This blog, from the outset, has aimed, aims to be many things. It very deliberately does not have a niche mono-focus.
If you've somehow stumbled across it with only a passing interest or understanding of what anthropology is and does, it’s understandable how that may not be an obvious assumption to make. Likewise of just how relevant all things quantum are to understanding the world, the universe around us, as well as how we perceive it.
These posts, whilst acting as something like their primary author’s account of record, have attempted also to act as a sandbox for exploring the interconnectedness of ideas in those ballparks. As they have, pulling at all kinds of strings (and string theories?), they've wandered through aw sorts, airts and pairts, and aw roond the hooses tae.
Ultimately, somewhere, they all also relate to Scotland. To its lands and cultural identity, as an ancient and peculiarly placed modern nation. As well as what that means, or has potential to mean, in a world beset by perma-crises. That’s the pin to drop, the starting point for the meander of this post, as context for another to follow.
So, picture Scotland. Picture rugged, wild landscapes, as much part of the nation’s story, of how enduring, internationally recognised, often confected, symbols of Scottish identity and how Scotland became established in popular imagination as a land of wilderness, heroism and history, as tartan and bagpipes or, whisper it, bloody shortbread. How did we get here?
Growing prominence of these symbols and perceptions of them are often contextualised as integral to efforts made to preserve and revive Highland traditions, in the wake of post-Jacobite persecution, depopulation and rapid socioeconomic change. Alongside that, Scotland's relationship with the European Romantic movement did much to transform external perceptions of the Highlands and was absolutely central to the birth and growth of tourism in Scotland.
These developments would in turn influence the relationship between landowning aristocracy and the wider nation. This was particularly so in regard to the Hanoverian royal family, in the shape of George IV and Queen Victoria.
Dr Patrick Watt, curator at National Museums Scotland, had this to say on the subject:
‘This is a contested, complex history, and also a fascinating one. There are competing claims, still, over the extent to which those symbols of Scotland we see today are Romantic inventions, or authentic expressions of an ancient cultural identity.
Using material evidence… (it is possible to examine and) … show how cultural traditions were preserved, idealised and reshaped to suit contemporary tastes against a background of political agendas, economic and social change.’
Key contemporary cultural developments undoubtedly influenced political, economic and social agendas, and vice versa. The overlap between Romanticism and Enlightenment, from a Scottish perspective, is fundamental to understanding tensions which ultimately led to the imbalance of perception between what we see when we look at land in Scotland and how we perceive ownership of it. That as well as the very real and disproportionate actuality of what land ownership is, how it came to be and how it is perceived.
Social and politicised movements or actions associated with them did much to influence, even manage, perceptions of Highland, and by extension wider Scottish, culture, both at the time and into the present. Whilst it may appear easy to dismiss highly coloured and influenced perceptions of Scottishness as nineteenth century fabrication, deep historical, as well as later highly politicised, roots underpinned the Romantic image.
Following the final defeat of the Jacobites, in 1746 at the Battle of Culloden, there were reprisals across the Highlands. The ‘power of the Clans’ was systematically dismantled. Male civilians were banned from wearing Highland dress. Gaelic culture and language were disparaged.
The ban on tartan did not apply to those enlisted in the newly created Highland Regiments of the British Army. A heroic image of the tartan-clad Highland soldier became a recurring icon of British Empire and its military prowess.
In large part, by the 1760s, the literary culture of Scotland, including that of the Scottish Highlands and Islands, either had been or was being introduced to the world. This was nowhere more typified than in the work of Highland schoolmaster and poet James MacPherson.
MacPherson claimed to have researched, collected and translated ‘Fragments of Ancient Poetry’, published in a pamphlet in 1760. Extracts were then published in popular outlets ‘The Scots Magazine’ and ‘The Gentlemen’s Magazine’. The notion of these as previously unseen glimpses of an unrecorded, or at least unwritten, Gaelic epic began.
In 1761, MacPherson announced the ‘discovery’ of such an epic, on the subject of ‘Fingal’, supposedly written by Ossian, which he published in December. Like the earlier ‘Fragments’, it was written in ‘musical’, measured, ‘poetical’ prose.
The full title of the work was ‘Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, together with Several Other Poems composed by Ossian, the son of Fingal, translated from the Gaelic language’. Catchy right?
The authenticity of these ‘translations’, from the works of an alleged third century bard, was immediately challenged by historians. What became later known as ‘the Ossian controversy’ was also intervened in by many prominent Enlightenment and Romantic figures.
Despite a prolonged and raging controversy over authenticity, MacPherson's work was translated into multiple languages and was popular across the UK, Europe and their colonies in the ‘new world’. It was also admired by many influential European writers, artists and composers.
For what it's worth, this blog's author (whose entry into the academic world of contemporary and wider cultural anthropology, began with a first joint honours degree in ‘Scottish Ethnology and Scottish Literature’, a foundational aspect of which was study of Ossian and the controversy surrounding it) is of the measured opinion there would have been no such controversy were it published in an even slightly later age.
If it was an acknowledged self-conscious, self referential, self reflexive (albeit likely subject to other controversy and malign criticism) Postmodern, rather than Romantic (or certainly Romanticised) work of literature, complete with overt admission of dubious provenance and courting of what questions of authenticity this raised and why, it would have been more likely to stir up less controversy if not opprobrium.
Still, it wasn't and it didn't.
It did however play its part as, from the late eighteenth century onwards, visitors were drawn to Scotland in increasing numbers, attracted to locations depicted in Romantic paintings, prints and literature. Many artists, writers and musicians arrived, sometimes as part of a ‘Grand Tour’, often on personal pilgrimages, inspired by the lasting influence of Ossian or the fame of Burns, Sir Walter Scott or other Scottish literary or artistic figures.
