On the moors
Max Hastings
Going To The Moors Ronald Eden (John Murray £11) Nothing has gone right for the Tory Party since it cast loose from the grouse moor image. If the Prime Minister remembers that, books a sleeper on the Royal Highlander to Inverness and gets Denis down for a good shooting school, she may yet achieve her ambition of recreating the golden age of Harold Macmillan. Meanwhile, she can start by reading Ronald Eden's history of the English shooting man in Scotland to get over the memory of the Commonwealth Conference.
Contrary to popular myth, Queen Victoria's empire-building in the Highlands did not create a fashion, but followed one, Quite 30 years earlier 'Ossian' , Sir Walter Scott and George IV's visit to Edinburgh awakened the English aristocracy to the existence of the great wilderness in the north. First by sea and coach, then by rail, a pioneering procession of sportsmen made their way to the hills.
They came back to report a paradise of grouse-shooting, salmon-fishing and stalking. Highland ghillies achieved a unique mixture of deference and bluntness which delighted landowners bored by forelocktouching on their English estates. Dukes and statesmen vied with each other to quote the latest insults from their stalkers.
Early invaders seldom ventured much north of Perth, but in the second half of the 19th century, like American pioneers in their wagon-trains, the Victorian shooters advanced their lodges and heather-burning northwards. Boul ton and Paul, later famous for machine-gun turrets, advertised 'Artistic Wood and Iron Portable Buildings For Leasehold Property', or, more simply, prefab lodges. A deluge of Highland guides, gazeteers and sporting memoirs began to pour off the presses.
The principal shortcoming of Ronald Eden's book is that he knows the social climate of the grouse moor so well himself that he makes no attempt to examine it. He does not remark, for instance, on the odd fact that while English sporting tourists have always adored Scotland, they have often detested and despised the Scots.
'Anglers are not obliged to provide lunch for the 'boatmen', read the Breadalbane Estates notice board at Killin in the Nineties, 'and those who are kind enough to do so are most earnestly requested not to give more than a soda-water bottleful of whisky between two boatmen.'
Many English tourists were simply peering between the bars of a Highland zoo. A constant English visitor to Sutherland in the 1880s professed to adore the country, but was disgusted by its peoples' poverty: 'The male proportion of the population is imbued with an ingrained determination to be idle.'
But the English mania for the Highlands has persisted through 150 years, slightly dampened today by failing cash, not sagging bloodlust. Eden's book pays tribute to the battalions of artists summoned north over the seasons to record the grouse moor and the deer forest. It's a pity that he has not included some of Country Life's splendid turn-of-the-century photographs from the hill, my favourite of which is captioned (and precisely depicts) The Mackintosh of Moy throwing apples to the stop boys'.
Of the novelists who have written about the English aristocracy in Scotland, Buchan is incomparably the best, but Trollope has contributed some delightful and less well known passages. Eden quotes from The Duke's Children. Lady Mabel Grex and the women have taken up residence amidst the effete comforts of Killancodlem. In the nearby hills the dedicated slaughterer Reginald Dobbes leads the Duke of Omnium's sons to the spartan killing grounds of Crumrnie-Toddie: 'Ugly do you call it?'
'Infernally ugly', said Lord Gerald. 'What did you expect to find? A big hotel and a lot of cockneys? If you come after grouse, you must come to what the grouse think pretty.'
In fact, of course, grouse have impeccable taste. Going To The Moors remains the most enchanting manner in which to pass an autumn holiday. Now that the Tory party is recovering from its disastrous ten-year infatuation with Bexhill-on-Sea, we may yet get a Prime Minister in plus-fours again.
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