Читать книгу Reading the Gaelic Landscape онлайн

55 страница из 56

How does a layer of Gaelic place-names sit in the abiotic / biotic / culture model of landscape when there are so few inheritors of those who transmitted their unique geography of place-names to mapmakers of the late 19th century? How do we perceive this toponymic layer, when the culture, language and the land uses which created it have vanished from the greater part of the Highlands? In some ways the named inheritance points to something missing in the model, which supposes a continuous cyclical interaction between the abiotic, the biotic and the cultural. It does not accommodate an interruption of the vertical process of influence and counter influence when the cultural landscape suffers a quasi-seismic change. The model cannot accommodate the excision of Gaelic culture from most of the Gàidhealtachd. What remains is a toponymic layer, frozen in time and detached from potential subsequent expressions of the landscape. It is as if a chapter in a book you are reading has been torn out. This cultural discontinuity resembles the geological concept of non-conformity. Here, though rock types are physically contiguous, they are discontinuous in time.