ABSTRACT
The Outer Hebrides, the rugged and windswept chain of islands which lie off the northwest coast of Scotland, are a periphery of a periphery for television producers in England. Even in the major places in Scotland where programmes are made, these islands, whose inhabitants number a little over 25,000, are peripheral to the mainland and to its central lowland belt dominated by Glasgow and Edinburgh, where the greater part of the country’s population of something over 5 million lives. The islands are divided physically from the mainland by the waters of the Minch, a strait of 40 miles’ width. But there is a perhaps greater divide: the Gaelic language, a language informed by the harshness of a landscape perched between sea and sky, a landscape treeless and marked with the ruins of homes that offer reminders of depopulation and of parting, a landscape in addition scarred by utilitarian pebble-dashed new builds. Gaelic culture has become de facto a travelling culture, arguably in a more robust state than the language itself, and its otherness is defined by an island / mainland dichotomy (Agnew, 1996, p. 32ff) rather than by the more conventional Scottish dichotomy of highland / lowland (see also Chapman, 1978; Womack, 1980; Kidd, 1993 inter alia).
