The Beauty of Scotland in colour [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION by George Scott-MoncrieffOne could not claim for any thirty-two photographs that they represented a comprehensive picture of the Scottish scene. Inevitably many familiar and favourite aspects, and some less known but as deserving, must be omitted. Mr. Habgood has gone his own way and taken his pick, expressing primarily his own taste in scenery: and I think he has presented an exciting visual introduction to our land. As an introduction it is none the worse for being an individual one, and, sorry as I am at the omission of some favourite aspects of our scenery, the loss is more than compensated for by the remarkable quality of Mr. Habgood's work in recapturing his own chosen aspects.I have a friend who insists that the finest view is always one with water in it. I was reminded of this as I looked at Mr. Habgood's collection. Nearly always water in some form or another is a feature of the scene he has chosen. Sometimes it is the sea, and Scotland of course has a phenomenally long coastline: far longer than England's, for all that Scotland is the smaller country, because of the countless indentations, promontories, capes, mulls, plocs, firths, bays and sea-lochs abounding along the west coast. Even the east coast has its firths of Forth and Tay, Moray and Dornoch, while, chiefly to north and west, each of more than seven hundred islands contributes a complete encirclement of coastline to the total score. Even so, it is by no means only seascapes that feature in Mr. Habgood's photographs, in fact he has taken comparatively few of anything like open sea-coast: there are freshwater lochs, burns or rivers, and, if the water in many of his subjects is actually salt it is generally presented in the landlocked form of a sea loch, or the artificial landlock of a harbour.In nature water has the attraction of never, except when frozen, remaining perfectly still, and that my friend advanced as reason for his predilection. It is certainly true that the motion of water gives a liveliness and a constant slight change to the scene, so that sometimes when we come upon a familiar water in winter and find it frozen, the stillness is so marked as to seem strange, abruptly bringing home to us the deadness of the season. Yet it is largely water, in liquid or solid form, that has eroded and shaped the ubiquitous hills and valleys of the Scottish landscape and given them the forms we know and that are so suggestively interpreted for us in these pictures.Such a water as Loch Eck, the subject of the first photograph, fills the floor of a narrow valley between half-a-dozen mountains whose crests rise 2,000 feet above the mirror-surface of the loch. It is in Cowal, a wild countryside but fringed with established holiday resorts for the people of Glasgow, which, although a long way off by land, is near enough by sea. In fact Loch Eck is only a few miles into the hills from cheerfully garish Dunoon, with its waterfront hotels and boarding-