The Bone Cave: A Journey Through Myth And Memory
Dougie Strang 
Birlinn, £14.99


 
Late October, and the roar of rutting stags reverberates across the Scottish Highlands. As days shorten, the old Celtic festival of Samhain approaches, signalling the end of the harvest season and the coming of winter. Traditionally, this liminal period is accompanied by a thinning of the border between this world and the next. It is, writes Dougie Strang, “the moment when the Cailleach, as winter crone, comes into her own”.
Gaelic legend casts the Cailleach as a spectral shapeshifter. In origin myths, she creates landmarks such as the Ailsa Craig out of boulders dropped from her apron folds. In sinister tales, she is a harbinger of death. And sometimes, she is linked to the mysterious “deer woman” creed, which sees hunters brought up short when their cervine prey turns into a beautiful maiden or wizened hag.
Strang studied folklore at the Edinburgh University School of Scottish Studies co-founded by Hamish Henderson and The Bone Cave is, as the subtitle suggests, a journey through the stories told by our ancestors. It also charts a geographical odyssey, as Strang follows their narrative arc through Perthshire, Sutherland, Argyll and Mull, visiting wild and lonely places where communities once thrived but where now, the only trace of their presence lies among rickles of stone.


Or does it? As Strang discovers, the hills, glens and burns still resonate with voices that once rang around winter hearths and their ancient tales are immortalised in Gaelic place names. There, by Allt Nighean Mhic Domhnuill (the Stream of Donald’s Granddaughter), a renowned stalker killed his last stag; Uaigh Dhiarmaid (Dhairmaid’s grave) marks the resting place of Fionn mac Cumhaill’s love rival; and Tigh na Cailleach denotes the Cailleach’s house.
Strang treads softly across this storied landscape. Travelling solo throughout the month of October, he cooks on carefully tended fires and camps out under the stars or – one memorable night – in the Bone Cave at Creag nan Uamh near Inchnadamph, Assynt. In its deepest recesses, the remains of prehistoric bears, lynx and wolves have been excavated and in the candlelit gloom, Strang imagines “the otherworld” pressing in through the walls, just as the roar of a passing stag echoes from the cave mouth.  
Deer, we learn, are also called crodh-sithe (“fairy cattle”) and “in the folklore of the Highlands, there is no creature … more fey”. During Strang’s trek, these animals are omnipresent, crossing his path and haunting his dreams like the Cailleach who, in one story, is glimpsed standing on a hillside, clacking deer bones together and muttering about the burning of the woodlands. An allusion, perhaps, to the despoliation of the Caledonian forest? 


As he walks, Strang ponders the origins and significance of Gaelic folklore, drawing links with the native peoples of Australia, Scandinavia and the Arctic, whose cultures also endured “oppression, deracination and in many cases deliberate extermination” and who, he speculates, “would likely have no trouble in recognising a Highland Dreaming” in a mountain gully gouged out by a giant boar, or in the seething Corryvreckan whirlpool where the Cailleach is said to wash her ancient plaids. 
Strang’s journey serves partly as a kind of reckoning with his own trajectory, from disconsolate Glasgow car mechanic to folklorist and writer living a happy family life on an Argyllshire hill farm. Escaping the city appears to have been key to his happiness, and he worries about the consequences of our increasing separation from the land and whether the stories embedded within it can survive the modernising onslaught of plastic pollution and electricity pylons. At one point, he realises a once-sacred well has been obliterated by a JCB. 


So-called “nature-writing” can sometimes feel a bit unnecessary: all breathless descriptions of stately pines or burnished leaves that, to misquote Kilmer’s famous poem, are never as lovely as a tree itself. Strang’s focus, by contrast, is less on the landscape per se than on humankind’s relationship with it, and his observations – whether on the people he encounters while hitching or the mountain crash sites where young airmen met their doom – are invariably thought-provoking and often deeply affecting, and his imagery feels fresh: lichen-clad oaks appear like “raggedy old men”; a passing boat’s engine buzzes “like an aggravated wasp”. 
Meanwhile, the tales he conjures from the hilltops – of fairies, kelpies, Nimble Men and rowing boats drifting across starlit skies – are enthralling. 
A month spent amid some of Scotland’s wildest, most desolate terrain is not for the faint-hearted, and the author dices with elemental danger more than once. 


He seems to yearn for the lost sensibilities of our hunter-gatherer forebears and I wonder if we occasionally risk idealising what Strang calls “my country’s depth-culture”. Perhaps prehistory was a kinder place, but as he acknowledges, Scotland’s more recent past is awash with the blood and tears of ordinary folk sacrificed to serve the ambitions of clan chiefs, aspiring monarchs and “improving” landlords. Nor should we forget those trashed and burned as supposed witches: a reminder, surely, that the forces promulgating ancient beliefs weren’t always benign. 
And my sceptic’s eyebrow twitched on reading that Lochaber locals would have insisted, with unwavering conviction, that the ‘parallel roads’ of Glen Roy “were made by Fionn mac Cumhaill and his warriors, as they raced their chariots round the sides of the glen”. Maybe. But mightn’t some of them have done so with a hint of leg-pulling swagger? Then as now, people are unlikely to have been homogeneous in their beliefs. 
Still, as Strang makes clear, the line between myth and reality is a shoogly one, and no doubt our ancestors were as capable as we are of suspending disbelief – particularly at this time of year. It’s at the tail end of October that his journey comes to a fitting end in the Black Wood of Rannoch among fragments of ancient pine trees, where the last wolves of Scotland are thought to have roamed. 
Strang favours the beast’s re-introduction, both to aid the regeneration of ravaged woodland and because “to be in the presence of something outwith our control, something that might even be more than a match for us, teaches perspective, humility even”. 


Mixing challenging questions about rewilding, land ownership and Highland re-population with enchanting stories and luminous prose, The Bone Cave is a beautiful book: the perfect companion to a winter’s night by the fireside.