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Published
by Polygon
Editorial © Scottish Literary Tour Company Ltd, 2001
Original photography © Marius Alexander & Paul Bassu,
2001
Designed by Lucy Richards
Written by Moira Burgess
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" Attempts to capture the spirit of a place in a definition
are rarely fortunate; it is wiser to point to its literature
as the embodiment of a thousand subtle and vagrant traditions."
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John Buchan,
The Literature of Tweeddale [ 1925] |
Take a journey real
or imaginary from the comfort of your armchair. Through
quiet glens, over barren moors and hills, along lochside, seashore
or city streets. On the way indulge in a host of Scottish writers
from Allan Ramsay to Irvine Welsh
Land Lines is an illustrated guide to the literature and landscape
of Scotland, an inspiring and imaginative journey over a panoramic
sweep of Scottish literary history - inviting you to travel
through time and place, memory and emotion, as expressed through
the personal vision of our writers and poets.
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It has been said that every
Scot is born equipped with a compass in the head.
We turn naturally, that is towards the north, and
there are the mountains, 'the mist covered mountains
of home'.
This is my country,
The land that begat me.
These windy spaces
Are surely my own.
Alexander Gray |
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gangers and riveters
sweating at furnaces
welding the rivet-tongs
hammering plates in place
haning the arms
of the great cantilever |
The great sick Clyde shivers
in its bed - Edwin Morgan |
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There
are so many ways to experience the landscape. There's the scientific
route, through geology for instance, learning how the mountains
and he lochs came to be where they are. Then history lends its
shading to the picture: we see Glencoe in a shroud of foreboding
because of the massacre, and Iona in a heavenly light because
we know about Columba. After that, legend and poetry come in.
yet men going about invisible concerns are here'
Edwin Morgan |
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Behind the mountains and glens, behind the farms and small towns
and cities, there's another landscape of Scotland. ...the landscape
of Scottish writing stretches beyond the mountains and glens,
the past and present, to another place and time... |
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Sky is larger than
life; land is small . Robin Fulton |
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