Researching A Scattering

I began writing A Scattering in 2015. Despite having a Scottish father I knew little of his history. In school in England I was taught that the Scots were the barbarian hoards who needed a wall to keep them out. When my father died I began researching his ancestors and I traced them back to the shores of Loch Rannoch, where they settled in the 1600’s marrying MacGregors and MacDonalds. On a visit there I found the remains of an abandoned village on the hillside and later discovered that my great, great, great grandmother had lived there in a Blackhouse. The novel grew from this point and the rest is fiction. I wanted to give a voice to an older Gaelic-speaking woman, whose story hasn’t been written in history books. I visited the area, exploring, walking and reading local history. I found Andy Wightman’s book ‘The Poor Had No Lawyers - Who Owns Scotland’ which was very useful. I read books about the Highland Clearances and Gaelic culture and what happened to crofters when they were removed from their homes. In Edinburgh Central Library I found letters by crofters, some in Gaelic, written from Canada and Australia to family in Scotland. I studied Gaelic and found it to be a beautiful, rhythmic and poetic language, and very unlike English. I learned how the language was suppressed by the English colonisers, who associated it with being uncivilised and who consistently practiced cultural genocide. The novel comes from the language and the landscape and the people.