Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh has walked in the Scottish Highlands every summer for 17 years, drawn by their beauty and by unexpected parallels with his homeland
I come from a land of hills full of stories that the lingering ghosts of those who once lived there want to tell. I did not know the same was true of the Scottish Highlands. I still remember my first encounter with the Highland moors. It was the autumn of 1992. My wife, Penny, and I had booked at the Inveroran Hotel in Glen Orchy near the bridge with the same name. We had chosen this hotel because Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, had stayed there when they visited the Highlands in 1803. We thought we could trust the great romantic poet to lead us to a beautiful place to walk. And so it happened that my first encounter with the unique and peculiar land in the north of Scotland had to be through an Englishman.
We took the train from Edinburgh to the Bridge of Orchy station. I was relishing the ride, not having done much travelling by rail. The opportunity of travelling within Palestine or to the surrounding countries by train had ended in 1948. The establishment of Israel in that year severed the lines of communication between the different parts of the Arab lands in the Levant and beyond it to the Hijaz and North Africa.
At the station I had my first experience of midges, pests the likes of which I had never encountered anywhere else. At first I thought there was something wrong with me. Why was I itching all over my face, neck and hands? I did notice flying around me the flimsiest of creatures; surely they couldn’t be responsible? The more I flailed my arms in the air the more they assaulted me. I could stand it no longer. I ran out of the station as fast as I could, dragging my bag behind me pursued by a cloud of irritating midges. Later, after having enjoyed the unspoiled nature of the Highlands, I was not sure whether or not to agree with the Highlander who was grateful for the midges for keeping tourists away. “Except for them,” he told me, “tourists would have long since spoiled this place.”
Arriving at the hotel, we wasted no time. We decided to use the few hours of daylight left to walk. It was the first time in my life that I found myself in the middle of a moor. Once there I felt a deep silence descend upon me, unlike any I have known. It was not characterised by the absence of sound, for the moor seemed to breathe, emitting deep sighs as the low wind swept through the water-soaked grass, weeds and bracken. I am used to the silence of the Palestinian hills near Ramallah, my hometown, where I often sit in the shade of a pine tree enjoying the rustle of the wind passing through the fragrant needle leaves. This fitful percussive sound overhead is hardly ever sustained. In contrast, the moan of the wind in the moor is continuous and deep, giving the impression of having travelled long distances to give life to an ancient, desolate terrain. It starts at a lower point, almost level with the ears, sweeping continuously over the flat land, loud then faint then loud again unobstructed by trees. There was sadness in that sound. It was like a wail.
The sweeping of the wind was punctuated only by the sound of water dripping in the undergrowth. The closest landscape to this that I could think of was a glacier with water streaming beneath it which, if one listened intently enough, one could hear. Once while walking in the Swiss Alps I was tempted to trudge over such a glacier. When I later asked a Swiss-Italian ski instructor whether it would have been safe to do this, she warned: :No. No! Crevasses! You fall in and then finito.”
Both terrains and the atmosphere they engendered were unfamiliar to me. Here the colours were muted, so unlike the stark unmitigated glare of the Palestinian hills. The water-saturated air was heavier and fresher, in contrast to the light dry air of the Ramallah hills made fragrant by the numerous herbs that grow there. The clouds moved fast, the sun made brief appearances. When it shone through the thick clouds, the hills were reflected in the lochs. There was more uniformity in our hills, their dry river-beds reflecting nothing. I could not imagine two landscapes more different than the Scottish and the Palestinian. One stretches open and drenched with water, the other lies fragmented by roads and Jewish settlements and for six months of the year is bone-dry. My lack of familiarity with the moor made me cautious. I could not be sure what would become of me if I were to leave the road and venture into it. Would my unsuspecting feet step on some soft bottomless bog that would suck me down like quicksand in the desert?
At dinner that night sitting at a table in the very middle of the room was a stately woman whom the waiter mockingly referred to as The Lady. She was a widow who, as we soon learned, was celebrating on this occasion her 80th birthday.
We later learned that she was from the seaside town of Helensburgh, and had been coming to this hotel for many years. The sole waiter, a frail man of 40, was utterly drunk yet still managed to put on an air of mock-deference for the benefit of The Lady. Perhaps too much so, bending and bowing in such an exaggerated manner that he ended up spilling food from a serving plate on to the white tablecloth. In her high-handed manner the Lady scolded him. He rushed to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of vintage red wine which he announced was the gift of the management for her birthday. She received it with great style and proceeded to sip it, becoming more garrulous in the process.
“Where are you walking tomorrow?” The Lady asked Penny.
“In the glen, taking the path along the river.”
“I only like the tops,” The Lady declared. “My husband, when he was alive, would make it halfway up then I would leave him behind and go up on my own. I’m a woman of the tops,” bragged the old lady, who now could hardly walk.
