Turning a Corner? My First Week in Scotland

On ancestors, home-longing, reconnecting wtih the land, and . . . bees?

The day I arrived in Edinburgh the moon was full, a time of new beginnings. It was dark when I landed, so I saw very little. I walked off the plane, down the stairs, and onto the tarmac (just like in the old movies). I looked up and saw the bright, round moon, its glow illuminating a ring of wispy clouds. I felt a wild place stir inside me, something beyond this industrial world.

I came to Scotland almost by accident. Last October when I was making plans for where I’d go in the new year, I talked to a friend in France about how I was exploring my options for leaving the Schengen Zone, which I had to do on January 5. I had looked at Turkey, Albania, Serbia, Morocco, and Egypt, and felt overwhelmed by the thought of traveling to any of those countries on my own. I’m not that adventurous I told her.

“You should go to Edinburgh,” she said. “I loved the 6 weeks I spent there.” (Scotland, like the rest of the UK and Ireland, is not in the Schengen Zone.)

Of course, I thought. I should go to Scotland. Why hadn’t I thought about that? I honestly don’t know. Since this year is supposed to be a search for myself and a new home, why hadn’t it occurred to me to come back to Scotland, the land of my Boyd ancestors?

Scotland has always had a soft spot in my heart. I love bagpipes and men in kilts. Every St. Patrick’s Day, I would look out eagerly for the Scottish marching crew and swoon to the traditional music they played. There is something about the sound of a bagpipe that makes time stop. No other instrument has that kind of power over me. Except the deep beat of a drum. I’ve also always felt particularly drawn to the Scottish countryside. The dramatic landscapes in The Outlander series captivated me as much as the Scottish accents.

But in the past two years, as my life turned upside down and I worked so hard to extricate myself from a life that didn’t feel right anymore, I had completely lost sight of perhaps what I needed most—to find my roots, as they say. But the universe gave me a nudge, and that was all I needed.

The Boyds

I’ve visited Edinburgh only once before, briefly in 2015 with my daughter. We spent a few days in Scotland before I started teaching in Cork, Ireland. We mostly did some very cool Harry Potter stuff, but we also made a side trip to see where my Scottish ancestors were from.

My Boyd relatives had migrated to Scotland in the late 1860s, about 100 years before my birth. My nearest Scottish relative was my great-great grandfather, only 4 generations back, which impressed me at the time. Granted he was only a toddler then, but his parents came with him, and I wanted to see where they had come from.

Here is a picture of that ancestor, George (standing, second from right), with his wife Louisa and their children: seven boys! Bob, or Robert Clementine, was my great-grandfather.

Bathgate, where my ancestors last lived, is an unexceptional town about half way between Glasgow and Edinburgh. My great-great-great grandfather was a manager in a coal mine. The family had moved around a lot, as well. So I have to admit I didn’t feel anything particularly magical about Bathgate. We searched the graveyard for my great-great-great-great grandfather’s grave. But we couldn’t find it. And so my search for my roots rested there. Until the last two weeks.

I’ve been able to reconstruct my Boyd family tree, going all the way back to a Robert Boyd who was christened in 1644 in Kilmarnock, the town outside the Clan Boyd stronghold, Dean Castle, which still stands today (although it was destroyed at one time and later rebuilt).

from Wikipedia

The Boyds had a title, granted to them with the land in 1316 by Robert the Bruce. The first Lord Boyd and nearly all thereafter were named Robert. So were about 2/3 of the men on my family tree. The Boyds lost their title with the destruction of the clans after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. It seems the last Lord Boyd had fought on the losing side of Bonnie Prince Charlie, who had aspirations to wrest Scotland from British rule.

After that, the Boyds don’t seem to have distinguished themselves much. My Boyd ancestors migrated to Glasgow, then to a variety of small towns between there and Edinburgh. That is all I know so far. But I’m planning a visit to the Scottish Genealogical Society’s library to see what else I can discover about them.

Reconnecting With the Land

Before I even landed in Scotland, I was feeling something deep in my gut that is hard to put into words. On the plane I started to read the book If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-Changing Journey of Authenticity and Belonging by Sharon Blackie. She had me on the first page with this epigraph from D. H. Lawrence:

. . . We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table.

Blackie’s subject is how being cut off from the tree of Life has affected women in particular. All over the world, women were once revered as “the creators of life, the bearers of the Cup of knowledge and wisdom, personifying the moral and spiritual authority of this fertile green and blue Earth.” Of course, the opposite is true today. But we can find the inspiration to reclaim our original connection with the Earth in the ancient stories, particularly those of the Celts, she says. “Celtic creation stories tell us that the land was shaped by a woman; Celtic history offers us examples of women who were the inspirational leaders of their tribes. These are the stories of our own heritage, the stories of the real as well as the mythical women who went before us. What if we could reclaim those stories, and become those women again?” she asks, speaking here particularly to women of the British Isles—Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England.

