws on MCCT reports, working documents, events
programmes, materials documenting events and volunteer discussions, my own
participant observation as a volunteer and contractor, delivering projects, and my
academic work on the role of culture in development in this region. The author is
hence positioned as part of this evolving MCCT research alliance. My writing is a
blend of auto-ethnographic and other methods6. The vocabularies and conceptual
debates around ‘civic geographies’ are new to the MCCT’s committee and
volunteers. The invitation to participate in AC2012 precipitated a self-conscious
engagement in these means of expression and debate. MCCT did not self-identify
as being an exemplar of counter civics, unsurprisingly, given that groups of this
sort in this area do not presently deploy their aims and position through rhetorics of
civic insurgency. MCCT’s subtle tenacity in that regard only becomes visible if one
sets the group’s existence, utterances and speech acts within a context illuminated
by knowledge of the history of Highland underdevelopment (Withers 1992: 155).
Not everything can or need be said in words.
Figure 2. The Bough Tent in Melness on the Kyle of Tongue in north Sutherland.
Summer in the Straths project, May 2007. Photo by Family MacBough. Mackay
Country Archive (SIS).
6
Other active MCCT volunteers and committee members reviewed drafts of this article and the final version.
ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2015, 14(2), 401-412
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Mackay Country and Family MacBough
Mackay Country is a group which actively seeks to remake place via cultural
means and research activity, to facilitate economic regeneration in the locality (Ray
1998). In 2006 the group embarked upon a project for Highland Year of Culture
2007 called Summer in the Straths. It involved a team learning to make the
travellers’ tents, or bough tents, starting with cutting and setting (shaping) hazel
boughs in the winter (MacPhail 2013). During early summer 2007 the team,
including tinsmith and craft metalworker Arthur Dutch, covered 150 miles along
traditional travellers’ routes led by two of the last people brought up in that
itinerant trading lifestyle in Sutherland, Essie Stewart and Alec John Williamson.
There were ceilidhs at known ceilidh sites and every school in the area was
involved in fèisean – small group work exploring Gaelic and English storytelling,
songs, tinsmithing, blacksmithing and the domestic and working lives of the
traveller families7.
Mackay Country’s involvement in Civic Geographies focused on this work
about the Ceardannan (Summer Walkers), and included their bough tent,
tinsmithing and itinerant storytellers8. This team has informally become a Mackay
Country sub-group since 2008 on account of their annual events, education
programme and commitment to each other. They have become known as Family
MacBough9. I ran Summer in the Straths and have managed Family MacBough
activities since then. Hamish Henderson said that the travellers were the settled
population’s libidinous alterego (Gunn 2010). In north west Sutherland the
Ceardannan were and are considered part of ‘the community’ and accorded respect
in that capacity whilst also being ‘othered’. Perhaps ‘the other’ within to some
extent, with the regular travelling routes forming pulsing veins through intractable
territories. Today’s activities by Family MacBough have rather unwittingly reetched those trajectories with new and different functions in terms of goods and
services, but again (or still?) embedding people in an area with less than one person
per square kilometre into networks of conversation and belonging. In terms of civic
geographies, this does indeed serve to mesh place, space and selves – dynamically
conjuring boundaries through these perambulations punctuated by carnivalesque
events. The securities sought by these activities are regional economic betterment;
strengthening ties between and within disparate remote communities of place; an
altered sense of place in place; an attempt at the same for those looking in from ‘the
outside’ and an inclusive, opt-in, set of local identities. In the context of dominant
7
These Sutherland travelling families, the Stewarts and the Williamsons, are tinsmiths and famed storytellers
who passed on news, songs and pipe tunes as well as providing essential goods and services.
8
Every other written source uses the term ‘bow’ tent. Once we had to move into a written form, we used
‘bough’ instead of ‘bow’ because that accords better to the spoken form used by the Stewarts and Williamsons.
Essie takes specific issue with the name being said in the same way as ‘bow and arrow’ as opposed to ‘the
bough of the tree’. Different areas and families take individual approaches to tent design, construction and
vocabulary. Written accounts are relatively new and the sounds will vary according to local and group accents.
9
Founder member Calum Millar coined the term ‘Family MacBough’.
Civic MacBough Goes To Town
406
loss-based accounts of Highland history which revolve around Clearance and
equate migration with trauma, asserting that movement is the constant and is a
creative force is a ‘speech act’ which has the power to rework everything from the
ground up. This is an innovative long term manoeuvre in the bid to secure a better
future in and for this area10.
Figure 3: The last family group to travel in Sutherland were brothers John and
Peter with sister Katy Williamson, Assynt 1978. Notice the boughs and canvas in
the cart. Photo courtesy of Willie Morrison.
