How this event commemorated the Massacre of Glencoe

Inside, the air is always stone still and ice solid. I was remembering the last time I had performed there with the same company, in November a few years ago, at another memorable commemoration, that time of the great Gaelic poet Duncan Ban MacIntyre and his major poem, Praise of Ben Dorain. 

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Saturday, August 31, was sunny and benign and, believe it or not, the air in the kirk was actually quite warm! The light glittered beautifully on the loch.

The pews were filled with folk. The Friends of St Conan’s Kirk were behind the event and had turned out in solidarity to support it. The mastermind organising it was Peter Hennessy and the woman behind the man was his wife Helen.

We began with Ian MacIntyre on bagpipes, calling us all to attention, then I read the famous Order to Glenlyon by Robert Duncanson, one of the most chilling pieces of writing in all Scottish history. Here it is, the letter ordering the Massacre of Glencoe:

Yow are hereby ordered to fall upon ye McDonnalds of Glencoe, & putt all to ye sword under seventy. Yow are to have a speciall care that the old fox & his sones doe on no acct escape yor hands. Yow’re to secure all the avenues that none escape. This yow are to put in execution at 
5 a cloack precisly. And by that time or verie shortly efter it, I’ll strive to be at yow wt a stronger party. 
If I doe not come to yow at 5, yow are not to tarie for me, but to fall on. This by the Kings speciall 
co[mm]and, for ye good & saftie of the countrie, that the [se miscrean]ts be cutt of root & branch.
“See that this be put in e[xecutione with]out feud or favour, else yow may expect to [be dealt with as on]e not true [to King nor] countrie, nor a man fitt to carie a [commissi]on in ye Kings service. Expecting yow will not faill in fulfilling hereof as yow love yor selfe, I subscrive this wt my hand at Ballechillis, feb: 12, 1692.
Robert Duncanson. For their Maties service, to Captain Rob. Campbell of Glenlyon.

After that, all the warmth in the kirk had suddenly drained away and we were facing a cold winter reality, as if 2024 had suddenly become 1692. Peter, with Karen Marshalsay quietly, delicately, mournfully accompanying him on a small clarsach of a type that would have been played by the Gaels in the late 17th century, introduced the background of the event, the essential story. 

Then Scott McCombie, head ranger at Glencoe, gave a short talk about what life would have been like for the villagers, the people, the families, the community who lived there in 1692. Karen returned with Eddie McGuire of the Whistlebinkies and Ann Barlow to sing a song of the period about the massacre and then I read four poems from across the ages that addressed it.

I’ll come back to the poems.

When I’d read them, Peter, Scott and I picked up the conversation and opened it out to the historical planning for the massacre and what lay behind it, both in the historical data and the characters involved.

Peter had set up a series of  poster-portraits in the area around us: – King William II (III of England); King James VII & II; The Master of Stair; Sir John Campbell of Glenorchy, Earl of Breadalbane; Robert Campbell of Glencoe; and Archibald Campbell, 10th Earl and 1st Duke of Argyll. We commented on them and what might have motivated them.

A remarkable performance representing the experience of the women of Glencoe was delivered by Vivienne Price, Carol Thomson and Anna Twigg, a stunning enactment of the devastation wrought, for beyond the slaughter of the men, there were also the rapes and murders of women and children. 

View across Rannoch Moor towards Buachaille Etive Mor (Image: Loop Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Then Eddie, Karen and Ann performed Jim MacLean’s beautiful, haunting song Cruel is the Snow (click HERE for a link to The Jim McLean Songbook – highly recommended!)

To end with, Ian MacIntyre returned with the bagpipes, to commemorate the whole story in mournful and insistently strong fashion. The sense of protest against the atrocity arose powerfully from the mournful recognition of the most horrifying things that human beings are capable of.

The poems were my remit, so I’d like to focus on them here. I started with Walter Scott’s On the Massacre of Glencoe, 1692 but I’ll come back to that and the other poems next week. I want to concentrate today on the second poem I read, TS Eliot’s Rannoch, by Glencoe

Professor Emerita of the University of Southern Maine, Nancy K Gish, in her essay Satellite Culture and Eliot’s Glencoe (core.ac.uk/download/pdf/38850036.pdf), begins by giving a brief account of the details of the massacre itself:

“On February 6, 1692, thirty-eight 
members of the MacDonalds of Glencoe were massacred by the Campbell Earl of Argyle’s Regiment on orders backed by the signature of King William. The government of William and Mary, in order to reconcile the Jacobite clans of the western Highlands, had required that all chiefs concerned must sign an oath of loyalty by 1 January 1692. 
“Travelling in winter, MacIan of Glencoe, Chief of a small branch of the Clan Donald, arrived too late to sign; this was used as a reason to refuse his oath and to provide a pretext for government intervention.
“The result was an event that even today resonates in Scotland as treachery. The Campbells were billeted with the MacDonalds and accepted their hospitality, a form of honor profoundly to be trusted in Clan culture. 
“Yet they carried orders ‘to fall upon the rebels the MacDonalds of Glencoe and put all to the sword under seventy.’After living and eating with the MacDonalds, the Campbells rose in the morning and ‘killed MacIan, his wife, two of his sons’ and others of his clan to the number of 38.  Many escaped to die of cold. But others survived to tell the story. While it has often been described as interclan warfare, it was, in fact ‘a regular unit of the British standing army acting under orders’.”

Gish notes that:

“Eliot had taught Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped in his 1917 lectures on Modern English Literature” in which David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart make their painful way across Rannoch Moor, hunted by the redcoat British Army. 

“In 1932 when Eliot visited Rannoch, he had thus been, in a sense, prepared for its forbidding and beautiful scenery. Yet his poem in the sequence entitled Landscapes, Rannoch, by Glencoe, remains a totally distinct and strangely haunting vision of what contains a history and emotion unlike anything else he wrote.

