Scottish history is rich with kings but what about ordinary folk?

The Herald Scotland

a day ago

My debut novel, The Foreshore, is set on a fictionalised version of the islands in the first half of the 18th century, a critical era of Scottish history and one of both enlightenment and violent conflict. I had always been fascinated by this era, and writing historical fiction was always going to be the natural path I took as a novelist, but it was the marginalised people of St Kilda who lit the spark.
Scottish history has always been rich with sagas of kings, queens and warriors, but what about those forgotten people who existed on the fringes of these narratives? There are no grand statues to these people, nor do they feature on any shortbread tins, but their presence still haunts the loneliest corners of this country.
Author Samantha York's debut The Foreshore (Image: free) Beginning my journey as a published author, I devoured any records I could find of the populations of our farthest flung islands. Their way of life became the backdrop, and their folk tales and ballads became the soundtrack to every page I typed.
Listening to the waulking songs of the women (Gaelic folk songs sung to the rhythmic beat of fulling cloth) and reading the early 18th-century records of the first Church missionaries on the island, made it possible to capture a fleeting murmur of lost voices.
I learned of the hardships of remote island life and used them as a backdrop to the human tragedies within my story. For instance, in 1727, the year The Foreshore is set, an outbreak of smallpox reduced St Kilda's population by more than half. It is moments like this that are often lost to history: the tolls taken by poor, working people reduced to dry statistics.
Even in those larger moments in Scottish history, true tragedies are often forgotten or romanticised. When we think of the Jacobite uprisings, which were somewhat dormant, but certainly simmering during the year in which The Foreshore is set, we often forget the shameful legacy of a corrupt class system, extreme religious divisions and the cultural displacement embroiled in them. The British Isles in their entirety and a large portion of continental Europe took part, but it was poor Highlanders who paid the price. Undervalued and bound by fealty to those who would eventually evict them in favour of more profitable livestock, they were dragged into a dynastic conflict which brought no benefit to them, purely to appease the lairds and landowners who owned their homes, and who tactically shifted from one side to another in an attempt to garner the most political favour.
It is a tale of class exploitation as old as stories themselves, but one that is often overshadowed in favour of a more glorified interpretation of history. Fifty years after the final rebellion, Scotland's most famous bard would pen the protest poem, Ye Jacobites By Name, which includes the words, 'your doctrines I maun blame', and 'what makes heroic strife … to hunt a parent's life wi bluidy war?'; yet today, Burns' clear cry of outrage is often sung in a sentimentalised, pro-Jacobite context.
To ground the lives of my characters, it was important for me to weave these ominous early signs of national upheaval into my narrative, to show how the lives of Scotland's oldest communities became blighted by events which often held no advantage to their own existence.
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These two worlds are embodied in The Foreshore by the two main characters: aging islander and matriarch Flora McKinnon, and dogmatic outsider Reverend Thomas Murray. Flora's concerns reflect those of her fellow islanders. Grief and famine are natural occurrences in her community's daily struggles to survive and uphold their traditional way of life.
In the novel, Reverend Murray's dedication to spreading new religious doctrines and ideas of a more 'enlightened' society, hold little sway over the lives of those he is sent to convert, reflecting the conflict between the culture of the Highlands and islands when confronted with the new ideologies which would pave the way for a modern, industrialised Scotland. The mystery at the heart of The Foreshore, the sudden appearance of a young girl on the island, without giving anything away, is itself grounded in historical narratives of a fear of outside influences and exploitation of the vulnerable.
As a novelist, one can never claim to be a chronicler of history, merely someone who uses its influence as a canvas. To capture this inspiration for yourself, I would recommend seeking it out: next time you take a hike in our mountains, glens and coastlines, look out for those ruins of former black houses, those crooked drystone walls turned green with age, nature reclaiming what was lost by humans. See if you can catch a long-lost scent of peat smoke, the warmth of livestock breathing in the byre. Manifesting such stories keeps the voices of marginalised and working people alive. We may bring our own interpretations to their lives, but in conjuring their existence, I hope we can bring some honour to them.
The Foreshore by Samantha York is out now on Salt Publishing at £10.99