Search Results

This chapter explores Langholm, which is central to the creation of Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry and politics. His self-imposed intellectual task began in the Langholm Library. MacDiarmid revenges his insecurities by creating a fictional autodidact epitomising the generalism of the foregone academic tradition of a metaphysical Scotland. The extent to which books about foreign countries (classified as geography) fill the shelves is the most striking thing about the Langholm Library. MacDiarmid’s birthplace in the Debatable Land of the Scottish Borders provided a dialectical source of inspiration throughout his life. The poet’s grief over the loss of his wife and children precipitated a crisis of identity that called him back imaginatively to his past in Langholm as he sought to find emotional resources with which to cope with the alienation of the present. From Langholm, his provincialist universalism was to be reborn in another ‘wee Nazareth’ in Angus, north-east Scotland.

This chapter examines the meaning of the phrase “Debatable Land.” Early maps showing aboriginal tribal divisions describe “Debatable Land” as either land that no one had laid claim to or land whose ownership was disputed. Either way, it was land that had not been settled. Whether the Aborigines saw it in this light is extremely doubtful: the phrase “Debatable Land” refers not so much to aboriginal beliefs, as to certain assumptions of their white interrogators. Implicit in the question, to whom does this land belong, are territorial notions possibly incomprehensible to those questioned. The phrase also reminds us that the process of settlement was not a laconic replacement of one culture by another, a simple, physical “taming” of the land, but a process of teaching the country to speak.

This chapter describes a sampler embroidered with the letters T, E, A, R by artist Maria Damon. Terra Divisa/Terra Divina: (T/E/A/R), referring to the Scottish/English “Debatable Lands,” is bisected by conflict on the diagonal: brown and green for the earth and its cycles of rest and renewal or, more violently, death and rebirth. The large, ornate T and A are from a Scottish sampler from the 1750s, described in the pattern booklet as “a step toward the majestic illuminations to follow.” The A takes pride of place and space: it is the largest letter, spilling over its borders. It resonates with the American literary classic, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, about a woman who is forced to embroider an A (for Adultery) on her clothing. The smaller E and R are from an English sampler made in an orphanage in the 1840s.

This chapter addresses the recent afterlife of Hadrian’s Wall, focusing on the use of this monument in debates about English and Scottish nationhood, and in particular the frequently recurring idea that modern political developments might lead to the re-building of this ancient frontier work. The use of this Roman Wall, which formed the boundary of a substantial ancient empire, as a marker of national identity is evidently problematic, although it draws on the dualistic concept of a division between barbarian northern Celts and civilized southern Britons that originated with Classical writers addressing the Roman conquest of Britain, and has been periodically revived at points of conflict and division throughout British history. The chapter ends by suggesting possible interpretive strategies that can accommodate both the Wall’s unavoidable history as a symbol of ethnic and national division, and its (perhaps underappreciated) significance as a transnational monument.