Scottish Highlands Campervan Mobilities in Pandemic Times

Abstract

This paper explores the idea of “enclosures” as encircling lines. These include semantic boundaries, insider-outsider binaries, and the gray area that includes the technically illegal and the rarely actually prosecuted, focusing on “wild” campervanning in the Scottish Highlands. Also considered are non-enclosures: common grazing, faraway gazes for driving on single-track roads, and alone time in a campervan that is not easily regimented into work and life. This paper thinks with Tim Ingold’s work on lines, showing how the “ghostly lines” of social imaginaries are changing in light of COVID-19. Lockdowns lead to staycations, which lead to overcrowding in the Highlands. Thus, previously elastic lines are drawn tighter, and gray areas coalesce into lines that are more obviously and more problematically crossed.