Brora. Photograph from book
‘A New Way of Living, Georgian Town Planning in the Highlands and Islands’ by Gordon Haynes (Whittles Publishing)
Last January I reviewed Bob Harris and Charles McKean’s monumental study ‘The Scottish Town in the Age of the Enlightenment 1740-1820’. That work does not appear in Gordon Haynes’s list of sources, but in truth his more modest production can be described not unreasonably as a lengthy footnote to the earlier publication. In terms of basic subject matter, that is, the two books have much in common.
Harris and McKean focus on the rapid development of some 30 familiar towns across Scotland in the period of the Scottish Enlightenment. Haynes focuses on exactly the same number of towns, in exactly the same historical period, but this time the towns are all located north of the old Highland line, ‘loosely drawn between Aberdeenshire and Kintyre’, and many of them are now no more than largish villages. In all other respects, however, the two books are markedly different.
Harris and McKean were published by Edinburgh University Press and, as we saw, their book is a lavish production with striking colour plates, and a text illustrated by a superb range of pictures, photographs, portraits, and figures. Whittles Publishing, on the other hand, based in Dunbeath – itself a very small community on the east coast of Caithness – has produced a book on a much smaller and simpler scale. There are pictures of many of the small towns being described, but they are all black and white and of limited size. The book’s 190 pages are tightly printed to such a degree that they become less than reader friendly: the available space seems to be overcrowded; the typeface used for the captions of photographs and other illustrations is positively tiny – a struggle to read.
None of this would matter had Haynes’s account of town planning in the Highlands in the 18th and early 19th centuries turned out to be an engrossing or entertaining read. Unfortunately it proves to be neither. The basic historical context is set out with sufficient clarity. In the post-Culloden period, the British government recognised that the social and cultural life of the Highlands had to change. Rightly or wrongly it believed that what was required, in its words, was ‘the better civilising and improving the Highlands of Scotland’, and money from annexed Jacobite estates would be used to that end.
‘Improvement’ would be achieved through the creation of organisations such as the Commission for Highland Roads and Bridges, the Board of Trustees for the Fisheries, Manufactures and Improvements in Scotland, and the British Fisheries Society. In other words the ending of the traditional clan system in the Highlands, and the sweeping away of the clan chiefs’ old hereditary jurisdictional powers by the Act of 1746, would mean that Highland society could then be assimilated into that of the rest of the United Kingdom.
To bring about this change, nothing was more important than the creation of a series of new towns mainly on, or close to, the west and east coasts of the Highlands. So what Gordon Haynes’s book becomes is a kind of gazetteer of the places involved: for example, on Islay, Bowmore and Port Ellen; on the west coast, Inveraray, Lochgilphead, Ullapool, Tobermory, and Plockton; on the Moray Firth, Pulteney (part of Wick), Thurso, Helmsdale, Brora, Beauly, Lossiemouth, Cullen; in the north-east, Grantown-on-Spey, Tomintoul, Fochabers, Huntly, Turriff. In all these cases (and quite a few more), the precise town plan, and its development over time, is painstakingly described. Some form of street grid plan is the common factor, but inevitably local circumstances determine how development does (or does not) occur.
The difficulty is that the necessary emphasis on layout and structure has a rather reductive, deadening effect: there is little sense here of people actually living in these new towns. As a result, the reader’s engagement with the material remains quite limited. (Equally, only with the author’s often dismissive comments on the impact of modern tourism on the towns does any sense of his own engagement emerge.)
Did these new Highland towns succeed in rebuilding Highland society in the way that their largely well-intentioned founders hoped? The answer that emerges here is a decidedly ambivalent one. Failure is perhaps more common than success. Most of these towns were expected to provide new forms of employment for the displaced Highlanders required to occupy them. The expectation was that this would lead to a reduction in the level of emigration – both overseas and to the towns and cities in the south. But in the long run, real economic viability proved very difficult to achieve. Industries might flourish for a time, but all too often end in failure. Investments were made in flax growing, linen and carpet making, in exploiting kelp seaweed, in tweed making, distilling, and of course deep-sea fishing. But success was rarely more than marginal.
In fact fishing was the activity most frequently seen as the answer to the Highland problem. Cleared from their traditional glens, ordinary Highlanders would be transformed into successful fishermen. But the narrative of the new towns established by the British Fisheries Society in the hope that a flourishing fishing industry could be created, shows that even in this area success was hard to achieve. The BFS built three new towns between 1787-88: Torbay in northern Skye, Tobermory in Mull, and Ullapool. The expectation was that they would become centres of the herring fishing industry, but this failed to happen – largely because the shoals of herring moved away into different areas. More successful was the BFS’s investment in Pulteneytown, built as an extension to the existing port of Wick in the first decade of the 19th century, and destined to flourish as a major centre of the herring industry on into the 20th.
As it happens the village of Dunbeath has a special relevance to that one British Fisheries Society success story. It was in Dunbeath in 1891 that the novelist Neil Gunn was born and Gunn’s fine – if now somewhat neglected works – include ‘The Silver Darlings’ (1941), an inspiring, epic account of the Caithness herring industry. Perhaps Whittles Publishing should issue a special edition.
for Bob Cant’s review of ‘Breaking the Silence: Voices of the British Children of Refugees from Nazism’ by Merilyn Moos
for Morelle Smith’s review of ‘Hamam Balkania’ by Vladislav Bajac, translated by Randall A Major
By Andrew Hook | September 2015
