Ways of seeing the Scottish Highlands: marginality, authenticity and the curious case of the Hebridean blackhouse

This paper examines popular cultural constructions of the Scottish Highlands during the interwar period. Situating events within the literary and artistic context of the «Celtic Twilight», it traces the establishment, and subsequent links between, two pioneering «heritage» sites which used as their focus the «blackhouse», the vernacular form of habitation in the Highlands. These sites, created under the auspices of the National Trust for Scotland and the 1938 Glasgow Empire Exhibition, are understood as «official» expressions of a romanticized, imaginary geography heavily reliant on ideas of cultural authenticity and marginality. By considering aspects of the «Self/Other» representational dialectic and placing in question popular constructions of peripherality the paper considers how such projects, ostensibly motivated by remembrance and preservation, were also a highly selective means of national identification. Ultimately, the work demonstrates how the modern impulse to differentiate between, and thereby classify, distinctive cultural traditions and forms of knowledge facilitated an obvious Highland bias in what subsequently became Scotland's accepted historiography.