“Elizabeth Schneider, in TS Eliot: The Pattern in the Carpet, called it ‘Eliot’s only great short lyric’, and noted the history of Glencoe, with its ‘desolation that in spirit includes the personal with the geographical and historical, the moral with the cosmic’. ‘There is,’ she claims, ‘nothing else resembling it in Eliot’.

“In Rannoch, by Glencoe, Eliot achieved something unique in his work, ‘a great short lyric’ and a recognition of otherness quite distinct from his characteristic treatment of landscape. Eliot got it exactly right; he captured the resonances that go beyond even the massacre itself to a long history.

“What, then, did Eliot get right, and why has the poem been generally ignored? The answer cannot be separated from Eliot’s notion of the meaning of ‘England’ and his ambiguous stance toward all those parts of the ‘United Kingdom’ that are not England and not English. On the one hand, he affirmed diversity of culture and insisted on the need for what he termed ‘regions’ to remain culturally distinct. In Notes towards the Definition of Culture, he argued that ‘a man should feel himself to be, not merely a citizen of a particular nation, but a citizen of a particular part of his country, with local loyalties’. 

“On the other hand, he distinguished them from those he labelled ‘the greater peoples’, in which England was included but not Scotland. England, he made clear, was not a region: ‘The Englishman, for instance, does not ordinarily think of England as a “region” in the way that a Scottish or Welsh national can think of Scotland or Wales’.”

Gish comments on this: “That Scots have continually thought of Scotland as a nation does not seem to be part of his conceptualisation.”

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Gish’s description of Eliot’s thinking here is crucial to our understanding of the poem, and why it remains so singular in Eliot’s oeuvre and why Glencoe remains so stubbornly singular, an outpost of utmost atrocity, in Scotland’s story.

It also gives us much food for thought while we’re thinking of Scotland’s independence as a nation, our unassimilable status, our outlaw status, in Britain’s imperial assertions of political identity.

Scotland’s importance, Eliot argues, like that of other “satellite cultures” or “regions”, lies “in its contribution to the richness and complexity of English culture”.

He offers two reasons for this. One is that “any vigorous small people wants to preserve its individuality”. The other is that “the satellite exercises a considerable influence upon the stronger culture”.

It’s a familiar story, is it not?

Nevertheless, Rannoch, by Glencoe remains unassimilable in Eliot’s collected poems, just as Scotland – or at least, the best of if it, the best of us – remains unassimilable in the “United Kingdom”. In this poem, as Gish puts it, “there is pure realisation of an external place, other and unassimilable”. 

It is: “External, not an address, and not spoken to self or to an other. Moreover, its images are not American or English, nor are they used elsewhere. Rather, they are drawn largely from Scottish history and legend and from a memory not Eliot’s and not English.” 

She notes the imagery: the crow, the stag, the warring clans, the idea of memory itself, and the meaning of the last phrase, “no concurrence of bone”.

“It is noticeable even to an American living in Scotland that memories remain for centuries and can evoke fierce emotions still – as the votes for devolution and a parliament have revealed.  

“Eliot’s sentence, ‘Memory is strong / Beyond the bone’ is striking not only for its immediate intensity but for its difference from the bones of Eliot’s early poems; these bones are like the ones at the end of ‘The Twa Corbies’: ‘O’er his white banes, when they are bare, / The wind sall blaw for evermair.’ 

“They evoke neither the horror of trench warfare, like those of The Waste Land, nor the purified body of ‘Ash Wednesday’, but the utter desolation of betrayal and abandonment. Moreover, the ‘broken steel’ and ‘Clamour of confused wrong’ resonate with long centuries of clan wars overlaid with the ultimate and unforgotten desolation of Glencoe.”

She goes on: 

“If, in Four Quartets, Eliot represents that part of his ambivalent concept of ‘regions’ as contributors to England, in ‘Rannoch’ he seems to have encountered something beyond his power to reframe, a wildness and difference whose history could not be ‘folded in a single party’.”

Rannoch, by Glencoe

Here the crow starves, here the patient stag
Breeds for the rifle. Between the soft moor
And the soft sky, scarcely room
To leap or soar. Substance crumbles, in the thin air
Moon cold or moon hot. The road winds in
Listlessness of ancient war,
Langour of broken steel,
Clamour of confused wrong, apt
In silence. Memory is strong
Beyond the bone. Pride snapped,
Shadow of pride is long, in the long pass
No concurrence of bone.

Gish concludes her essay like this: 

“This closure leaves no space for the notion of ‘contribution’ or value to the ‘greater peoples.’ It asserts instead the recognition of what is other and for itself. Yet it does not recur in any later poem … 

“Many visitors go to Scotland and for a moment see that it is itself, but they cannot hold on to that realization when they leave. For Eliot, whose later visits to Scotland were for openings and performances at the Edinburgh Festival, the experience of Rannoch may never have been repeated. 

“Yet it offers perhaps  the one poetic realisation of what may not be infolded or appropriated, and what his theoretical proposition of preserving individuality demands, if it is to be other than a momentary tourist’s view of a history outside the self. 

" In the history and memory of Glencoe, there can be no ‘concurrence of bone’ between the betrayed and the betrayer, inevitably as they are intertwined.

“In the vastness of Rannoch, what remains is a form of identity beyond regionalism that cannot serve as a ‘satellite’ or enter into the ‘single party’ of Eliot’s private consciousness. That he recognised this, if he did not retain it, may account for its unique position 
in his poetry.”

It also may account for the place Glencoe holds in our collective memory, and the place Scotland maintains, beyond England’s  empire and the United Kingdom’s flaunted statehood and monarchy. This place survives.