The people of Unnimore thought that ‘flitting’ would not come upon them while they lived. As long as they paid the rent, and that was not difficult to do, anxiety did not come near them; and a lease they asked not. It was there that the friendly neighbourhood was, though now only one smoke is to be seen, from the house of the Saxon shepherd.

The story of Mary of Unnimore as told by herself

Something was there
and then it wasn’t. This day
like any other: roebuck ghosting the far field
beyond the head-dyke, redstarts
like blood drops alighting on the roofs.
Along the shoreline of the loch
women gut and rinse the brown trout
trembling in their hands.
Men excavate the peat bank.
Vast townships of cloud migrate overhead.
In the distant halls of power
wealth flows from afar, accumulates
like sediment as laws are passed,
maps redrawn, hierarchies maintained.
To buy or sell a person is illegal.
To buy or sell the place that they call home
is sound investment: the type of asset
you can put to work. But here,
in the backwaters of empire,
where the greatest means of knowledge
are those tested by the providence
of earth, the guiding principle
of virtue is to look upon the world
with a symbiotic eye.
There are children playing in the kailyards.
Goats grazing underneath the rocky
lip of Sithean na Raplaich,
where a lone girl walks the grazing path
with a milking pail in hand.
One by one, she moves between them
with a certainty that life goes on
like this, its lone enduring promise
the covenant of dùthchas.
And why wouldn’t she believe
in all those centuries of continuity
leading her here, to the task
her mother taught her, just as her mother
learned from her mother before that.
It’s not that life is flawless
but the only one she’s ever known,
and there’s a beauty in the way that it unfolds.
Soon, none of it will matter anymore,
once the factor and his officers
have come snaking through the glen
with their summons to evict,
the landlord’s shepherd close behind
with his cash crop of livestock.
There will be no shelter here tonight,
only the long road to the land of strangers.
Every house will be stripped
and every roof caved in,
as each man, woman, and child
is made to bear on their back
the sum of a life. The hiss of fire
on the flag of the hearth will reach her heart
when they douse it, and she’ll stand
on the slope of Cnoc nan Càrn to hold
in her mind’s eye one final time
a vision of home, before turning away.
This place was never yours,
they’ll say, though years from now
as she steps from factory floor to city street,
the winter haar pouring in,
muting the world, effacing everything,
it’s here that she’ll be: the sun
overhead and those faces she knows
returning along the river’s edge,
the day’s warm milk filling her pail.