Scottish Country [antikvár]

Ithough we lived in England until I was eleven, I was brought up to think of Scotland as my real home and of my family as an unfortunate band of exiles. Every summer we made a holiday pilgrimage to the Highlands, cheering in triumph as we crossed the border on our way north and enjoying, from that moment on, a month of freedom from the polite restraints of English county life. We stayed, billeted on my Eraser cousins, in the privileged orbit of Beaufort Castle, a splendid baronial pile and clan chiefs seal on the banks of the river Beauly. It was an idyllic, untrammeled world, especially for us children, who spent all our time outdoors and were taught how to fish and shoot in the justified context of learning to live off the land. Naturally it reinforced my impression of Scotland as a near-fabulous country—the kind of place a sensible person would choose never to leave. The price we happily paid for being allowed to run wild over my uncle's far-flung estates was long hours of indentured labor. One of my earliest Beaufort memories is of joining a line of barefoot, kilted cousins and being set to work every morning in the fields below the casde clearing the land of stones and ragwort—the yel- low-flowered, tenacious weed better known in the Highlands as "Stinkin' Willy." Named after the Duke of Cumberland, who commanded the Hanoverian forces that butchered the Highland clans at the Battle of Cul-loden, it gave our unpleasant, lost cause of a task a patriotic savor: We were rewarded according to who could root out the greatest number of these ideologically unacceptable invaders. By the time my father, a peripatetic clan chieftain, returned to settle in the Highlands, I had acquired a somewhat wider experience of the Scottish scene. After spending a few winters in Argyll, my exile's romantic amor patriae was tempered by the realities of leading a remote existence in an unforgiving climate. It was not until I came back to live permanently in Scodand with my own family, after years of being schooled and working in the south and abroad, that I really began to get to know my own country. As I watched my children grow up here, taking for granted the commonplace pleasures and trials of Highland life, I began to share their unquestioning sense of belonging. Traveling the length and breadth of the Scottish countryside in gathering material for this book, I have had my eyes opened again by working with Christopher Sykes, whose visual acumen and (in some ways) more objective viewpoint saved us on a few occasions from presenting the familiar heather-and-haggis image of "Bonnie Scotland." Hoping to dispel the popular notion of the Scottish country house as a grim, rain-lashed fortress with thickets of antlers on the clammy stone walls and nothing but a few tartan rugs to keep out the chill of centuries, our aim has been to reveal, through Scotland's less well-known houses—from croft to castle.