190
Indeed, as every child in Scotland learns almost by rote, just 30 years prior to
Gilpin’s tour, the infamous 40-minute Battle of Culloden sullied the moorlands in
county Inverness with the blood of thousands. “Some 1000 of the Young Pretender’s
army of 5000 weak and starving Highlanders were killed by the 9000 Redcoats,
who lost only 50 men”
20
.
Then came the subsequent hunting down and murder of an additional thousand+
highlander clansmen who had supported Charles Edwards’ Jacobite Rebellion, an
attempt to take back the British throne and reestablish the Stuart Dynasty. That
dream, not shared by every Scot, and however mixed in terms of clan martial relations and greatly varying qualities of life, was gone. So too, much of the practical
underpinning of highland cultural norm in terms of chief/clan combinations of
socialized/feudal land tenure. From April 16, 1746, onward the memory of the
“Forty-Five Rebellion” would remain etched in a cultural population that was soon
to be entirely fragmented, as the northern half of Scotland dissipated demographically, whilst the southern half of the country grew dramatically urban. Crofter subsistence, with particular dependencies on kelp, bovines, and potatoes, lost out to
massive factory-worker institutions in the central lowlands, as well as an eventual
potato blight, with a similarly catastrophic impact as in Ireland.
When Gilpin visited the Grampians, Scotland’s total population was approximately 1.3 million, the majority in the South. By the period of Lawson’s rhapsodic
visit, Scotland had almost tripled in number. Today’s numbers of people between
the north and the south of Scotland mirror her rapid history of technology onslaught:
235,000 highlanders in 2017, and 5.2 million Scots to the South.
20.2 Every Conceivable Infliction
Ecological history records a parallel and equally salient evolution during the nineteenth century of artistic jubilation, namely, the ill-fitting infrastructure and byproducts of industry that played its considerable role in shaping the political and
economic realities of those who might otherwise wish to reside purely in the aesthetics of Scotland, on one hand; and those who simply wished to survive every
conceivable infliction, as they surely mounted from one disaster to the next. For
example, when, in the early 1860s, artists and tourists were gulping up the Grampian
views, just to the South, in Glasgow, “100,000 people lived in one-roomed houses…
[and] from time to time there were outbreaks of cholera and typhus, and thousands died”
21
.
20 See “Battle of Culloden,” Encyclopedia Brittanica, Updated March 30, 2019, By the Editors,
https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Culloden, Accessed April 8, 2019.
21 See Scotland – A Short History, by P. Hume Brown, New Edition By Henry W. Meikle, Oliver
And Boyd LTD., Edinburgh, 1955, p. 330.
20 The Grampians
Indeed, as every child in Scotland learns almost by rote, just 30 years prior to
Gilpin’s tour, the infamous 40-minute Battle of Culloden sullied the moorlands in
county Inverness with the blood of thousands. “Some 1000 of the Young Pretender’s
army of 5000 weak and starving Highlanders were killed by the 9000 Redcoats,
who lost only 50 men”
20
.
Then came the subsequent hunting down and murder of an additional thousand+
highlander clansmen who had supported Charles Edwards’ Jacobite Rebellion, an
attempt to take back the British throne and reestablish the Stuart Dynasty. That
dream, not shared by every Scot, and however mixed in terms of clan martial relations and greatly varying qualities of life, was gone. So too, much of the practical
underpinning of highland cultural norm in terms of chief/clan combinations of
socialized/feudal land tenure. From April 16, 1746, onward the memory of the
“Forty-Five Rebellion” would remain etched in a cultural population that was soon
to be entirely fragmented, as the northern half of Scotland dissipated demographically, whilst the southern half of the country grew dramatically urban. Crofter subsistence, with particular dependencies on kelp, bovines, and potatoes, lost out to
massive factory-worker institutions in the central lowlands, as well as an eventual
potato blight, with a similarly catastrophic impact as in Ireland.
When Gilpin visited the Grampians, Scotland’s total population was approximately 1.3 million, the majority in the South. By the period of Lawson’s rhapsodic
visit, Scotland had almost tripled in number. Today’s numbers of people between
the north and the south of Scotland mirror her rapid history of technology onslaught:
235,000 highlanders in 2017, and 5.2 million Scots to the South.
20.2 Every Conceivable Infliction
Ecological history records a parallel and equally salient evolution during the nineteenth century of artistic jubilation, namely, the ill-fitting infrastructure and byproducts of industry that played its considerable role in shaping the political and
economic realities of those who might otherwise wish to reside purely in the aesthetics of Scotland, on one hand; and those who simply wished to survive every
conceivable infliction, as they surely mounted from one disaster to the next. For
example, when, in the early 1860s, artists and tourists were gulping up the Grampian
views, just to the South, in Glasgow, “100,000 people lived in one-roomed houses…
[and] from time to time there were outbreaks of cholera and typhus, and thousands died”
21
.
20 See “Battle of Culloden,” Encyclopedia Brittanica, Updated March 30, 2019, By the Editors,
https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Culloden, Accessed April 8, 2019.
21 See Scotland – A Short History, by P. Hume Brown, New Edition By Henry W. Meikle, Oliver
And Boyd LTD., Edinburgh, 1955, p. 330.
20 The Grampians