The woman who can see into the past

is useful because there is precious little evidence of any village.

These have not been straightforward miles. The road delights in

flirting with Knapdale's giddy contours, and the seaward prospects to

where profiles of Islay and Jura harden out of a warm and woolly morning

forever hijacking your mind and your eyes away from the road. So the

journey dawdles,and if you are in the right frame of mind these sixteen

miles can make light of an hour.

The landscape is classic Argyll, which is to say that it compels the

mind's eye in every direction at once, including the past. Especially

the past. What the place needs, you tell yourself amid the standing

stones and bewildering carvings and great cairns is an archaeologist

with the soul of a poet. Such a person might do the place justice in a

great book. At Kilberry, such a person exists.

She is Marion Campbell and her book is Argyll -- The enduring

Heartland. The book has just reappeared in print after too many fallow

years. Such a book should be as available in Scotland as whisky.

Says Campbell: ''There is yet another kind of cairn. You will find it

in a fold of hill-ground where a shepherd lost his way in snow, or at a

steep corner where a cart overturned. These are not graves -- the dead

sleep in the kirkyards -- but we lay a stone on them to appease that

which here parted suddenly from its clay.

''As we near any of them, even the oldest, plundered or excavated

though they may be, you may see us hunt about for a pebble to bring in

our hand; cur mi clach air a charn - I will lay a stone on his cairn,

whoever he was, he was here when I was not, and I am the future of his

past.''

I declare an interest in this book. I am not indifferent to this new

edition. Indeed, I have helped in a small way to bring it about. I

bought the original shortly after its publication in 1977 at a time in

my life when I was still nurturing ambitions to write books for a living

rather than journalism, but I was unsure about what kinds of books I

wanted to write.

I found my role model in Argyll for the way it wove, its sense of

place with threads of poetry, humour, history, nature, landscape, and

one less easily definable thread which confronts the past with a kind of

awed respect and lifts it off the page with the highest endeavours of

the writer's art so that it smells like honeysuckle on a sea wind.

That was the kind of book I wanted to write.

I have read it many times, in whole or in part. Its linkage of short

self-contained essays and episodes lends itself to a poetry book-ish

approach. I would go back again and again to my favourites. I still do.

These would include: ''Landscapes with Figure'', a haunting initiation

into that portion of hospitable paradise which is the field between

Marion Campbell's back door and the sea; ''The Song of Deirdre'' which

sets legend into landscape; ''The Centre,'' a reverential hymn to the

enigma of Dunadd; ''The Ill Years, an extraordinary reading of the

Massacre of Glencoe. She is a Campbell, remember, and I have (according

to one genealogist's theory at least) a strain of Macdonald of

Benderloch blood and I cannot fault either her compassionate account of

what happened nor the soundness of her cry for reason and an end to the

300-year-old perpetuation of a hideous propaganda.

And when I came to write my own Glencoe book I sought permission to

quote her on the Massacre and so resumed a fragmented correspondence

which had begun as a simple fan letter in 1980.

Several times in my own writing I have turned a phrase I secretly

admired only to discover that I had subconsciously borrowed it from

Argyll, and had to put it back where it belonged. It is no meagre debt I

owe to Marion Campbell and her book, and when my friend and sometime

collaborator, photographer and publisher Colin Baxter began to expand

his catalogue with non-photographic books, I advanced the case for a

reprinting of Argyll, on the basis that it was simply among the best

books ever written by anyone about Scotland. If that sounds like too

blunt a generalisation, too uncritical an assessment, all I can say is

-- read it.

So now, after 15 years of ragged correspondence, and with the

re-publication of Argyll as an excuse, I was on the road to Kilberry to

meet a woman who unwittingly set me on roads of my own. She lives now

not in Kilberry Castle which was home for 70 of her 76 years, but in a

small cottage in the grounds. Other Campbells, nephews, have inherited.

She is smaller somehow than the ''Old done wumman'' (her phrase) of

her letters, but she is old only at a distance. Her voice and eye and

handshake are steady and the face is tranquil and a generation or two

younger than her years, even if a heart-attack and a bit of a limp have

slowed her down.

Campbells have been at Kilberry for at least 400 years, and possibly

much longer. No-one knows. The records are gone. How old is Kilberry

then? No-one knows. The records are gone.

''It's been so added to and surrounded itself with extensions and

wings. Somewhere at the core there is a simple tower house. You

encounter bits of it when you want to rewire and find you have to go

through eight-feet-thick walls,'' Campbell says.

They have been liberating walls. Despite the

big-house-and-boarding-school upbringing, the embryonic writer in

Campbell was perfectly placed and suitably blessed to imbibe a love of

Argyll's teeming archaeology and half the world's literature at her

father's knee and from her mother's milk.

