Laudator Temporis Acti

Candia McWilliam, Debatable Land (1994; rpt. London: Bloomsbury, 2011), p. 176:

The reverence Callum Kerr had towards his own Scottishness came out in his speech, which held on to Scots usages in an accent barely Scots except to the ear attuned to the Borders bite at words. He also wanted to keep the past alive; though his intelligence suspected that much of the tradition owed itself to nineteenth-century invention and a wish in the Scots to be other than the Irish, his heart swelled in a way he could not stop at the old songs and stories. This access to something he could not describe but that filled his heart when he heard, for instance, the word 'Locheil' or the talking crackle of heather burning, he wanted to pass to his child. He supposed he wanted her to have those things he could not describe but knew he did possess, loyalty and a sense of place, as a father with faith might show the way to his child.