The Legend of Brigadoon: Architecture, Identity and Choice in the Scottish Highlands

Since the nineteenth century two distinct domestic architectural traditions in the Scottish Highlands have been interpreted in Britain as representative of Highland and Scottish identity. But Scotland's positive national identification with both the indigenous turf-walled and thatched Highland blackhouse and the imposed white, regular forms of the eighteenth-century " improved cottage " and farmhouse have failed to account for the historical relationships between the two architectural traditions and Scottish Gaels, or Highlanders. The aim of this article is to examine these historic relationships, to consider the misinterpretations of romanticism and the folklorists, and to question the Scottish government's current regionalist planning policy. Through the twentieth century, city dwelling architects, planners, folklorists and academics have sought to define the cultural identity of the Scottish Highlands through its domestic architecture. The region has two architectural traditions: the millennia-old indigenous blackhouse and the imposed Classical farmhouse and cottage. As a consequence of the transformative process of agricultural improvement during the eighteenth century, the latter now dominate the Highland landscape, while the former persisted into the twentieth century only in impoverished coastal crofting communities, and have now largely disappeared. The historic relationships between these two architectural traditions and Scottish Gaelic culture are complex. The blackhouse is an indigenous, Gaelic, house type promoted by folklorists and architects in the 1930s as a Highland cultural icon. However, by the twentieth century the blackhouse was viewed by Scottish Gaelic society in general as an embarrassing symbol of backwardness. These improved farmhouse emerged in the Highlands as a symbol of Britishness and modernity. The houses were built in the late eighteenth century by tenant farmers whose new wealth was founded upon the mass Daniel Maudlin is a lecturer in Architectural History and Theory at the School of Architecture and Design, University of Plymouth. He was also an inspector of Historic Buildings with Historic Scotland.