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In the three works which form the core of this book, we will explore how selected authors, using different and yet comparable methods, attempt to suspend time and serial vison with a constant temporal and spatial state of mind. This is most evident in Sorley MacLean’s poem Hallaig, where time is the explicit subject of a poetic assassination. In this work, he employs a surreal iteration and reiteration of journeys between named places to suspend the pastness of the past. His ancestors in Raasay are continually present. They cannot be extinguished. The dead have been seen alive.

White men need paper maps … We have maps in our minds.

(Nick Thompson in Basso 1996, 43)

Cognitive maps, the maps we make and retain in our minds, are not the same as those we buy in bookshops, displayed in numbered ranks of orange and pink. Cognitive maps cannot be bought. They are unique to ourselves, our family and our community. The interior landscapes they represent have not been surveyed or drawn by distant outsiders. Cognitive maps may not be true to scale or comply with cartographic conventions. But even maps which result from physical survey, and which purport to portray an objective and official reality, innocently include their own distortions and omissions. They represent the preferences of those who made and commissioned them. If the true dimension of a motorway on a roadmap is scaled, the tarmacadam is hundreds of metres wide. Why is it blue, whilst a trunk road is red and a C road yellow? Admiralty charts do not map landform unless it lies beneath the sea. Unless it is used as a reference point for sighting, land is irrelevant to marine navigation. Contours showing landform are invisible in any case. They do not exist. They are an abstraction. General Roy’s magnificent military sketch of Scotland made after the 1745 Jacobite rebellion only shows places, which might be of value to an army on campaign.