‘The Mightier Movement.’ Scottish Highlands

 

 

Don’t read this. You already know about Highlands, Lowlands and Islands, faeries and fir trees, Scottish coos, Crofters and Clearances, the invasion of sportsmen and ranchers, the disappearances of pine, wolf, deer and beaver. You know about leftist and rightist Scottish Nationalism. Perhaps you have experienced the Highlands Communal spirit, smelled a Scottish rose, admired a Scottish thistle. I hadn’t. I didn’t know.

I still don’t know much. I travel and write to learn.

Scotland, A Divided Land:

Scotland, like Italy and Sri Lanka, is divided geographically, economically, linguistically, and culturally. The capital city, Edinburgh, and the industrial, working-class city of Glasgow are in the Lowlands, where climate, soil, and topography support large-scale farming and, hence, cities.  The Highlands are rugged and cold, traditionally supporting small nomadic populations. The Islands—Shetland, Orkney, Hebrides and Southern Islands each has its own history of human migration, and unique relationship to the mainland.

We spent most of our time in the Highlands town of Tain. 

Highlands Communal Spirit 

Lonely Planet suggests the Tain Museum but does not recommend lingering in the town of 3,500, on your way to Loch Ness and the Isle of Skye. We missed those must-sees and stayed in the vicinity of Tain, hoping to get a taste of what it is like to live in the Scottish Highlands.  

The people around Tain were friendly.  All we had to do was say hello, and strangers would stop to tell us all the details of their day. We made ourselves at home, chasing the waves on Dornoch beach. The Tarlogie woods outside of Tain became a favorite route through a grove of ancient forest in a region deforested 400 years ago.  We roamed the stone-fenced farm roads of Aldie and collected raspberries, blackberries, rose hips, and cherries. At low tide we crossed the fairytale Tain pedestrian bridge over Dornoch Firth (bay) and gathered marsh samphire – a salty, crunchy, bright green asparagus of the sea.   Always, people nodded approvingly as we filled yogurt containers with wild bounty. They shared recipes for jam or biscuits and evaluations of the harvest: It’s looking to be a great year for brambles.

We saw this communal spirit at the Tain library, where people who gathered to play chess or discuss a book enjoyed a free cup of tea and a biscuit; at Dornoch Beach, where a Free Toy Library let children pick pails and shovels to build their sand castles; and at the Tain Community Center, where seniors like us enjoyed a yoga class for a few quid.

From Communal Spirit to Public Policy 

The communal spirit we found in Tain was present elsewhere in Scotland, reflected in attitudes, practices, and public policy.

Major museums in Edinburgh and Aberdeen were not only free, but they encouraged loitering, designating themselves as warm spaces and creating areas for sitting and picnicking. In Edinburgh we did just that, spending hours between plane and train, living in the National Museum, appreciating the large, cheap lockers that fit our backpacks. On a rainy day in the Highlands, we hung out in the Invergordon Maritime Museum, reading about tartans while drinking tea with milk, made by the docent for a quid.

There are free boxes of tampons and pads stacked high in the bathrooms for people who have menstrual periods, available in museums, community centers, libraries, and all public buildings. It is public policy to provide this essential for all who need it. 

Some communal things we noticed because we come from the US and have been traveling the world. Scots enjoy the same national health care as all UK citizens. Water is potable, and no restaurant would consider charging for it. Humans, sheep, and all other creatures enjoy excellent air quality. Shepherds still share grazing grounds and shearing.

Other communal aspects made Scotland an exception. The Right to Roam is national law, passed in 2003. It is like a bill of rights for wanderers and people without homes, and a bulwark against ubiquitous golf courses and estates that want to restrict passing foot traffic. The law also specifies that all must care for the land and not destroy crops or litter. Part of the law specifies the right to park a car or camper, or put up a tent for free on public lands.

