A Highland Song is a magical-realist trek through the Scottish Highlands, and at first I didn’t think I liked it at all. My first attempt at getting teenage runaway Moira through the austere, perilous mountains to her Uncle Hamish’s lighthouse ended with me restarting the game out of frustration, having been stranded, lost and shivering, on the same unforgiving mountain range for so long that my patience was frayed thin. I was battered by relentless wind and rain, kept getting stuck in caves, and dutifully picked up sprigs of lavender and white gorse while never seeming to find anything helpful, like a bothy or a Twix. Moira kept taking tumbles down the scree because I misread the scenery, robbing her of what little energy she had left. It was brutal, and not at all enjoyable.
But the second time, I tried a different path not long after leaving Moira’s home, through a tunnel under a dam, and made it just a couple of days late to the lighthouse. The third time, I was there in time for Beltane (the Gaelic May Day festival), to see the game’s ending. The fourth time, and the fifth, I had days to spare, and spent them exploring the crags, probing caves, meeting strange travellers and climbing peaks I hadn’t yet conquered. I found hand-drawn slivers of map tucked into matchboxes, lunchboxes and mouldy discarded sporrans, and scoured the outline of the hills from each peak to discern their meaning. Sometimes I even found shelter when I needed it, though I also once fell through a bothy floor into yet another cave.
As, presumably, with real-life hill-climbing, A Highland Song gets more enjoyable the more experienced you are, once you know some of the routes and get used to the discomfort. (I say this based on absolutely no experience, because you wouldn’t catch me dead up a Munro. Or more likely you would catch me dead, as I have no sense of direction and zero survival skills.) In this sense, A Highland Song lines up with reality. The hills are forbidding, peaks jutting up like broken teeth, dotted with the ruined cottages of the crofters who were driven out centuries ago, dense with forgotten stories. You need considerable resilience to make it through.
It took me a good couple of hours before I was able to read the scenery by sight, and see where you can and can’t climb. Even once I’d developed an eye for it, Moira would still sometimes fling herself off a rock face when I jumped towards something that turned out to be in the foreground, or the background. The painterly art style is beautiful, capturing the colour and feel of the Highlands with its rough strokes, evoking bracken and heather – but it doesn’t always make it clear where the edges of things are, or what’s a path and what isn’t. Cairns and posts usually mark out onward paths, but not always. Sometimes they take you backwards, and sometimes you’ll arrive somewhere promising, only to find that you haven’t found the right scrap of map, and your way forward is closed off. Best clamber all the way back up a mountain and look for a different route.
It helps that, no matter where you are or how bad the weather is, you’ll usually find something new in these mountains. The story draws on plenty of Scottish history and mythology, drip-feeding you lines of poetry and flashbacks and snippets of Jacobean-era history. Scotland isn’t set-dressing here, it is the game – the contours of the peaks, the soundtrack comprised of folk music, wind and weather, the wildlife, the mystical quality of the light, Moira’s natural talent for compound swearing. There is much for Scots to enjoy, too, in the writing and delivery; in conversation with a statue, Moira says she sounds awful posh. “I’m from Edinburgh,” the statue replies immediately.
It took me a few run-throughs to internalise this, but A Highland Song isn’t about making it through the mountains – it’s about being in them, in all their inhospitable majesty. It has made me look with new curiosity at the Trossachs, a short drive from where I live, the lochs and peaks that, for me, have always been a scenic backdrop. Now I look at them and imagine a small and hardy person up there, putting one foot in front of the other, looking for the edge of her world – and I wonder what that feels like.
A Highland Song is out 5 December; £13.49
