Green Letters, Studies in Ecocriticism Volume 19 Number 1 February 2015
Special Issue: Literature and Sustainability
containing an essay by Dr William Welstead, Baugh. pp75-88:
The role of culture in the sustainable use of a “cultural landscape”: a case study from the Hebridean machair
This article explores the interrelationship between landscapes and culture. Taking as its focus the distinctive machair landscapes of western Scotland and Ireland, this study argues that continuing concern for the sustainable use of this landscape is fostered by its celebration in poetry and song and that, in turn, this literary culture depends on traditional ways of farming this fragile landscape. The blown shell sands of the machair plains are rich in calcium carbonate which contributes to its fertility and to the biodiversity of its flora. This article reviews how the machair landscape has been praised in traditional songs and how contemporary poetry functions as a vehicle for the transmission of cultural knowledge and values. It also considers how machair has become an “index” for Scottish Gaelic culture.
A Lucas battery filler. A distilled water bottle for topping up accumulator batteries.
Early household radio sets were powered by glass accumulator batteries. See 2014.31.1 These batteries were regularly taken to be charged at local shops, such as Calum “Calum Salum” MacLean’s shop in Salum, where they would be topped up with distilled water.
“A picnic on the beach with the Becks. Robin and I are sitting on the car. My parents arrived in Tiree in the same week as the Becks and met in the Scarinish Hotel while we were all waiting for our furniture containers to arrive on the cargo boat.” by the donor of this photograph and others in this collection at 2025.53 Isabel Beaton.