Right to Roam philosophy was apparent in the recent steep reduction in intercity bus fares. Now, for two pounds, you can ride from Tain to Thurso or Inverness to Edinburgh. Trains are more expensive,  but the fact that a tiny town like Tain has a train station is an indication of a people-centered transportation system worth protecting 

Let the Sheep Defend You. Crofters, Clearances, and the Invasion of Ranchers and Sportsmen in the Highlands  

The communal lifeways of Highland subsistence farmers known as Crofters were invaded in the mid-19th century by wealthy ranchers and urban English elites seeking land for wool cultivation, summer homes, hunting grounds, and golf courses. This mass removal became known as the Clearances.  

I picked up the 1855 pamphlet by Donald Ross at the Tain museum. Ross was a muckraking journalist based in Glasgow who came to the Highlands to investigate the massacre of women who protested the 1854 Clearances in the Tain/Dornoch region.  The women crofters were fighting capital, patriarchy, royalty, corrupt law enforcement, and the destruction of sustainable agriculture. Ross’ goal was to refute the yellow journalists who wrote sensational false tales of women violently attacking sheriffs to justify deputizing thugs to beat them up.  He dug further, gathering crofters’ testimony of their violent and unwarranted removal. 

The crofters kept fighting back, and in 1886, they won a bill of rights protecting their land from unreasonable seizure. It is a ruling they still lean on today as they work to expand their autonomy through communal landholdings. 

It is telling that the Scots refer to the Trail of Tears as Native American Clearances. Like Indian Removal in the US, the Clearances are history with an oppressive legacy.

Scotland and the UK: Victims and Perpetrators of Empire. 

UK neglect and abuse of Scotland, and especially Highlanders,  has a long history, before and after the 19th-century Clearances. The English Crown used tactics on the Scots similar to those used by Europeans in the Americas. Violent land removal, forced erasure of language and culture, destruction of local economies, and funneling young men into the military. But for the Scots, the history is complicated. As well as being targets of conquest, some were also participants.  

Some displaced crofters tried to make a living as fishers and shipbuilders on the coast. Others left for Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and the Caribbean, where they entered territories already populated. Some intermarried with Indigenous communities. Some became tools of erasure of Indigenous peoples. Some wealthier Scots became owners of people, enslaving them on plantations in Jamaica, Barbados, and the US South.

The Tain museum had an exhibit on John Ross, whose life exemplifies these multiple roles. Ross’s father was a tenant farmer from Tain, Scotland, who migrated to Georgia, United States, at the end of the 18th century. John’s mother was Cherokee. John became Chief of the Cherokees and represented the tribe during Indian Removal and the Trail of Tears. He also enslaved African people. 

Scotland, like Wales and Northern Ireland, is perpetually divided over its continued dependence within the UK. In 2014, an independence referendum failed by a slim margin. Since then, the UK has left the EU, and there is reason to believe a new referendum would pass. While we were in Scotland, Prime Minister Keith Starmer was replaced by Andy Burnham. It was an opportunity for Scots to express their desire and expectation for another independence referendum. But the new MP was quick to  declare a new referendum “off limits.”   We heard disgust in the coffee shops when Burnham referred to his Manchester home as Number 10 North:

All of Scotland is north of Manchester. If we don’t count to Burnham, why not let us have our independence?  

 

 The other “Mightier Movements” of Scotland 

Illness interrupted our side trip to Glasgow. We missed joining the antiracists who overwhelmed a group of racists fueled by anti-immigrant hatred. We registered and paid for a walking tour sponsored by  Stand Up to Racism and Women Against the Far Right Scotland, but missed that as well. The women have been organizing against the use of violence against women as the cudgel with which racist groups gathered support, painting immigrant men as more dangerous than Scottish men.

I had also planned to visit the archive of protest placards at the Women’s Library in Glasgow,

And I  wanted to visit the monument to John MacLean.

In every town and city we visited, we found multiple war memorials. It seemed Scotland sacrificed more than its share of young men in battles to expand the British Empire. Most prevalent were those for World War I. This patriotic song that both glorifies war and expresses Scottish nationalism as a love of land, exemplifies the messages of the memorials.

