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The retelling of stories is to retrace one’s steps in a journey or to retrace the steps of our ancestors who made the same journey at some time in the past. Sorley MacLean invokes life on the east coast of Raasay by resurrecting the ghostly journeys of past peoples, who travel hither and thither between one place and another, over most of the island. MacLean’s ghost band repossess the island through place-naming. Does the Gaelic language lend itself to place-naming because the word for a noun is ainmear, literally a namer?

The most complex cognitive map is the survey view (Tvensky et al 2000). It is landscape imagined from the air. Landmarks, even though they may not be intervisible at ground level, are seen relative to one another. In this type of mind map, the frame of reference is absolute. This is how Donald Mackinlay of the Verses sees Lochaber in Song of the Owl, and how Duncan Bàn Macintyre mind-maps his hunting territory in Song to his Gun. It is how an older Kenn discerns his younger self, embarking on his hesitant, personal quest as he explores the Strath, and as the mature man overlays it with the whole territory of Scotland’s north coast from Ben Loyal to the Orkneys. His narrative path of boyhood becomes embedded within a wider region. This same scale of expanse will be delineated from the sea in the heroic voyages of the Silver Darlings. Sorley Maclean dramatically extends the overlay of the individual narrative with the survey view. In his poems, the Cuillin and Hallaig, he maps the mega-movements of a mythical beast and the surreal journeys of ghostly presences over a cluster of mountains, and throughout the island of Raasay.