Her vision of a powerful heritage of women’s connection to the land and how it was taken from them brought tears to my eyes. I’ve had this general idea of wanting to live close to nature, but reading If Women Rose Rooted has awakened a deeper yearning that I had nearly forgotten—the yearning to belong somewhere, to feel connected to a particular place and the life that inhabits it.

“So much has been lost in devaluing the feminine,” Blackie writes. “We have lost the dark, dancing wisdom of women, our deep ways of knowing, our creative, life-giving fire. . . . Our severance from nature leaves us feeling as if we do not belong in the world, and that can be a source of anxiety and deep despair.”

During those dark and confusing months of the pandemic as I sat on my couch and wrote and wrote, I longed most of all for connection, but I didn’t know where to look for it. I looked for it in people, primarily, sometimes disastrously so. I looked for it in spirituality, which entailed a turning inward that I’ve found very nourishing. But the deeper sense of connection to life and the natural world from which we have been severed continues to allude me.

Borrowing from T.S. Elliot, Blackie calls our modern, patriarchal, industrial world a Wasteland. It is a “rootless place, and its ground is infertile.” More chillingly, she writes,

The Wasteland is the hollowness inside us, for we are reflections of the hollow world we live in. To embrace it might mean that we spend our lives doing work we hate in order to feel secure. [It]might mean that we hunger for . . . all the latest versions of all the latest gadgets, as we try to fill the hollowness inside us with ‘stuff’. It might mean that we wrap ourselves tightly in busy-ness and noise and never-enough-time and anxiety. . . . The Wasteland burns us up and burns us out.

Today, it particularly ties us to devices and machines that offer us connectivity, but don’t provide what we really need: connection and community.

Blackie describes her own embrace of the Wasteland and the burnout that followed. She made her way through academia, got a Ph.D., distinguished herself in her career, and was a called a success. She spent her weeks working and commuting, her weekends exhaustedly trying to keep up with cleaning and grocery shopping, only to start the cycle all over again. I can relate. I felt like my to-do list would continue scrolling into infinity while I ran after it like a gerbil on a wheel. Thankfully, I didn’t end up working for a soulless tobacco company, as Blackie did, but I still felt a tremendous discontent with the life I was leading.

Things began to change for Blackie on a trip to Ireland, the land of her great-grandfather. She felt “for the first time in my life . . . as if my feet were in the right place. My place, my culture and the stories of my ancestors rising out of the hills and bogs of this land where they were living still. The Call came again, loud and clear.” So she decided to move there.

Elsewhere she quotes another woman who found her “right place” in the Scottish Hebrides. “There’s a strong sense there of the long history of humans in the Scottish landscape,” she says. “For me that particular place represents my indigenous roots. It speaks to me like nowhere else can. It nourishes me. It’s such a deep thing, stretching out into the story of my ancestors, generations back.”

On the plane, hanging in the air somewhere over France, I read passages like these and was filled with a tremendous home-longing. I don’t think we have a word for that. We talk of homesickness, of the yearning for a home that was once ours and is no more. It’s a feeling we have about a home that we can or cannot return to, but it most definitely was our home. What is the word, then, for the kind of longing for a home that you’ve never had? (It seems the Welsh word hiraeth, which Blackie references, may convey that, at least partially. According to a UPenn site, the word has no English equivalent. It’s a “a combination of the homesickness, longing, nostalgia, and yearning, for a home that you cannot return to, no longer exists, or maybe never was.”)

Like most Americans, I imagine, I have never had a strong sense of any particular place as “home.” For various reasons—moving when a child, moving around for education, losing everything in Hurricane Katrina—I never really developed a deep attachment to any of the cities I lived in. Now as I think about where I would like to live for the next phase of my life, I don’t feel anywhere in the U.S. calling me.

But I have felt Europe calling me, as I’ve written about before. I haven’t been able to pinpoint a particular place, though. I thought first of France but have discovered that my affection, while real, doesn’t run deep enough for a commitment to move there. I’ve also thought of Germany, where I lived for a year during high school. It was hard to leave then, and I’ve always had this sense of a lost home of sorts. But I have lost touch with the people I knew there, and the country has changed dramatically since the mid-1980s. I will be visiting Berlin in late March and April, though, a trip I feel I must take to see what my feelings about Germany are now.

My affection and home-feeling for England runs deeper than either France or Germany, but I found on my return to southern England that congestion and development have changed the places I once loved. London is so large that I was overwhelmed during my two weeks there. Maybe north of London I could find a home for a while, I had thought. But reading If Women Rose Rooted, I knew that I had set my sights too low. England might be a comfortable and interesting place to live. But what if Scotland offered something more, a deeper connection to the land and its people?

Looking for Scotland

I’m staying in the middle of Edinburgh, in a neighborhood that is convenient for getting around but provides nothing nature-wise. It’s all stone and concrete, construction work and traffic. There isn’t much to distinguish it from the Wasteland Blackie writes about. So I’ve been yearning to get out of town and see the countryside.

