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The Walbiri people of Northern Australia believe the world was made by the movements of their ancestors. Their song poetry and rock pictures record the ancient trails. Songs are linked by lines or tracks. Singing reveals the temporal and spatial relationships between places. The Walbiri follow the old ways but as they must live as hunter gatherers they sometimes need to make new trails. The totality of an individual’s life is mapped by tracks followed in the past, and forged in the present. Life is a summation of a person’s movement marked on the ground. Sequences of connected songs infuse both daily and ritual life, because every act involves a dialogue between ancestors and those alive in the here and now (Wagner 1986).

In Òran do Ghunna dh’an Ainm Nic Còiseim – Song to a Gun named Nic Coiseim, Donnchadh Bàn Macintyre maps his whole life as a gamekeeper with 21 place-names in three hunting territories in Argyll and Highland Perthshire. Places are not cited in a linear sequence. They are dropped like pins over his familiar landscape and identify the quality of habitat and the quarry it supports. Dòmhnall mac Fhionnlaigh nan Dàn – Donald MacKinlay of the Verses – does the same in Òran na Comhachaig – Song of the Owl, set in Lochaber, citing 30 place-names ranging over his hunting domain. Places are linked to events and the practice of the chase. Donald’s ancestral past is symbolised by an ancient owl he meets and with whom he converses about old age and heroic figures and their exploits in the past. Neil Gunn’s protagonists in The Silver Darlings and Highland River map their hunting territories with place-names on land and at sea. They encounter other worldly characters from history at the Broch and Chapelhill in the Strath of Dunbeath and on the Flannan Isles. Kenn’s quest upriver, Finn’s repeated visits to Chapelhill and Young Art’s to the former settlement of the Clash connect the Highlanders of the past with boyhood.