These excerpts come from the last couple pages of Scotchman's Return, a short story by Hugh MacLennan, a Nova Scotia-born author of Highland descent. MacLennan uses this story to explore the legacy of his father's Highlandism and to share the essence of a personal journey that many others in the Scottish Highland Diaspora must have experienced when they realised that ‘home’ was not the Highlands. It reveals something of that moment of consciousness when the significance of place is recognised as defining identity; that moment when it comes to be understood that how and who one is depends upon an ability and willingness to interrogate assumptions about one's ancestors and the spaces they occupied.

It can be a transition of agonising complexity. MacLennan was born in 1907 in Glace Bay, a Cape Breton mining town, and many of his stories, including this one, are autobiographical in how they confront the inherent tensions of understanding oneself in the broader context of the Scottish Highland Diaspora. The fact that Highlanders ended up in a place like Cape Breton Island, for example, was a consequence of empire. The story of Highland emigration to Cape Breton represented, on the one hand, Highlanders’ own rejection of profound and irreversible socioeconomic and cultural change, and, on the other hand, their opportunism and desire to exploit colonial opportunities for their own benefit.