ABSTRACT
The concern of this chapter is with the geography of protest, and specifically with the straightforward spatial distribution of location. This somewhat limited perspective is adopted here for two reasons. Firstly, because the nature of our understanding of these Highland events demands it; as the previous chapter indicates, the historiography of post-1914 protest has paid insufficient attention to the diversity and numerical intensity of the pressure for land. While we may agree with Adrian Randall1 that counting events is notoriously both a fraught and a flawed process and that this does not axiomatically demonstrate significance, it nevertheless adds an important layer to our understanding, particularly when a full delineation of the scope of these protests has not as yet been achieved. Withers, for instance, does pay close attention to the geographical perspective when discussing the long-run transformation of the Highlands more generally and of events of protest in particular, but his concern is with a ‘culture region’ and he consequently does not seek to fully address the intraregional variations revealed here.2 This chapter confines itself to a straightforward consideration of the distribution of disturbances because these events demand that we do so. It is more than a concern for dots on a map – as important as this is – but it enables us to plot the situation of events “on the ground” in the important mental and material contexts which gave rise to them. These are, moreover, contexts which only fully emerge from the raison d’être of the current work: a monocular perspective on protest performances alone and new approaches to its interpretation. The second key reason why the concern of this current chapter is solely that of the spatial arrangements of these Highland events is that protest culture is, initially at least, more appropriately considered in its own right.
