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. It is typical that, when she alighted that particular morning at Kingussie to visit friends, she took ‘the rest of the day to walk’ to their remote lodge. Once arrived, she was soon ‘soaking in a bath of peat brown burn water, then tucking into a salmon that was swimming in the Tilt an hour earlier’ — the dream in a nutshell.

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To emphasise that field sports turned the Highlands into a mystical destination, the front cover shows a Robert Lorimer 1906–7 masterpiece, ‘Ardkinglas in Argyll’, and the back an array of sporting gear and salmon trophies. Social history predominates and the book is more broadly entertaining as a result. The eight chapters devoted to it form the bulk of the text.