Making of a Scottish Landscape

The Making of a Scottish Landscape: Moray's Regular Revolution explores the making of the Moray countryside - and offers an intimate portrait of people in the landscape on the distant shoulder of northeast Scotland. The Making of a Scottish Landscape traces the progress through Moray of the craze for Improvement that swept through Scotland during the later eighteenth century. Moray's landowners applied Enlightenment rationalism to agricultural practice and the rural environment. The countryside was redesigned: from the fertile farmland of the coastal Laich of Moray, to the rugged highland whisky country of Strathavon and Strathspey. Lochs were drained and bogs reclaimed. Field scapes were re-planned. New crops were sown and new farming traditions took root. Naked moorland was clothed with forestry, or colonized by doughty settlers. Meanwhile, a Great Rebuilding regularized built environments to a neoclassical template, establishing new vernacular styles and a revolution in domestic comfort and convenience. Moray's land hungry husbandmen were willing recruits to their lairds' regular revolution; and even among landless cottars - displaced from traditional townships, transplanted to new villages, and proletarianized as agricultural laborers - there was scarcely a murmur of dissent.

John R. Barrett is a professional archivist, occasional archaeologist, historian, walker and cyclist who now lives scenically, with two cats, on Speyside in northeast Scotland. He has published original research into local history, Scottish history, archaeology, archive sources and historic landscapes. His study of the Civil War in Scotland, Elgin's Love-gift, and an edition of the memoirs of a seventeenth-century controversialist, Mr James Allan, inspired a historical novel Broken Sword. He has also written (pre)historical fiction for younger readers. Academic research, for a Ph D at Aberdeen University, forms the basis for A Regular Revolution.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.