After the massacre at Culloden

the Crown and its lackeys impoverished

the Highlands – forbade the language and the kilt,

began the Clearances, the diasporas.

By Victorian times all that had become

the background of fiction – as in ‘Kidnapped’,

Robert Louis Stevenson’s adult novel

about bigotry, pride, loyalty and friendships,

masquerading as a boy’s adventure yarn

set among the lochs, the glens, the heather.

Young David Balfour – a Protestant

lowlander – is traduced, kidnapped, shipwrecked,

outlawed, redeemed. He becomes a killer

with a flintlock by force of circumstance.

Before he must take to the heather –

with his alter ego, Alan Breck

of the king’s coat with silver buttons –

he takes the ferry from Mull to the mainland.

The ferry is ramshackle. Nevertheless

the Sound is still, the day is bright, all

– passengers and boatmen – take turns at the oars

to a song in Gaelic, ‘Heel yo ho, boys!

Bring her head into the weather!’,

and David Balfour, although he understands

not a word, shares in the fellowship.

As they approach the mouth of Loch Aline

they see a ship at anchor, a coffin ship

destined for the American colonies,

and skiffs, plying between the ship and the shore,

full of people, and the shore crowded

with men, women, children – and, closer,

they hear from land and water a keening,

and one of the singers on the ferry

begins a lament, in which the others join.

Our hero, though he has none of the Gaelic,

is struck to the heart.