ABSTRACT
Environmental conservation became subject to legislation in postwar Britain when the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949 (Sheail 1984, 29) framed nature as a valuable shared resource. In this view, natural wild landscapes could contribute to social reconstruction through offering scenic amenity and places for healthy recreation. Within Britain, Scotland’s world-famous mountainous regions might at first glance appear to offer an ideal expanse of natural countryside in which to experiment new forms of social amenity, allied with technological progress. However, the celebrated natural beauty of the Highlands had come into being through a history of cultural conflict and territorial dispute. This chapter examines cultural, political, and material elements contributing to the insertion of hydro-electric power schemes into the Scottish Highlands after the Second World War, the result of the wartime Hydro-Electric Development (Scotland) Act of 1943. While this initiative was seen by modernizing central planners as an urgent corrective to the long standing decline of this ‘semi-derelict region’ (Kirby 1946, 1), described as a land in a ‘coma’ from which it might never recover (Highland Herald (HH) 12 June 1947, 3) at the same time there was pressure to maintain the artificial wilderness of the Highlands as a ‘cultural museum’ (Burnett 2010) that was in the social imaginary a potent focus for how various local and national communities imagined themselves. Although design elements such as the site, buildings, and landscape architecture of specific hydro projects such as the Glen Moriston and Glen Affric schemes will be discussed, they will not be considered in isolation. Instead, they will be addressed as additional design elements inserted into an already designed environment, making reference to the pre-existing historical processes of making and unmaking the Highland landscape as a wilderness area (Maver 2000). The result, as I argue, was that these major engineering projects of modernization took on a monumental elegiac cast as expressions of the ‘Celtic’ culture being debated in the Highland region in the period of postwar reconstruction.
