Guns, Game and the Grandee: The Cultural Politics of Deerstalking in the Scottish Highlands

Abstract

This paper considers how the concentrated pattern of private landownership in the Scottish Highlands can be understood in relation to the field sport of deerstalking. Focusing on developments during the interwar years, it demonstrates how a series of connected representational practices, embodied rituals and political strategies were deployed by the sporting and landed community in defence of this elite leisure activity. These power-laden strategies coalesced into a distinctive culture of nature, which, although in part a continuation of tendencies set in train during the nineteenth century, also embraced new rhetorics of nationhood, ecological thought and landscape preservation. The paper demonstrates how humans, animals, technologies, science, localized history and popular memory were all drawn into deerstalking’s unequally weighted networks of association. Ultimately it asserts that the motif of custodianship and tradition commonly associated with modern sporting landownership in the Highlands was, and still is, used as an effective means to retain hegemonic control of the land resource.