Academic Harmonisation?
For Mackay Country there was a poignancy in the fact that the organisers
invited non-academics into the heart of conference to break and create new ground
in terms of research practice and process (Pain et al. 2011). My original
involvement with Mackay Country as a group came in 2003, developing across the
years (see Mills 2013). I was a Mentor for The Scottish Community Action
Research Fund (SCARF)11. MCCT selected me to help them develop a research
10
A 2004 MCCT Research Brief (Ebb and Flow) stated: “The history of the Gaidhealtachd is a history of
movement. […] As a research topic migration is uniquely inclusive. Everyone either has family who emigrated
out of Mackay Country or family who emigrated into Mackay Country.”
11
A community organisation could apply to this programme for help in assessing their community needs,
carrying out research and creating or implementing development plans.
ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2015, 14(2), 401-412
407
plan which they had called The North West Sutherland Academic Harmonisation
Project – clearly destined for greatness, and perhaps even some sort of future
twinning with other fans of fine titles such as… The Royal Geographical Society,
incorporating The Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG)? MCCT’s principal
aim was to find out about and get access to as much academic research about the
area as possible. Within the academe it is often not well understood that individuals
without a university email address do not have access to on-line journals, e-book
libraries and the wealth of source data available on-line for university research.
When you add the significant matter of geographic disadvantage, it becomes clear
that engaging with academic literatures is far from simple from within Mackay
Country12.
In 2003, the initial aim was reworked more fully as follows:
For too long MacKay Country has been described and defined by lack,
emptiness and problems – lack of people, lack of transport, lack of jobs,
lack of services, lack of young people. When places are constantly
defined in this negative way it has a pervasive effect on local people’s
view of themselves, their capabilities and their possibilities. Why
would young people return to a place which has come to be known as
only this? By working with local communities and drawing on
historical and contemporary materials relating to MacKay Country, we
want to change that. We want to collectively forge a new local identity
which focuses on dignity and self-confidence for both individuals and
communities. It is from this position that local people can best tackle
local problems – the future is the hostage of our imaginations (Lansley
et al. 2003).
The resultant project was called Back to the Future – learning about the past in
order to shape the future. Since then Mackay Country has created part-time work
or self-employed contracts for up to a dozen people annually and has provided
training in fieldwork, research and archive skills. Those people have gone on to
create their own small businesses locally or have used these skills in other
employment13. Family MacBough came later and is just one aspect of this work.
The large proportion of younger people actively involved in delivering Mackay
Country work is unusual for a history based organisation, but that is principally on
account of the bough tent based activities. These also shifted the gender balance to
include a team of ‘boys’. Until that point 95% of Mackay Country delivery was by
women.
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/BuiltEnvironment/regeneration/pir/learningnetworks/cr/casestudies/casestudy124SCARF
12
The National Library of Scotland is 300 miles. Highland Council Library Service and The Highland Archive
Centre are 100 miles. UHI has a growing library for students.
13
This year the Gaelic projects and transcription business, Facal, created by Mackay Country fieldworker
Catriona Macleod and her partner Alasdair Macleòid won joint first place as Gaelic Business of the Year:
http://www.facal.co.uk/index.html
Civic MacBough Goes To Town
408
From Summer in the Straths, we learned many things. The daunting practical
task was to assemble a team who could learn to cut boughs and build a tent, but
were also able live for a month in tents in constant public view from morning till
late at night. There is no ‘green room’ in a bough tent. We had 1,600 people visit
our campsites for ceilidhs, casual and school visits in four weeks. We learned that
Summer Walkers is a good translation of Ceardannan because you walk the roads
from April to October within the area your family works. The cart is for the canvas
and the kist; the tin working kit; the haberdashery goods to sell; the family group’s
goods and chattels – no one travels in the cart unless they are very infirm. They
would get terribly cold sitting still like that. Through metalworking and caring for
the tent, it became obvious that these ways of working and moving draw lightly on
the resources along the routes and assume that recycling is an everyday way of
operating, not a new, campaign-driven, add-on. Through doing and travelling and
dwelling and learning we have come to see and feel the place in new ways. As long
as MacDonald’s (2011) worries over ‘salvage geographies’ are understood and paid
heed, then these histories of the feet and the fireside help us to understand the
changing land before us.
At conference we sought to impart some sense of these excitements and
puzzles. We brought one end of the bough tent and set it up at David Hume’s feet.