There is a memorial in Glasgow with a different message that I so wanted to see: the John MacLean memorial.  The Ballad of John MacLean by Matt McGwinn, and this one by Hamish Henderson, tell the story behind the memorial and the man. MacLean was a different kind of Scottish hero who today evokes a different kind of Scottish pride.  He was anti-war and a socialist, with a universal view of working-class liberation.  Like Eugene Debs in the United States, MacLean spent two years in jail for refusing to enlist in World War I. The jail time eroded his health, and he died young.  200,000 people attended his Glasgow funeral march.

 

We missed the John MacLean Memorial, the Women’s Library, and the anti- racism walking tour. When you go to Glasgow, please say hello to these past and current sources of liberation for me.

The Crofters, the MacLeans, the Women Against the Far Right. These are Scotland’s Mightier Movements.

Thoughts on the Double Edges of Culture, Inspired by Scotland 

Scotland had me seeing double. Even the sheep showed their two sides. In Wales I fell in love with them as only a foolish city girl can.  Scottish sheep were just as beguiling, but after learning about the Clearances, I also saw the animals as invaders, like the European pigs and cows that replaced Tainos and Arawaks in the Caribbean: symbols of empire and violence.

In Scotland, I thought about how culture encapsulates all that is good and evil about us humans. We nourish each other with our ancestors’ recipes. We express ourselves through language, art, music, theater. But our cultures are also the armor we don when we go to war, the costumes we wear when we decide who to hate. 

In Tain I got weepy listening to bagpipes and admiring the diverse patterns of tartans—all plaid but all different. Clan history is — like all ethnic nationalisms — lovely and terrible. The rituals of dance, music, and costume are beautiful. In the United States, they were transformed by a Scottish immigrant into violent manifestations of white supremacy. The Scottish immigrant who founded the Ku Klux Klan adopted rituals from the homeland, like burning crosses, membership, ritual, costume, and othering. Does this mean there is something especially sinister about Scottish nationalism? Of course not. It is yet another nationalist manifestation– like Zionism, Spanish and British Colonialism, German Nazism, Christian nationalism. It is akin to the nationalisms that fueled Japanese conquests of Korea and China-and the hubris that led the United States to invade Latin America and build border walls.

What is to be done about these past conquests?

1. Make sure they are fully in the past. Confront racist movements, like they are doing in Glasgow.

2. Face, reconcile, and repair the past. The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh is doing its part to begin the process of reconciliation.  Anti-imperialist education now accompanies stolen objects, and previous racist assumptions about artifacts are questioned.  The Maritime Museum of Aberdeen also has an excellent new exhibit, established in 2025, as the result of internal discussions that followed the global reckoning after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Repair is needed. Former colonies are taking the lead, putting reparations on the table. 

 

A Taste of Life in Tain, Scotland? 

One woman asked with incredulity why we came to Tain. It is a question we hear often in the places we visit.  Burdened with economic blight and corrupt governments, people find it hard to see their homelands as destinations.

Our visit to Tain was free of those things that encumber residents. Our cares were still in the US, worried about family, friends, and a nation under siege with ICE raids, endless wars, and cuts in health care. In July 2026, in my hometown, fifteen activists who organized against ICE faced federal indictments. Mightier movements faced mightier evils in my homeland. 

Shortly after we arrived in Tain, I got sick. I spent the month slowly getting well. I baked bread with Scottish oats and rosehips. I knitted with yarn and needles picked up at Tain’s Hospice Second Hand Store.

The summer of 2026 was the hottest on record in much of the world. Fires engulfed Japan, Turkey, Croatia, Algeria, Spain, and Canada. Winds carried poisoned air across national borders. The pollution in my hometown of Minneapolis was so bad for several days that even the healthy had to stay inside. There were fires in Scotland too, but the lovely Highland breezes blew them away from us.

The word burn in Scottish has nothing to do with fires. It means river or creek. 

In the Highlands we played along the burns. For us, Scotland was a cool place to heal amidst a burning world.