The 'Great Highland Myth' and post-war Scottish Countryside Policy

This paper explores how Highland imagery came to dominate Scottish landscape identity, to the exclusion of other, more varied landscapes, and how Highland iconography persists into the present day as the way Scotland presents itself across its boundaries. The paper considers theories of landscape, identity and cultural values associated with the countryside, and explores how these might apply in a Scottish context, as well as noting how the boundaries of the Scottish 'countryside' were set. It places the origins of the 'Great Highland Myth' after the 1745 rebellion, and identifies three key influencers who created and reinforced the conflation of Scotland and the Highlands (Macpherson, Scott and Queen Victoria) to the exclusion of other landscapes, and other perceptions of landscape; influencers whose impact has outlived their own reputations and standing. The paper accesses archive material to show how this selective portrayal of the Scottish landscape allowed the landowners of the great Highland estates, who owned and managed much of the Highlands, to position themselves as custodians of the national identity, and to assert their own cultural values as national norms. This in turn allowed them to resist encroachment of their own societal and geographical boundaries, first in rejecting national parks for Scotland in 1949, and then by welcoming country parks as a means of diverting people away from the estates and into their own designated and demarcated landscapes.