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In 1730, Edmund Burt was sent to Scotland to work as a contractor for the government. For most of the time, he was based in Inverness, from where he wrote regularly to an acquaintance in London about his experiences. Burt had an insatiable curiosity about everything. From cooking and personal hygiene (the standards of which continually shocked him), to weddings, funerals, public executions and even the activities of witches, no aspect of Highland life or society escaped his scrutiny. Burt's witty and satirical style makes entertaining reading, but whilst he was certainly critical of many things, he draws a very sympathetic picture of the grinding hardship and poverty faced by so much of the ordinary population. His writing is a salutary antidote to many of the Romantic views of the Highlands and Jacobitism, which were later to take hold. It is now available for the first time in one volume, with modernised spelling and includes an Introduction by Charles W. J. Withers, Professor of Geography in the University of Edinburgh.
Stepping Westward is the first book dedicated to the literature of the Scottish Highland tour of 1720-1830, a major cultural phenomenon that attracted writers and artists like Pennant, Johnson and Boswell, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Hogg, Keats, Daniell, and Turner, as well as numerous less celebrated travellers and tourists. Addressing more than a century's worth of literary and visual representations of the Highlands, the book casts new light on how the tour developed a modern literature of place, acting as a catalyst for thinking about improvement, landscape, and the shaping of British, Scottish, and Gaelic identities. It pays attention to the relationship between travellers and the native Gaels, whose world was plunged into crisis by rapid and forced social change. At the book's core lie the best-selling tours of Pennant and Dr Johnson, associated with attempts to 'improve' the intractable Gaidhealtachd in the wake of Culloden. Alongside the Ossian craze and Gilpin's picturesque, their books stimulated a wave of 'home tours' from the 1770s through the romantic period, including writing by women like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. The incidence of published Highland Tours (many lavishly illustrated), peaked around 1800, but as the genre reached exhaustion, the 'romantic Highlands' were reinvented in Scott's poems and novels, coinciding with steam boats and mass tourism, but also rack-renting, sheep clearance, and emigration.
The traditional view of the Scottish nation holds that it first arose during the Wars of Independence from England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Although Scotland was absorbed into Britain in 1707 with the Treaty of Union, Scottish identity is supposed to have remained alive in the new state through separate institutions of religion (the Church of Scotland), education, and the legal system. Neil Davidson argues otherwise. The Scottish nation did not exist before 1707. The Scottish national consciousness we know today was not preserved by institutions carried over from the pre-Union period, but arose after and as a result of the Union, for only then were the material obstacles to nationhood – most importantly the Highland/Lowland divide – overcome. This Scottish nation was constructed simultaneously with and as part of the British nation, and the eighteenth century Scottish bourgeoisie were at the forefront of constructing both. The majority of Scots entered the Industrial Revolution with a dual national consciousness, but only one nationalism, which was British. The Scottish nationalism which arose in Scotland during the twentieth century is therefore not a revival of a pre-Union nationalism after 300 years, but an entirely new formation. Davidson provides a revisionist history of the origins of Scottish and British national consciousness that sheds light on many of the contemporary debates about nationalism.
Originally published in 1980, this book examines the evolution of the Scottish landscape from pre-historic times to the mid-nineteenth century. It considers the way in which the structural base of agriculture and the changing farming ‘system’ came to alter the Scottish rural landscape. This book, with its focus on the underlying landscape processes, gives a developmental view of landscape change. It therefore considers the crucial question of the rate and pace of landscape change and argues that the Scottish landscape was not the product of a few brief phases of quite rapid development but rather the result of a continual and gradual process of change. It also looks at the regional variation of landscape change and establishes the importance of regional linkages in the diffusion of ideas especially in new technology.
The wholesale assimilation of Scots into the British Army is largely associated with the recruitment of Highlanders during and after the Seven Years War. This important new study demonstrates that the assimilation of Lowland and Highland Scots into the British Army was a salient feature of its history in the first half of the 18th century and was already well advanced by the outbreak of the Seven Years War. Scotland and the British Army, 1700-1750 analyses the wider policing functions of the British Army, the role of Scotland's militia and the development of Scotland's military roads and institutions to provide a fuller understanding of the purpose and complexity of Scotland's military organisation and presence in Scotland in the turbulent decades between the Glorious Revolution and the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie, which has been too often simplified as an army of occupation for the suppression of Jacobitism. Instead, Victoria Henshaw reveals the complexities and difficulties experienced by Scottish soldiers of all ranks in the British Army as nationality, loyalty and prejudice clouded Scottish desires to use military service to defend the Glorious Revolution and the Union of 1707.