I’m not aware of a Highland Games prize for the neatest hair bun, but if there were one, this row of contenders would take on all-comers. The picture is included in Robbie Lawrence’s Long Walk Home, a double volume of photographs that are the result of five years of travels in Scotland and Scottish outposts in the US in search of the true tartan spirit of Highland gatherings. “Every event I photographed,” Lawrence writes by way of introduction, “whether on a dusty sports field in Denver, or at the local park in Burntisland, is at its core a coming together of friends and family to enjoy sports, dance and music.”
To begin with, on this quest, Lawrence hoped to strip away the myth-making, to look beneath the kilt of the games, to capture something like their authentic nature. He abandoned that idea, however. Instead, his pictures of grunting caber tossers and spry country dancers, and pipe bands emerging from dreich summer weather, became an attempt “to engage with the myriad of fabricated ideas surrounding the modern Highland Games”, the ways in which those rooted in glens by daily fact or inherited memory find joy in their Scottishness.
The poet John Burnside provides an essay for the second book of Long Walk Home, alongside artful studio portraits of Games legends and hopefuls, lit like Old Masters. Burnside recalls his own version of the West Fife diaspora, relocated in 1965 to Corby New Town, evoking memories of childhood drums and bagpipes “that seemed to rise up out of the earth itself to claim me physically, spiritually… a call to something I did not need to understand”. Scottishness as presented at the Games may well be “as much myth as it is history” Burnside writes, but that only means “we must guard it carefully, retell it beautifully and, more than anything else, love it wisely”.
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