Hello friends. I recently posted a piece of Gaelic lore on Instagram about owls, which folk seemed to enjoy and I’ve been asked to share more. I thought I’d do so today in a short letter exploring Gaelic’s special relationship to the land and my place in it as a native Scot.
My favourite book to read is the land beneath my feet. By tread and touch I discover a hidden world, a Gaelic landscape, which has been silently gathering moss and slumbering under drifts of snow.
I have only to brush aside the verdigris and frost to reveal ancient inscriptions carved upon root, rock, and river by the imaginations of those whose flesh has long since returned to the land.
Woods here contain many pages — soldier’s leaps, druid groves, and bogs of severed heads (Fèith nan Ceann). Into the rarified air of the hills we have maiden springs (Fuaran na h-Inghinn), deer streams (Allt an Daimh), and the crag of the wolf (Creag Mhadaidh). Legendary heroes have shed poisoned blood in the glen half an hour from my house (Diarmid’s Tomb), and the glen itself (Gleann Sìth) belongs to sìtheaneach, the faery folk.
Every day I walk. Every day I read a landscape that shifts my perspective closer to that of my ancestors. From bàn (the sparkling pearlescence of a sunny hill) to dubh (the shadowy black of a sunless ridge) and vivid uaine (the toxic bloom on a loch, a faerie colour), layers of meaning stack up like pages. There are no primary colours in Gaelic, it is a subtle yet specific language that reflects a mutable land, a book whose cover and endpapers change with the seasons.
But the land is an author, too. I am a blank page being written upon. Old names are etched in my flesh with an alphabet of trees. For in old Gaelic individual letters symbolised wands of oak, hazel, birch — a whole mysterious woodland of known and forgotten trees. And so these ancient names become wooded dells where we find strength, wisdom, or rebirth.
Write upon me trees, write upon me sky. Use the old words which I feel and know before understanding them. Scribble names and colours and ebony salmon pools upon me until I am a chapter between wood and hill, waiting to be discovered by other readers like me.
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I think this is one of the most beautiful texts I’ve read this year, so thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing it 🖤 As someone who has moved abroad, I find that learning the language of the country I now live in (Germany) really is the best (and maybe only) way to connect not only to the people, but to the land itself, however painfully slowly and effortfully I try to understand and memorize each word. May languages continue to bring us inspiration and connection forever and always!
Oohh that last paragraph was like a spell! Magical❤️ I think land and nature has such personality, and you can feel the differing energies that different locations hold✨