This ended the conversation. Clearly not being “people of the tops,” like her, we were deemed unworthy and had fallen in her eyes.
“Careful, the plate is very hot,” warned the voluptuous woman who was serving our breakfast and whom we had not seen at dinner. I ordered the full Scottish vegetarian breakfast and ate every morsel. I felt totally fortified for a long walk. As the matronly waitress was picking up the dirty plates I struck up a conversation. It began with the kinds of dogs her family owned. I was surprised when she said they had five shepherd dogs.
“Why so many?” I asked.
“To handle the sheep. My husband has 500 of them,” she announced proudly. “Then you must be rich,” I said.
“O no! They’re not ours. My husband is just the shepherd.”
It was this woman’s passing comment that induced me to read more about the history of the Highlands and learn about the great tragedy that had afflicted the people living there in the 18th and early 19th centuries, leaving behind those ghosts with their many stories waiting to be heard.
A year later we came back to Glen Orchy for another walking holiday. This time the weather was kinder to us. We started on the Old Military Road. Walking by the cultivated forest, the river Kinglass ran to our left. It was wider here and flowed slowly. Its shallow bed was full of shiny round stones. I stopped to take in the view. What superb country this is. The river flowed in an open expansive glen with hills to the right, and along our path as far as the eye could see lay more lochs with a track that would take days to walk.
I thought of Palestine’s main river, the Jordan, and how it was impossible to take such a walk along its banks, for the river is caged in barbed wire from the point where it leaves Lake Tiberius until it flows into the Dead Sea. The smooth contours of the green hills here reminded me of the Galilee hills in spring. Not long ago I walked in them searching for the villages that a great-great-uncle of mine used as hiding places when he was on the run to escape arrest by Ottoman forces during the first world war. Those villages were all destroyed in 1948 when Israel was established. Cleared of its former inhabitants, the land is now used to plant barley and wheat. I had tried to imagine what it must have been like over 60 years ago when it was alive with the labour of simple farmers, their lowing animals and active village life. Now the land lay silent except for the whisper of the wind among the wheat stalks. A silence not unlike the quiet pervading these Highlands which, as I now know, had been inhabited until the early 19th century when greedy landlords decided it was more profitable to raise sheep and forced the tenants out of the land.
Unlike the Scottish Clearances (the very word, which came into use long after the events it describes, is offensive – implying that human beings can be “cleared” like weeds or rubble) Palestine’s Nakba took place during the lifetime of a generation that is still alive today. But time is not the only factor. Palestinians, not unlike the Scots, have long memories.
As I was beginning to get carried away with the resemblances in history and nature between the land I grew up in and this Scottish land, I reached the top of Aonach Eagach. The Lady would be proud of me. I had assumed that one would only be able to see more hill tops from that high vantage point. But ahead of me there was yet another lochan, one that seemed so idyllic, couched in the cusp of the hill fed by a small river that then left it to proceed further to another glen and another loch.
It lay there, silent and remote, a place on which I could project other thoughts and feelings and test myself against what was remote enough for me to represent the wild. Palestine/Israel is too small to have places of real escape like this. In the Highlands the loss of that way of life was not replaced by another. The landlords who evicted the farmers did not bring their own people to replace them. The land returned to what it had been: empty glens, rivers and lochs offering hikers a superb view of an exquisite land that seems to be there for their sole enjoyment.
This beautiful land spread before me. I thought of the many ways in which the history of my people in Palestine makes me angry and, without a solution in sight, continues to be a source of fury. Even as I walk I carry so much baggage that wears me out and weighs me down. All along the way in this beautiful glen and up these hills I had been identifying and unburdening myself of one cause of anger after another arising from the effect of living under a foreign occupation in a land that was becoming out of reach to the non-Jewish inhabitants. Along the path I continued to shed them, so that by the time I reached the top of this hill, panting and short of breath, I felt that I had disposed of so much of the baggage I had been carrying that when I finally paused to rest, breathing deeply, I felt light headed and unburdened. The long climb had helped chase the angry thoughts away.
As I stood there relieved and refreshed I thought of what Robert Macfarlane wrote in The Wild Places: “We are fallen in mostly broken pieces, but the wild can still return us to ourselves.” Over the years I’ve returned to the Highlands to do exactly that.
• Raja Shehadeh is the author of Palestinian Walks and Strangers in the House (out this week, £8.99), published by Profile Books. A longer version of this piece will appear in A Wilder Vein, an anthology of wild places of the British Isles, published in the autumn by Two Ravens Press (tworavenspress.com).
Where to stay
Rooms at the Inveroran Hotel in Glen Orchy (01838 400 220, inveroran.com) start at £40pp; breakfast £6. Special offers available out of season.
