Settlement 3 m. W of Lochinver in Scotland's highland region. Norman MacCaig spent holidays in a cottage here and in many lyrical and witty poems celebrated the landscape, wildlife, and people of the surrounding parish of Assynt. In ‘Clachtoll’ he found local correspondences for Persephone, Perseus, and Icarus, where ‘one decorum binds the sounds | Of crafting lands and fishing grounds’. ‘A Man in Assynt’ laments the oppression and depopulation of the local country, a place with which MacCaig had pursued:
" a love-affair, so nearly human
we even have quarrels.—
When I intrude too confidently
it rebuffs me with a wind like a hand
or puts in my way
a quaking bog or a loch
where no loch should be. Or I turn stonily
away, refusing to notice
the rouged rocks, the mascara
under a dripping ledge, even
the tossed, the stony limbs waiting.
"
The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain & Ireland. © 2008
Oxford University Press.
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