Scotland’s 20th-century literary renaissance explored modern ideas and technologies in the context of the Highlands and Islands, last strongholds of an indigenous linguistic culture. Since then, and with varying degrees of subtlety, novelists, poets and playwrights have longed for, and sought to recover, an ancient identity linked to the land and to a Golden Age before the industrial Fall. The novelist Neil M Gunn (1891–1973) in particular saw the everyday reality of his childhood and his ancestors as something charged with symbolic significance; his work can be read as a search to recover a prior identity, an older sense of ‘self’.

Kapka Kassabova’s Borrowed Land: A Highland Story sits well within this tradition. Born in Bulgaria, she arrived in Scotland some twenty years ago, and since then has moved from Edinburgh to the Northwest Highlands, a little way south of Gunn country (Gunn was from Dunbeath, Caithness). Strathglass is a wide glen that opens onto the River Beauly and, by virtue of its shape and location, has been a conduit for transport, power infrastructure and migration to and from all points west. 

For Kassabova, the glen is alive with symbolism and kinship. A key figure in this spiritual ecology is the Cailleach, a wise woman who also features as a white witch and healer: ‘something harms the women of the inner glen [when] the land becomes mere commodity to be bought and