by Alison Clark

Love of Country is Madeleine Bunting’s account of her ‘pilgrimage’ to the Hebrides. Born into a Catholic family with Scottish ancestry, she spent holidays both as child and adult in the Highlands. This drew her further west. Her name will be familiar to Guardian readers and it is in part her journalist’s insatiable curiosity that takes her beyond a personal exploration of the isles from Jura to St Kilda. Coinciding with the Scottish referendum, her travels give rise to nuanced reflections on home, belonging and nationhood.

Bunting’s observations on history, culture and politics shed light on topics that perhaps some of us Scots take for granted – narratives of the clearances, the ‘Celtic twilight’, gaeldom itself. She draws on a wide range of reference, literary and historical, citing among others, James Hunter, as does Neil Ascherson in Stone Voices. As Ascherson uses the device of ‘stones’ to pursue his ‘search for Scotland’, Bunting uses the islands, while still responding to them for their own sake.

I can still ‘see’ the colours she depicts, not only the varieties of blue, green, grey and hite of land and sea but Flannan Isle ‘like a gigantic cupcake’, pink and white with thrift and sea campion with the lighthouse as candle. Her descriptions are not souvenir sentimental, including as she does the discovery of an office chair perched on a rock washed up with the other sad detritus from the ocean. Bunting travels and camps in all weathers, remembering as she goes, Johnson and Boswell and reflecting on Orwell’s choice of Jura where he wrote 1984. In a gripping narrative packed with information and analysis, Madeleine Bunting takes us with her to the north west edge of the British Isles. Though not her home, the Hebrides proves to be her ‘soul territory’.