Spiritual Spaces, Beautiful Places: Highland Conservation during Scotland’s Twentieth Century

Dr. Sarah Leith – The University of St Andrews

This lecture revisits T.C. Smout’s concept of ‘use and delight’ to further consider conservation work in modern Scotland. Smout outlined this concept within his Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and Northern England since 1600, a collection based upon his Ford Lectures given at the University of Oxford. The debate weighing up the practical use of the Scottish landscape, including its renewable energy resources, against the preservation of landscape as a delightful space is a salient one in present-day Scotland, twenty-five years after Smout published Nature Contested. Building upon Jill Payne’s research concerning hydroelectricity and the preservation of landscape in the Scottish Highlands, this lecture also builds upon Robin Lloyd-Jones’s biography of conservationist, writer and mountaineer William Hutchison Murray, as well as Robert Macfarlane’s discussions of Murray. The lecture compares Murray and his contemporaries, including Isobel Wylie Hutchison, Sydney Scroggie and Nan Shepherd. This lecture employs the lenses of both culture and literature, using poetry and life writing to examine understandings of land, spirituality and beauty as divinity during the twentieth century in Scotland.