Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 21 on 10/07/2005.

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In the footsteps in Scott part 3

In the latest chapter of Walter Scott’s travels in Scotland we travel to Rob Roy country. Words and pictures: John Hannavy

Weaving historical facts and figures into his writing was one of Walter Scott’s recurrent strokes of genius – legend meets literature against that beautifully drawn landscape for which Scott’s writings are renowned. It was that marriage of fact and fiction which caught the Victorian imagination – and which later led to quite considerable criticism of his work by those who saw it as a deliberate distortion of Scotland’s heritage in order to tap into the Victorian love of the romantic.

Scott was openly critical of the submersion of Scotland’s unique heritage into a British rewriting of history, and may, in his endeavours to celebrate the uniqueness of Scotland’s past, have been just as inaccurate.

After Culloden, so many aspects of Scottish life were either banned or discouraged; the wearing of the kilt was proscribed, the legal power of clan chiefs was reduced to little more than any other landlord, and the London government sought to ensure that the traditional feudal nature of Highland life would never be restored.

But, seven decades later, public thirst for stories set in this exciting and – for most people at least – remote environment was apparently insatiable.

Scott’s romantic image of Scotland’s past was widely accepted and read as fact, and by the time of his death, with Queen Victoria’s love for the Highlands also widely publicised, Scott’s works were assumed to have been set within an historically accurate landscape and culture.

In the preface to an early editio.....

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By John Hannavy

Section : Scottish Landscapes

Page number : 18