Over the weekend, I was able to get out and see St. Andrews and Stirling, two lovely towns, with some very pretty countryside in between. The view of the sea and the purple-and-blue-shaded Highlands in the distance from the shores of St. Andrews was beguiling. But my first real experience of the land of Scotland came during a hike in the Pentland Hills Regional Park a couple of days ago.  

I took a bus directly from where I’m staying to the edge of the park. I walked to a trailhead, past munching cows under the trees dotting a field, up a hill, past a reservoir and up, up, up to the top of a larger hill. As I climbed up, I could see the foot-worn trail rising up to the crest of the ridge and disappearing over the edge. A perfect representation of my life right now, I thought, a path into the unknown.

On the top of the ridge, I felt the wind pick up and admired the view: the brown woodland waiting for spring, the green paths snaking through the brown grass, and little people and their dogs in the distance walking the sensuous curves of the hills. I followed the top of the ridge for a few yards and then noticed the rock jutting out here and there from the vegetation beginning to turn green.

“Before memory or history—beneath everything—is the rock,” Neil Oliver writes in A History of Scotland, a book I picked up at a used bookstore. The rocks were dark, like the lava rock I had seen on Mount Etna in Sicily. It felt alive to me then. (I discovered later that it was indeed 5000-feet-thick volcanic rock produced by lava and ash that spewed from long-extinct volcanoes.)

I sat down on the dry grass and green moss, resting my feet on an outcropping of rocks to prevent sliding down the hill. I laid my hand on a bit of rock next to me that was partially covered in lichen. The sun was bright, so I shut my eyes. The wind was strong now, taking hold of me, filling my ears. It began to speak to me, in its language, of change and time and the land. I actually felt time rushing at me, and I felt connected to the rough stone under my hand, as if it and the wind were a part of me somehow.

I laid back to feel the earth beneath me. The wind caressed me and the land held me, and I thought of my ancestors leaving this home and wandering across the ocean to Canada and then down into middle America. And I thought of sitting on my grandfather’s lap, curling up and sleeping while he watched football or an old Western. (He was a large man, very tall, like most of the Boyd men. His lap was the safest, most comforting place I remember from my early years.)

I couldn’t help but begin to cry. For the great sense of loss that I felt, having been separated from the Boyds at age 9, when I moved with my mom two states away. And also for the way I felt held here again on this spot of earth. I felt profoundly the love of the earth and of my ancestors, and I wondered if they grieved their loss upon leaving this land.

The sun went behind the clouds, and I opened my eyes, looking up at the infinite blue sky and the fast-moving lower clouds. After a bit I began to feel a chill. So I put my jacket back on and sat up and looked at the rocks around me. I could see now the shades of red, iron ore, in the black lava rock. Then I noticed about 10 feet away a set of keys, grown rusty with time, lost here and never retrieved. That seemed significant, somehow, as if they might have been left here for me. So I reached over and picked them up. Two skeleton keys and a small, flat, round-headed key. These were house keys, and maybe the key to a gate. Then I noticed the ornamental part of the key ring: an embossed representation of thistles, which are the national flower and symbol of Scotland.

In my metaphorical mood, I couldn’t help but ascribe some meaning to this discovery and the whole experience I had up there on the hill. I suppose that at this in-between stage of my life, I’m looking for signs and meaning. But I’m not rushing to conclusions, either. I wrapped the rusty keys and ring in a tissue and put them in the front pocket of my backpack. If I do end up making a home here, I’ll hang them on the wall. But who knows what the future holds . . .

Bees Swarming

Later that day, I had my first meeting with the life coach Jessie Harrold, whom I wrote about in my last letter. I was telling her about all of this and getting rather out of breath. She encouraged me to pause and close my eyes. Then she asked, “what do you see? What comes to your mind right now?”

“I see bees, buzzing around,” I said. “But not like when they are collecting pollen, drifting from flower to flower. They are buzzing madly around, like swarming.”

“You know, when bees swarm they are looking for a new home,” she said.

I looked it up later and found this online: “Swarming is a natural process. It is the colony reproducing by the old queen leaving with some of the bees. They leave their hive and find somewhere to hang in a cluster until the scout bees decide on their new home.”

That’s exactly where I am, right now, and I could use some scout bees to find the right place for me. Often, I’m as confused as the rest of the colony, pioneers in the making, hanging out waiting for some direction. But I’ve started to feel a little less so. I’m going to spend the rest of my month here getting to know this place and seeing what else I can learn about my Boyd ancestors, who felt compelled to leave their home in search of a better life. How fitting that my search for one has led me back here, to the land they left behind.

My next newsletter will be a monthly update, sent to all subscribers. Until then, I look forward to hearing from you. Have you read Blackie’s book? Does her message resonate with you? Have you searched your family history and what has that meant to you? I’ve love to hear your thoughts.

All the best,

Anne