Spinning the Ephemeral PDF - SMU Fashion Media

296 Fiona Anderson
teenth century onwards the Scottish Highland landscape therefore played
a dual role as "commodity and potent cultural symbol" (Mitchell 1994:
15). It symbolized Highland Scotland as a part of the British mainland
that represented a mythic time and a place, before and beyond the negative
effects of industrialization.
As Raymond Williams states "a working country is hardly ever a
landscape" and the transformation of the Highlands into a sporting and
leisure playground, helped to idealize its landscape within the British
popular imagination (Williams 1973: 120). This mistaken perception of
the Highlands as an unchanging and truly "natural" environment, also
meant that it held associations with enduring ideals of masculinity. For
example, it became one of the principal domestic British landscapes that
had potent links with the late-nineteenth-century British imperialist cult
of hunting. As Mackenzie states:
hunting represented the most perfect expression of global dominance
in the late nineteenth century. Hunting required all of the
most virile attributes of the imperial male—courage, endurance,
individualism (adaptable to national ends), sportsmanship . . .
resourcefulness, a mastery of environmental signs and a knowledge
of natural history (Mackenzie 1998: 50).
Sporting handbooks of the period highlight the particular opportunities
for the imagining of this imperial masculine ideal within the Scottish rural
landscape. For example in his An Encyclopedia of Rural Sports Blaine
(1852) states:
Caledonia must indeed, from the nature of the surface of the country,
long continue to offer powerful excitements to preserve the
more masculine features of the chase, when cultivation and population
have extirpated some of the most prominent objects of it in
other localities . . . The stag, in a state of nature is still to be met
with in this paradise of wild sports. In Mar forest, and the western
parts of Ross and Sutherland, red deer yet offer to the southern
traveller a realisation of those scenes which he has before only met
with in story (Blaine 1852: 115).
Despite the romanticized and mythic tone of Blaine's words he also makes
reference to a distinctive feature of hunting within the Scottish Highland
landscape, the need to climb mountains on foot, rather than hunting on
horseback. This is evident in Figure 6, which features a deer-stalking party
at Glen Finnan, of which the majority are wearing the tweed cloth thought
suitable for such masculine sporting activity. In addition to the nineteenthcentury
cult of hunting, there was also a strong relationship between sport
in its broader sense and imperial British masculine ideals. In fact, as
revealed by Mangan, the imperial warrior ideal that emerged in the closing