Home from the hill

As well as being a leading architectural historian Mary Miers is an editor at Country Life. For her latest book she has mined the magazine’s unmatchable picture library and the photographs are by Country Life regulars Simon Jauncey, who lives in Highland Perthshire, and the late Paul Barker, who sadly died before publication. His memory is duly saluted.

Crucially the author is a Highlander by birth and domicile. Every week she commutes between London and her Black Isle home and she summers on South Uist. She knows the Highlands and Islands, or the Gàidhealtachd, from top to bottom: from Balmoral and the Highland balls of the Northern Meeting to crofters’ kitchens and island ceilidhs. It was on the sleeper from London to the far north that she mused on the continuing mystique of the Highlands in the romantic imagination and decided to write this book: a social and architectural history, the two indivisible, because the ‘shooting lodge’ in its various forms (many now hotels) served and promoted the arcadian Highland dream.