191
By 1908, “thirty-nine million tons” of coal were produced in Scotland, corresponding to equally ungainly numbers in sectors ranging from steel to ship tonnage
on the Clyde
22
.
Today, Scotland has 32 councils (“unitary authorities”), one of which, Perth and
Kinross hosts a hydroelectric plant, begun in 1946. The Tummel hydroelectric
power scheme is located between Lochs Ericht, Rannoch, and Tummel. No such
industry attended these roaring cascades at the height of the Grampian artistic and
philosophical revolutions which veritably worshipped those falls.
To grasp the extent of transformation throughout the Highlands, one telling
source is the Royal Grampian Country: A Report Prepared and Published for the
Scottish Tourist Board by the Department Of Geography, University Of Aberdeen,
Introduction by Kenneth Walton, Professor of Geography, February 1969. At that
time, summer season visitations numbered between “300,000 and 350,000” tourists, as discussion ensued as to the maximum carrying capacity of such tourism (as
it has in equally finite areas of great interest in the world, from Yellowstone,
Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon to Chamonix and Milford Sound)
23
. In mapping
the coexistence of diverse visitor activities by altitude and by month, a most instructive graphic emerges
24
in which, for example, there is skiing above, at around
3000 feet, red deer calving in the center, just above hill sheep lambing, grouse nesting and shooting, salmon, brown trout and sea trout angling, and pheasant nesting.
There is also hind shooting, partridge, and wild duck shooting, and, amid the whole
picture, from lower hills and valleys to high summits—tourism, which, by the end
of World War II, outpaced small family poultry farmers. Tourists, at approximately
one pound per head of profit for the farmer, slept in the newly dominating B&Bs,
where prior hens laid eggs.
While areas like the “high Cairngorms, Caenlochan and Dinnet oakwood” were
administratively given over to conservation reserves
25
traditional human settlements
had already—in the late 1960s—witnessed tremendous decline. As depicted in
Royal Grampian Country, “The inhabitants of the high glens, or of the crofters in
the valleys compare their physical and social environment most unfavourably with
that of the town”
26
. Such trends coincided and were deemed to do so with increasing
fall-out, in terms of indigenous agriculture and the continuing rural-to-urban
country- wide migration.
And so came the roads, toilets, tourist accommodations, buses, various amusements, ski tows, “après ski entertainment”
27
, and the predictable cascade of other
amenities, infrastructure, and diversion. Probably no more paradoxical sadness (and
not a little terror) attends this brief history of the Scottish sublime than that of the
22 ibid, p. 329.
23 ibid., p.118.
24 ibid., p.111.
25 See The Protection Afforded to Wildlife in Scotland, by R. A. Haldane, 1966.
26 p.58.
27 ibid., p.106.
20.2 Every Conceivable Infliction
By 1908, “thirty-nine million tons” of coal were produced in Scotland, corresponding to equally ungainly numbers in sectors ranging from steel to ship tonnage
on the Clyde
22
.
Today, Scotland has 32 councils (“unitary authorities”), one of which, Perth and
Kinross hosts a hydroelectric plant, begun in 1946. The Tummel hydroelectric
power scheme is located between Lochs Ericht, Rannoch, and Tummel. No such
industry attended these roaring cascades at the height of the Grampian artistic and
philosophical revolutions which veritably worshipped those falls.
To grasp the extent of transformation throughout the Highlands, one telling
source is the Royal Grampian Country: A Report Prepared and Published for the
Scottish Tourist Board by the Department Of Geography, University Of Aberdeen,
Introduction by Kenneth Walton, Professor of Geography, February 1969. At that
time, summer season visitations numbered between “300,000 and 350,000” tourists, as discussion ensued as to the maximum carrying capacity of such tourism (as
it has in equally finite areas of great interest in the world, from Yellowstone,
Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon to Chamonix and Milford Sound)
23
. In mapping
the coexistence of diverse visitor activities by altitude and by month, a most instructive graphic emerges
24
in which, for example, there is skiing above, at around
3000 feet, red deer calving in the center, just above hill sheep lambing, grouse nesting and shooting, salmon, brown trout and sea trout angling, and pheasant nesting.
There is also hind shooting, partridge, and wild duck shooting, and, amid the whole
picture, from lower hills and valleys to high summits—tourism, which, by the end
of World War II, outpaced small family poultry farmers. Tourists, at approximately
one pound per head of profit for the farmer, slept in the newly dominating B&Bs,
where prior hens laid eggs.
While areas like the “high Cairngorms, Caenlochan and Dinnet oakwood” were
administratively given over to conservation reserves
25
traditional human settlements
had already—in the late 1960s—witnessed tremendous decline. As depicted in
Royal Grampian Country, “The inhabitants of the high glens, or of the crofters in
the valleys compare their physical and social environment most unfavourably with
that of the town”
26
. Such trends coincided and were deemed to do so with increasing
fall-out, in terms of indigenous agriculture and the continuing rural-to-urban
country- wide migration.
And so came the roads, toilets, tourist accommodations, buses, various amusements, ski tows, “après ski entertainment”
27
, and the predictable cascade of other
amenities, infrastructure, and diversion. Probably no more paradoxical sadness (and
not a little terror) attends this brief history of the Scottish sublime than that of the
22 ibid, p. 329.
23 ibid., p.118.
24 ibid., p.111.
25 See The Protection Afforded to Wildlife in Scotland, by R. A. Haldane, 1966.
26 p.58.
27 ibid., p.106.
20.2 Every Conceivable Infliction