On Discovering Your Native Place

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Recently, reading Kenneth White’s Travels In The Drifting Dawn, in a section where he is returning home to Glasgow, he wrote:

‘Sitting at the window, looking out at the dripping rowan tree, and beyond it the misty rain and beyond the rain, though invisible, the mountains and the sea:

Everyone has his own native place. Where is your native place?’

It served its purpose and got me thinking about my own native place.

Is it where my roots are? (I live still in my childhood town, in fact just next door to the house that I grew up in. Grounded in memory and ancestry.)

Is it where my heart is? I love rural places, coastal places, my favourite place (so far, in my wanderings), being Orkney. Is it the place that speaks to me, and I feel at home in?

I will have to think on it. But what about you guys?

Where is your native place?

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10 thoughts on “On Discovering Your Native Place”

  2. Good question, Andy! I was born in the city, so I can’t help loving some aspects of a teeming metropolis. But after moving to the suburbs, I enjoy the quietness, especially at night. I love the trees and the birdsong. Love wide expanses of green grass. Wish I lived closer to water!

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  3. Okay, I totally understand what you’re saying, and I could answer like Michael above – but I gotta say because of our ‘between homes’ experience I’ve come to realize my roots are deeper in the hearts of those I love than in any literal place….I promise I’m not being contrary.

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  4. That made me think. Thanks. My native place is by the sea, the Baltic sea. Water is were I come from, from were we all come from if you think about it. Water breaks and suddenly you are born 😀

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