‘Their families had gone back in time hundreds of years at the same place’: attitudes to land and landscape in the Scottish Highlands after 1914

The focus here is on the period after 1914, as the protests of this time have received comparatively little attention hitherto. The focus is also on the notion of a peasant ideology to protest, which has been used in the past (notably by Rudé 1980), as a suggested commonality of Celtic protest. The argument will be made that, while it cannot be denied that the actions of the Highland tenantry

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complex than has hitherto been asserted. Out of this comes the realisation that the view, common to much of Highland historiography, of the ‘crofting community’ as an undifferentiated mass, obscures more than it reveals. In turn, this must raise questions over the notion of a single regional class consciousness and, indeed, over the efficacy of the class model as a whole to the comprehension and explanation of Highland protest. Moreover, the suggestion will be made that this concern with the failure to give weight to gradations within the land-working tenantry can be extended to other Celtic regions.