MacCaig did not share Philip Larkin's much vaunted aversion to ‘Abroad’, but he did not take any initiative to visit other countries. He accepted invitations to read his poems in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, many places in England and Wales, and received a grant to visit Italy and meet Italian poets. Some poems, a small handful, emerged, set in America and Italy, but the other places merited hardly a mention. And yet there are almost a hundred poems with place names in their titles in The Poems. In many respects, despite the originality of his thinking, he was a creature of habit and one habit associated places that he liked with people that he liked. Certainly, by the time he was in his fifties he knew where and with whom he could expect to enjoy himself; he remained open to new experiences, places and people but he did not seek them out. He was Scottish by birth and habits rather than from any thought-out conviction or nationalist fervour. A little squib published in his collection The White Bird in 1973 is called, mockingly, ‘Patriot':

In ‘Characteristics’, it looks as if he is laughing at his American guests but then turns on his own people:

There are a few poems about journeys but it is not, thinking of his thousands of miles of travel, a major topic. He has an amusing poem describing his discombobulated (favourite word) experience in a sleeping compartment from Edinburgh to Inverness, ‘at rightangles to everything, / a crossgrain in existence’… ‘bivouacked / on a ledge five feet high’… and having ‘to draw in my feet / to let Aviemore pass.’ And two other train journeys give him thoughts. In ‘Crossing the border’, on his way home from London, he has his back to the engine and to the future, ‘watching / time pouring away into the past’.