ABSTRACT
Scottish ballads and folk tales place rivers as liminal sites, forests as places of danger the in-between of towns and villages as places of banishment and exclusion from community. This chapter considers this rural in-between as a site of loneliness, seeking to explore how it was conceptualised in the Scottish imagination, used by people and came to frame the relationship between the community and the individual, not least in a context of changing moralities. It particularly reflects on how ideas of loneliness become attached to place, and how such spatially produced emotion informs what loneliness is for 18th-century Scots.
