At Home in the Hills

Sense of Place in the Scottish Borders

John Gray, John N. Gray

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN:
  9780857451798
  9781571817396
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857458711
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

To most outsiders, the hills of the Scottish Borders are a bleak and foreboding space - usually made to represent the stigmatized Other, Ad Finis, by the centers of power in Edinburgh, London, and Brussels. At a time when globalization seems to threaten our sense of place, people of the Scottish borderlands provide a vivid case study of how the being-in-place is central to the sense of self and identity. Since the end of the thirteenth century, people living in the Scottish Border hills have engaged in armed raiding on the frontier with England, developed capitalist sheep farming in the newly united kingdom of Great Britain, and are struggling to maintain their family farms in one of the marginal agricultural rural regions of the European Community. Throughout their history, sheep farmers living in these hills have established an abiding sense of place in which family and farm have become refractions of each other. Adopting a phenomenological perspective, this book concentrates on the contemporary farming practices - shepherding, selling lambs and rams at auctions - as well as family and class relations through which hill sheep fuse people, place, and way of life to create this sense of being-at-home in the hills.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Reivers of the Marches
• Chapter 2 Tenants on Landed Estates
• Chapter 3 Sheep Farming in the Community
• Chapter 4 Forms of Tenure
• Chapter 5 Sheep and Land
• Chapter 6 Hill Sheep and Tups
• Chapter 7 Lamb Auctions
• Chapter 8 Ram Auctions
• Chapter 9 The Big House
• Chapter 10 The Farmhouse
• Afterword
• References
• Index