He duly gazed down at us from his painting. Our projectors threw ten thousand
photos an hour at him. We cluttered the space beneath his portrait with items made
in tin and bone. Our laminated weather-proof Pont and Gordon maps might have
been familiar to Hume from the later Blaeu versions (Withers 2005)? We chattered
and wandered and wondered. Essie told her Ossian story. Visiting academics
shared their tales. What might ‘The Great Infidel’ have made of all this?
For us it was intriguing. In advance we were a little afraid of feeling like the
human zoo. The joining instructions stated that the Civic Geographies exhibitors
were not permitted into any other part of the conference. This disappointed us but
in my enthusiasm to make the most of the opportunities I paid £350 for a
conference place to make sure I would get to encounter all the riches. That was an
act of foolish over-preparation. Once we were installed, the hosting academics
encouraged all of our team to wander at will into other sessions. We had some
fascinating and complicated discussions with RGS-IBG staff about the difficulties
of creating open access journal options. I caught Charlie Withers’ Royal Scottish
Geographical Society lecture on ‘The Enlightenment and Geographies of
Cosmopolitanism’ with which I was sincerely delighted. This civic geographies
experiment created important new aspects for the unfolding story of routes through
which ‘post-institutional’ engagement can rhizomatically develop (Philo 2012).
ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2015, 14(2), 401-412
409
Figure 4: Selected Mackay Country biographies.
For MCCT, visiting this kind of social space created a need to ‘restage’ our
core aims and presence. That verbal and conceptual ‘reframing’ was the key entry
level requirement for access and presence. This exogenously generated need to
prepare and deliver a new sort of ‘cooked declaration’ initiated an informal ‘totting
up’ of MCCT aims and achievements to date, 10 years after MCCT began focusing
Civic MacBough Goes To Town
410
on history and culture to deliver appropriate local development (Scott 1992: 216).
The result of that conversational review and the collective aspects of writing this
paper is a resolve by the MCCT to hold a conference in 2014 which seeks to revisit
their aspiration for ‘academic harmonisation’ (Scott 1992: 198). The aim is to
provide an update on new and emergent research initiatives in Mackay Country. It
is hoped that a ‘call for papers’, from academics and interested practitioners of
many sorts, might result in new awarenesses of personal and professional research.
In the spirit of reciprocity, the MCCT will proffer an invitation to the AC2012
‘Civic Geographies’ organisers. Access to scholarly publications, academic
research monies and roles is restricted to those with full membership (tenure)
within the ‘civic university’. This serves an important function, alongside the peer
review system, in protecting and nurturing spaces within which to conduct research
and achieve intellectual progression as a member of a formal academic community.
Tackling the disbenefits of that system, alluded to here, is a complicated matter
relying on new means of maintaining high academic standards whilst also
creatively blurring the hard edges of membership and participation, both
disciplinary and social. Individual academics, research councils and specific
journals such as ACME are actively exploring different means to achieve that. The
AC2012 ‘Civics’ event is one such experiment. In this article the experiences of a
community group also seeking to identify, through experimentation, successful
strategies for reciprocal research alliances has been set alongside that story.
Acknowledgements
This work was undertaken as part of my Wingate Scholarship. I would like to
express my profound gratitude for that support. The work for AC2012 was
undertaken by Essie Stewart, Arthur Dutch, John Cairns, Owen Brown and Issie
MacPhail. Mackay Country work is carried out by a large group of volunteers
alongside people on paid, short term, project specific contracts. The work is led by
Secretary Ronnie Lansley, Durness, and Treasurer Frances Gunn, Tongue, assisted
by committee members Murdo MacPherson, Kinlochbervie; Mary Mackay (Chair),
Durness; Kirsteen Mackay, Melness; Kris Scott, Skerray; Rhona Graham, Skerray;
Stephen Graham, Skerray; Mhari Magee, Bettyhill; Sandra Munro, Bettyhill;
Shona Munro, Bettyhill and Jannette Mackay, Strathy. Family MacBough
comprises Calum Millar, Drumbeg; David Shaw, ex Gualin; Rachel Skene, ex
Tongue; Catriona Macleod, Strathnaver; Gavin Lockhart, Skerray; Kris Scott,
Skerray; Ben Stickland, Skerray; Rhona Graham, Skerray; Stephen Graham,
Skerray; Shona Munro, Bettyhill; Matthew Bulch, Culkein Stoer; Essie Stewart,
Bonar Bridge; Arthur Dutch, Clashmore Dornoch and Issie MacPhail, Clashmore
Stoer. Many other people assist for specific activities. Gary Smith of Raffin Stoer,
an original and hugely respected team member, sadly died in October 2011, aged
52. His ‘Bucket List’ included Issie MacPhail returning to doing academic work.
ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2015, 14(2), 401-412
411
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