Farming on Film: The Portrayal of Environmental Myths and Legends on Screen in Early-Twentieth-Century Scotland

• In Event: Interrogating Naturalization and Romanticization in Rural Extractive Environments: The American Midwest and Scotland

Abstract

The 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow featured a series of seven films intended to showcase Scotland’s history and culture. The agricultural focused film, They Made The Land, educated viewers on the critical processes of Scottish farming, from sheep daubing to peat harvesting to drainage techniques. Directed by Mary Field, the nineteen minute movie also presented myths and legends of human-environment relations. They Made The Land depicted the Scottish landscape and farming techniques in a manner intended to illicit nostalgia and pride for the hardship the Scottish “race” faced. The images and script glorified a history of unrelenting labor, thrift, piety, as well as the inevitable and unquestionable need for “improvements.” They Made the Land is a rich artifact used to analyze human-environment narratives, both those projected and those untold, during the inter-war period.

Closer examination of the black and white film, reveals a more complex understanding of environmental myth-making about rural life on the Scottish landscape emerges. Absent from the film are explanations of the legal acts of enclosure and rent raising. These actions pushed tens of thousands of Lowland Scottish families to emigrate to urban centers, coastal areas and overseas from 1760 to 1830. The lands that would inspire Victorian writers, artists, deer stalkers, fly-fishers, and grouse shooters were only available in absence of their recent occupants. The narrative required to explain major land-use changes without the presence of the lead characters is necessary to understand the creation of a national identity within an empire. Films destined for a public audience, such as They Made the Land, serve to better understand how Scottish environmental myths and legends were formed, and also to recognize similar narrative patterns throughout the British Empire.

Author

• Hillary Loomis, Southern Illinois University