Scotland [antikvár]

NTRODUCTIONFifty years ago the Orkney poet Edwin Muir set out in a battered 1921 Standard motor car to travel round Scotland. He drove south from Edinburgh, crossing the Borders from east to west, then turned north, through Glasgow to the Highlands. Finally, breathing a sigh of relief, he crossed the Pentland Firth back to his native islands.It was not a happy journey. Muir was infinitely depressed by what he saw as a country in decline. "Scotland," he mourned, "is gradually being emptied of its population, its spirit, its wealth, industry, art, intellect and innate character." He was particularly pessimistic about the Lowlands and the big cities: "Industry itself is vanishing like a dream a large population lives there in idleness, for there is nowhere else to go, and little prospect that Monday will dawn for a long time."Muir's Scottish journey was made in the grim conditions of the 1930s. He was in a black mood when he began it and a blacker one when he had finished. Yet as he nursed his temperamental little car clockwise around the country, Muir the poet kept on interrupting Muir the social commentator. Despite his stern intention to reach the bleakest conclusions about Scotland, he kept on being side-tracked.He was exhilarated by the street life of Edinburgh, the sturdy independence of the Border towns, and the splendour of the Highlands. There were communities and villages where the message of doom appeared to have had remarkably little impact, even if it had been heard at all. By the time he reached the north, he was reserving most of his irritation for his struggling little motor car, which was encountering grave difficulties on the gradients of Sutherland, rather than the self-destruction of the nation. Scotland, in short, was refusing - as always - to conform to a stereotype. It is a lesson which most travellers in the country have learned in time, however well tuned their prejudices may have been to begin with. And it is one which this book again confirms.Douglas Corrance, whose journeys across Scotland over the past ten years have yielded the splendid and varied photographs which follow, would not, for a moment, pretend to any fixed prejudice about his country beyond a great enjoyment of it, and a serious conviction that it contains more wealth in terms of its people and the places they live in than most outsiders dream of. He is aware - as his pictures often and wittily demonstrate - that it has its absurdities; and he is only too conscious of the banality which surrounds so much of the tourist's image of Scotland. But in the end he finds he likes the place enormously. As a photographer who has worked often abroad, he