''My father could bring the old ruins to life, flesh out their bones,

explaining that would have been where, which greatly helped my

understanding, and my mother had a more romantic approach to it all. My

father was also a brilliant linguist as well as a soldier (captain,

Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders) and was always reading. I would walk

in on him and ask him to read aloud -- whatever it was -- Scott,

Kipling, or Sophocles in the original Greek. He would just carry on from

where he happened to have reached but he would start reading aloud. So I

was surrounded by this beautiful noise!''

So how old was Campbell who first encountered Sophocles in the

original?

''Oh, about four or five.''

So presumably she didn't make much of it?

''Oh yes! It was such a beautiful noise -- the rhythm of it!'' she

exclaims.

Kipling remains a favourite, 70 years later. ''The rhythm again. But I

read all the time, all kinds of things. I would rather read the back of

a packet of crisps than read nothing.''

It was her father too who helped to shape her arguments about that

darkest of Argyll's hours, the Glencoe Massacre of 1692.

''I was so impressed by his reading of Glenlyon (Robert Campbell of

Glenlyon, captain of the Government troops who did the deed) as the kind

of officer -- he knew hundreds of them -- who could carry out orders but

is incapable of independent thought or action.'' And in Argyll she

wrote: ''Every revolution is full of them, might well fail without

them.''

And still, posterity has not seen the light. She confesses to being

particularly disappointed by Nationalist friends who listened to her

arguments and responded: ''Marion would say that. She's a Campbell.''

She sees the thing now (practical historian that she is, forby a

Campbell) as ''a bit of political frightfulness, the work of an alien

mind for which Glenlyon took the rap and unwittingly lent his surname to

the infany of the hour''.

In her last word on the subject, it is the pen's might which prevails

over the sword's: ''It returns and returns, the atrocity and its

propaganda, but let us make an end soon. Surely we who know of Lidice

and all the other horrors of our time -- or can learn from them -- can

find some bitter pity for the heirs of Cain.''

There are other works in the Campbell oeuvre -- five children's books,

an archaeological volume in mid-Argyll and one astonishing

''off-the-wall'' novel published in 1973. The Dark Twin bares virtuoso

powers of invention and unashamedly feminsist sentiments -- rare in a

late Bronze Age setting -- and it is surely as worthy of reprinting as

Argyll. Off-the-wall feminist publishers please note.

I read it very recently for the first time, a gift from the author,

and I found it as difficult to unravel as it was to put down. ''People

either love it or loathe it,'' she cautioned in a covering letter ,

''and that includes me from time to time.''

And in an earlier letter: ''It upsets Anglo Saxons who don't know what

it's all about, which I find reassuring.''

More baffling by far was the nature of its gestation, a series of

fragmentary waking dreams which put characters and dialogue into her

mind. She began to make notes about them without knowing what was behind

them or what sense they might make. Over several years they amounted to

a pile of loose-leaf pages, and by re-ordering them and applying what

George Mackay Brown calls ''invisible mending'', the book's

extraordinary web was woven. She is still at a loss to explain the

source of the dreams.

''I had been in London for a while and had spent some time watching

Italian and French films. I thought perhaps that was what was coming

back. Then I realised I was seeing the dreams in colour. You didn't

watch colour films in small cinemas in the 1930s! Then I began to hear

the dialogue in Gaelic . . . .''

Which prompted the obvious question. Does she have ''The Sight''?

She frowned. ''A bit, not much really.'' Then . . . ''But I would

hear, sometimes.''

Hear?

''At Liverpool during the war, watch-keeping -- (she was a Wren) I

would hear the name of a ship, and within 24 hours or so it would be

reported sunk. Once I heard the same name three times and she sailed

into port, having fought a successful engagement.''

Argyll's reappearance would be doubly welcome if it sparks off a

reappraisal of a less than wholly appreciated literary treasure in our

midst. If such a reappraisal has any justice in its make-up, it will

clamour for a new edition of Twin.

Campbell writes of things past. Given where she was born and shaped it

is hardly surprising, but in Argyll in a chapter called ''Tomorrow''

which almost seems to turn on her muse, she snaps:

''I should be sorry to leave the impression of dwelling on bygones to

the exclusion of present and future: I would prefer to see the past used

as trees use their fallen leaves, a compost to feed future roots.

History has moulded the present and will colour the future of nations as

of individuals, whether they study it or not. Only the man who has lost

his memory confronts each in bewilderment, unable to draw upon inherited

talent or acquired skill; and even the amnesiac may find his hands

moving of themselves in arts he does not know he knew. A nation which

ignores its past is in the same sorry case; sorrier still is the case of

the country whose history is fed to it through alien minds and the fogs

of prejudice.''

In her Argyll, and for that matter her Scotland, there is no less

alien no less fogged mind than Marion Campbell. It would be a good time

to restore her vision to the sight of all her kindred Scots.