Touch The Earth
Today,
the hills and glens of Corgarff and Strathdon are very thinly populated and,
in many areas, deserted. The old life of the clans is gone. So too is their
language of Scottish Gaelic and most of its associated culture, though it
survives still in other parts of the Highlands. In some parts of the
Highlands, forcible clearance of people from their lands by landowners was
partly the cause of the disappearance, but underlying this was the basic
problem of how an often unsparing land could support many people except at a
level of harsh poverty. Throughout much of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries,
poverty drove people from the Highlands, and indeed other parts of Scotland,
to create the great Scottish Diaspora to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand
and elsewhere. Lowland Scotland was however a driving force in the
enlightenment and later, under the influence of writers like Sir Walter Scott
and RL Stevenson, in the Romantic Movement. It was also a powerhouse of the
industrial revolution. The Romantic Movement helped change the attitude of
many to the Highlands, from regarding them as wild and barbarous, to seeing
their beauty and challenge.
Many
of those who left the Highlands and lowland rural Scotland did not go abroad
but went to work in the new industries created in lowland Scotland and the
rest of the United Kingdom by the industrial revolution. Scotland was one of
the earliest countries in the world where the majority of the population
became urbanised and still has one of the most urbanised populations in the
world.
From
the late 19th century onwards, these people began to rediscover the beauty,
the challenge and often the peace of the Highlands. Perhaps as a necessary
balance to the grim industrial surroundings or sprawling suburbs many of them
lived in, they seemed to feel a need to rediscover a more “natural” world, to
“touch the earth” as some have put it. They returned to walk the old, now
deserted paths and ways, the hills and mountains. During the 20th century,
their numbers grew greatly, especially in its later decades. They included
people from all walks of life; from the comfortably well off middle classes,
and from the poor and unemployed. The advent of the private car gave many
more an easier access to the Highlands and now they include many people from
England and other parts of the United Kingdom as well as from overseas.
The watcher at the bridge would see a new
peaceable kind of passer by, the successor to the drovers, the Hanoverian
soldiers, the whisky smugglers and others. In a sense, the people have
returned to the glens.
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| Jenny Smith's house at
Delachuper |
the bothy at Delachuper is
hired to walkers |
