Following his true course was often painful for George Mackay Brown. It meant being regarded by some in the south, and in the ‘literary world’, as eccentric or, worse, quaint. It meant, in Heaney’s words, ‘martyring himself to modernity’. […] He found himself unable to write in Edinburgh and, after six years, he returned to Orkney. And there was remained, a poet as rooted in his landscape as Barnes or Clare, Herrick or Herbert, in an age of Intercity trains and Concorde travel.

There were practical reasons for his staying put. He suffered from agoraphobia; leaving home was an ordeal for him. But his stability had its roots in something more profound than a dislike of travel. By drawing his boundaries close about him, he believed, he had freed his imagination to travel through space and time. He had reached an understanding of the Orkney islands, and of the generations who had inhabited them for over five thousand years, that hurtling about in the modern world would have denied him.

~ Maggie Fergusson, George Mackay Brown: The Life

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