The sound of silence: Angus Martin and the Mull of Kintyre
MY CONTRIBUTION to the festive spirit this year will be to abstain from thought about the restless-spirited denizens of the dark side who run this country, both nationally and locally, and concentrate instead on a trilogy which celebrates the beauty of life in one of the few parts of Scotland where outdoor life is still largely free of environmental corruption. That part is south Kintyre, and the author in question is Angus Martin.
Angus is a sort of “nature bard”, though he is also a prolific local historian. Here I will confine myself to his three semi-diary books: A Summer in Kintyre, Another Summer in Kintyre and A Third Summer in Kintyre. Together they give what will probably go down in history as the most comprehensive description of the period 2013-15 in the insect, plant and ambulatory human life of South Kintyre that we are ever likely to have. Like his non-human subject matter, Angus is out in all weathers – in his case investigating, observing, making notes, writing poems or brewing tea by an unpeopled shore on a driftwood fire.
I will not try to sketch out Angus’s human subject matter, partly as no reader is ever likely to have heard of the characters involved, and partly because most are incidents in a larger story. That story is the lack of story in the life of a person whose main interest is in nature. Life on hill and shore is a progression without a plot. But that does not make Angus’s writing any less interesting. On the contrary, the lack of “events” is part of the charm of these books.
It is a relief to find a nature writer who is not a supporter of one or other of the fraudulent wildlife or “conservation” charities that infest urban Britain, working with manipulable statistics to exaggerate alleged crises for fund-raising purposes. Angus is more interested in mossy saxifrage (Saxifraga hypnoides), for example. Though not uncommon in upland Britain, it is rare on the Mull of Kintyre, he says, being found only at Largiebaan on the west side and at Johnston’s Point on the learside, or east, though a local expert maintains it “can be found near the top of the ‘Big Corrie’.” (Third Summer, p. 116)
Students of current events will recall that 3rd June 2015, the day when Angus went looking for his saxifrages, was also the day when Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen, South Korea successfully tested missiles which could hit North Korea, and Hamas fired rockets at Israeli cities before the Israeli Defence Force retaliated with airstrikes against Hamas training camps in Gaza. Nothing new there. But the confirmation of the presence of a locally rare plant in the Largiebaan area of the Kintyre cliffs was a genuine novelty.
In that sense, the best comparison I can make to these books is with Gilbert White’s famous Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne (1789), which more or less kick-started the modern trend for books devoted to a close examination of nature while ignoring the larger events of public life. Like Rev. White’s famous book, Angus’s trilogy is made easier to read by being presented in short snippets. In White’s case, letters to friends; in Angus’s diary entries which vary in length from one page to four or five – never longer than that.
Gilbert White’s minute but extended study of the whole ecology of the parish of Selbourne in Hampshire was published in 1789, a year which saw numerous important events which he wisely ignored. In the English-speaking world, those ranged from the mutiny on HMS Bounty to the ratification of the US Constitution. In faraway France a revolution broke out following a meeting of disgruntled bourgeoises on the Royal Tennis Court at Versailles and the riotous liberation of seven lunatics from the Bastille prison. The world of “events” was turned upside down, but Gilbert White stuck to his birds, earthworms and theories about the food chain.
Angus’s three years of diarising were not enlivened by quite such momentous events as those White ignored, except perhaps for the Scottish independence referendum, held in September 2014. The only comment Angus makes about public events in any of these books is to say that he was “disappointed but not surprised” by the result as “the opportunity was missed to replace a corrupt government in London with a model designed on sounder ethical principles.” (Another Summer, p. 211) Sadly, after a decade of government by obsessive dark-siders, we know just how corrupt politics can be, even in hyper-virtuous Scotland.
In more recent times, the corruption of Holyrood has cast a pall more directly over Angus’s unvarnished Eden. Following the new American GPP model (Governing for Private Profit) many Scottish politicians are trying to leverage their positions in Holyrood to get secure, well-paid employment in offshore bureaucracies where they will not even be nominally accountable to an electorate. The indirect result of this has been a drive to force windfarms on previously untroubled communities up and down Kintyre (and elsewhere).
The whole area around Largiebaan, where Angus found his mossy saxifrage, is soon to be destroyed by the sight of, and infrasound from, thirteen 660-foot high wind turbines being put up by EnergieKontor, a company from Bremen which is notorious for trying to avoid paying community compensation for its unsightly cashmills. Members of the Scottish fake government, being mindful of their own future employability, turn a blind eye to the fencing of hill ground and the proliferation of Keep Out signs. They are unconcerned about the danger of lithium-ion batteries for power storage, which not even the Scottish Fire Service knows how to deal with if one of them spontaneously combusts like an electric scooter battery. You get the feeling they would have rubber-stamped the Highland Clearances if they had been given a personal bung by the Global Rewilding Trust.
Trotsky famously said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Likewise you may not be interested in the Scottish government but if you have any resources it could filch for its own benefit, it will be interested in you. Here the resource in question is an unindustrialised landscape. In his first volume, Angus mentioned the precise area slated for destruction in these words:
“The peace of that day, and especially that hour at Largiebaan, is what made it special to me. I was enveloped, physically and spiritually, in that profound stillness which one might find – but not always – in remote places and in the absence of other human beings. Certain places have it and others don’t. I can go to particular points on a landscape and I find it unfailingly. Even with a wind blowing, that ‘eternal Silence’ of Wordsworth’s may be heard, if one listens for it, beneath the turbulence of surfaces. It lives for me in moorland places especially.” (A Summer, p. 68)
That is what the Scottish government wants to destroy: what some might call the peace of God, or others of Wordsworth. Either way, it clearly passeth the understanding of the black holes at the centre of Holyrood environmental policy.
Gilbert White had a government which was prepared to fight for his freedom to worship in his own way and ignore French republican aggression. Angus does not have that freedom today due to the institutional authoritarianism which the Scottish government is using to destroy individual liberty (except for itself). How very French of it!
Angus’s three books are not only attractive accounts of a peaceful life in a beautiful area amongst people who, by and large, do not want to destroy the peace of others. What Gilbert White started, Angus has ended. His trilogy is unique to the extent that it will never be possible to write anything like it again once the German windfarm has gone in at Breakerie on the Mull of Kintyre, right next to Largiebaan, where the saxifrage once blossomed unseen by almost everyone except Angus.
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Readers wishing for more information on this windfarm might like to watch a short film I have made on the subject, called Hands Off the Mull!
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Photo of Mossy Saxifrage (Saxifraga Hypnoides) courtesy of Celtic Wildflowers.