Works they produced, drawing inspiration from their forays, in turn inspired more people to seek out the places evoked in music, art and literature for themselves. Seeing change all around them, as much influenced by Enlightenment figures as Romantic, influential Highlanders made efforts to preserve elements of traditional Gaelic culture, even as they promoted a new rural economy, the human impact of which we now know as the Highland Clearances.
With the Jacobite cause perceived as extinguished, as a political and military threat, Hanoverian royalty began to embrace and champion what they purported to have come to see (and in this, attempting to make others see too) as their Stuart lineage. Gestures were made, which they hoped would be perceived as being towards healing divisions of the previous century.
This was illustrated most vividly in the Highland pageantry associated with events, stage managed by Sir Walter Scott, during King George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822. This spectacular and controversial event in many ways set a new template. The confected conflagration of tartanry and weaponry, encouraged to the point of prescription by Scott, have remained stalwarts of accoutrement, associated with perceived Scottishness, ever since.
It was no coincidence that this visit and cementing of a sanitised version of Scottishness, one which could be stage managed as an aspect of empire and colonisation, whilst the inner colonisation of Scotland, its land, its resources, as well as the behaviours and attitudes extending from the colonised minds of its peoples, as was the wont of the British 'elites', kept calm and carried on unabated, occurred amidst the development of Edinburgh's New Town (built in stages between 1767 and circa 1850). With the benefit of hindsight, in his novel 'Strange Loyalties', the great modern Scottish novelist William McIlvanney, observed the historic, symbolic nature of what the New Town had come to mean, to colonisers and the colonised:
“…built to be a Hanoverian clearing-house of the Scottish identity. The very street names declare what’s happening, like an announcement of
government policy in stone: you have Princes Street and George Street and Queen Street with, in among them, Hanover Street and Rose Street and Thistle Street. Any way you count it, the result is the defeat of Scottishness. This was an identity superimposed on the capital of
Scotland, an attempted psyche-transplant: ‘Scottishness may have been a life but Britishness can be a career.’
A young Queen Victoria took this growing, managed perception and fascination to new lengths. Following a series of royal visits to the Highlands, she acquired the Balmoral estate. And where royalty went, other aristocracy, money and the perception of power it conveyed, followed.
Uses the estate was put to, particularly following the death of Prince Albert, when it became a retreat from the pressures of court and government for Victoria, also provided a template for them. Balmoral, often in conflicting ways, helped ensure the perceived ideal of the Scottish Highlands, which emerged from the culture and politics of the late eighteenth century, endured. Even as fashion, attitudes and perceptions of history changed and evolved.
This backdrop set the context for Scotland to develop what is now the most uneven distribution of land ownership of any European nation. Much of it is still informed by the same perceptions and attitudes, albeit updated to accommodate managed perceptions of how to address climate crises, often cited by those who are only able to own vast tracts of it due to wealth accumulated in industries central to their causes. It has also inspired a healthy disrespect for overly Romanticised visions of Scotland past and present - and how they relate to the sharp contrast of reality of the world around us and lives lived in it, as well as how it came to be, both in terms of lived and fictionalised experience - in its satirists and comedians.
A cynical lens through which to view Scotland - or any other real and imagined place - is so often given more acute focus through satire produced by people who live there, inside looking out rather than outside looking in. In terms of light relief regarding the subjects at hand, here’s one or two of Scotland’s finest, doing what they do best.
When we look at where we are at, how we perceive Scotland, its land, its culture, more often than not, what is portrayed as altruism or well-meaning philanthropy is and has been, in effect, both a Romanticised notion of Scottishness, including what the land is and is for, and unadulterated greenwashing. We’re looking at you Mr Povlsen, as well as all of those other ‘carbon credit’ seeking corporate mass land owning ‘elites’.
Posting this began as context for a practical, how-to guide. As ever, it has wandered a little in establishing it.
Focusing in a little more, it is worth stating, much work has been done, in wider and Scotland specific contexts, by stalwarts of the cause, making the case for land redistribution as part of a meaningful transition to a more resilient, equitable and sustainable world. It is worth linking to some of it, as truncated means of more fully rounding out necessary context to this post.
Resilience.org, as a news arm and program of the Post Carbon Institute (in particular this article on ‘carbon offsetting’), provide decent summary primers to wider contextualisation. How perceptions of ‘re-wilding’ can be manipulated to suit the same agendas, as is ever the way with all things land and Scotland, is well covered by the redoubtable Andy Wightman, here.
Alternative takes, on good genuine re-wilding, which involves humans too, are available at connected sites and organisations, here and here.
In terms of how community ownership and buyout of land, both in lieu of more robust land reform legislation and following on from what legislation has been enacted, also influencing it, the stories of West Whitlawburn, Eigg, Assynt and latterly Langholm Moor are foundational and precedent setting.
Previous references, some repeated again here in, should make it clear, on almost all things related to land in Scotland, this blog defers to the tireless research and campaigning of Andy Wightman over long periods of time. His seminal work, outlining how capture of the commons was promulgated by exploitative self interest, ‘The Poor Had No Lawyers - Who owns Scotland (And How They Got It)’, first published in 2010 and regularly updated in new editions, supplemented by Andy's ongoing other projects, is nothing short of an inspirational call to arms.
At least it has been for this writer.
So, with this context established for what land ownership is in Scotland, how it is perceived, how both relate to how we also perceive what a home is (with further context for that given here and here) and how both perceptions have been managed to perpetuate a status quo, in their favour, by vested interests, what are your options, as a Scot of any hue, for ruggedising your life against the discontinuities to come, signalled by ongoing perma-crises?
We get down to the nitty-gritty of practicalities in Pt 2…