Jo Vergunst
Farming and the Nature of Landscape: Stasis and Movement in a Regional
Landscape Tradition
Abstract
This paper explores farming landscapes in Orkney, Scotland, focusing particularly on
local responses to the rise of the environmental movement and agri-environmental
schemes. It argues that where institutional designations of ‘nature’ tended to invoke a
generalised temporal stasis, local and regional understandings of ‘landscape’
emphasise specific histories, transience, and movement. Seeking these regional senses
of landscape through an ethnographic approach, the paper presents some personal
histories of responses to nature conservation that have a context in local cultural
understandings of landscape. The continuing importance of the udal land tenure
heritage in Orkney in relation to this is described. Finally, the ways that farmers and
recreational walkers move around farm land are presented as further evidence for the
importance of localised concepts of landscape in contrast to institutional designations
of nature, while recognising that environmentalists themselves have come to take on
aspects of such concepts. Agri-environment schemes seeking to be relevant in
particular landscapes should propose the kind of active, participative management that
the farmers engage in with the rest of their land.
Key words
Nature, landscape, movement, farming, Scotland
Introduction: Directions in farming, agri-environment and landscape research
Farmers in north east Scotland, like many of their contemporaries in Europe and
elsewhere, often seem to be situated within two rather different landscapes. On the
one hand is the agriculturally productive landscape that has been formed through
generations of labour and the technological development of farming, and supported
through a subsidy system and the cultural norms of farming communities. On the
other hand farmers have, since the 1980s especially, been encouraged to provide other
kinds of non-food landscape goods and services, ranging from nature conservation
and flood control to public access to the land. Although both landscapes involve the
influence of broader society on how the land should be managed, the second
landscape sets up an opposition between the cultural norms of farming and an
alternative agenda for land use that has in some scholarly circles been named ‘postproductivist’. Agricultural subsidies have been reformed with increasing momentum
over recent years towards broader environmental and public goods, giving the
impression that rural land must be shifting from the first to the second of these
landscapes, and yet most recently ‘food security’ is again becoming an important goal
in an uncertain international context.
This paper explores how these two landscapes come into existence and come to
be in tension with each other in specific locations. In particular, I will pursue the
various meanings associated with ‘nature’ in rural landscapes in Orkney, Scotland,
from the perspective of farmers and some of the public who have access to their land
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and in relation to how they conceive of formalised or institional designations of
nature. I will argue that there are specific and localised dynamics to these debates
which it is difficult for agricultural and agri-environmental schemes to engage with.
In tying to the theme of this special issue, I explore how movement through the farm
landscape relates to resistance to institutional designations of nature. Data is presented
from mobile participant observation and interviews in Orkney amongst farmers and
people taking recreational walks.
Previous research has found that farmers engage with environmental concerns in
a wide variety of ways. Morris and Potter (1995) set out a typology of UK farmers’
participation in agri-environmental schemes, varying from active to passive adopters
and outright opponents. These behaviours depend on combinations of attitudes,
current resources and plans for the future of each farm business: some farmers seek to
use agri-environment programmes (AEP) to maintain the economic viability of the
whole farm, others have a principled support or objection to such schemes. Morris
and Potter also described the intentional discourse behind the shift in subsidies
towards the support of what is understood as more environmentally-friendly farming:
‘It can be argued that one of the most important, if least tangible, objectives of AEP
schemes should be to bring about a shift in the attitudes of farmers towards
countryside management which will outlast the schemes themselves and to establish
conservation as a legitimate use of land and resources which, for some at least, can
earn them a living’ (Morris and Potter, 1995, p. 61). From this perspective the
schemes are as much tools of governmentality (Foucault, 1991; Murdoch and Ward,
1997), intended to inculcate a change in subjectivity amongst the farmers, as much
they were to produce actual material change in the landscape.
Agri-environmental farming was identified as one part of the shift towards a socalled ‘post-productivist’ rurality. In a review article, Evans et al. note the presence of
this term in studies from the early 1990s onwards that ‘sought to capture a sense that
the state was no longer committed to a single model of agricultural expansion through
increased food production and that movement away from this position was helping to
create differentiated or “new rural spaces”’ in the UK and Europe (Evans et al. 2002,
p. 315). Slee, meanwhile, has argued that practices of consumption based on new
residential patterns (including commuting), tourism and recreation, amenity forestry
and the presence new, less productivity-oriented, landowners all ‘point towards an
inexorable shift in the economic role of the countryside’ (Slee 2005, p. 260).
However, almost as soon as the label ‘post-productivist’ was used by
researchers to describe the new rural landscape, others were noting the continuation of
productivist practices and attitudes (Evans et al. 2002). In particular, Burton et al.
(2008) point out that there is no substantial evidence for the hoped-for cultural shift in
farmers’ attitudes towards nature conservation since the introduction of agrienvironmental schemes. Drawing on fieldwork in Scotland and Germany, they show
that farmers do not usually generate the same kind of symbolic capital through agrienvironmental farming as they do through the straight plough-lines and intensive food
production of standard farming practices, and so the farmers have mostly not come to
take on the ethos of such schemes. Other empirical work has also suggested that that
great majority of land under the CAP is still farmed according to the cultural values of
intensive farming (Wilson 2001, Hoggart 2001, Ward et al. 2008).
Also working in Scotland, Sutherland focuses attention on the ‘financial
realities’ of agriculture that farmers are all too aware of (Sutherland 2010, p. 423),
arguing that where farmers perceive economic benefit from agri-environmental
schemes these options can be taken up. On the other hand, agri-environment payments
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usually do not provide an adequate return on the labour and materials expended on
them in comparison to standard farming, especially in a new subsidy context intended
to increase the influence of the free market (specifically the Single Farm Payment
system stemming from the CAP reforms of 2003 [Lobley and Butler 2010]).
Sutherland (p. 421) notes: ‘there appears to be an inherent inconsistency between
policies which encourage commercialisation of farming, through decreased
dependence on price supports, and policies which fund environmental schemes at a
rate which is not competitive with actual labour costs.’
I would like to contribute to these debates by considering the dynamics of
relationships between farmers and specific landscapes. While previous work usually
explores the range of farmer responses to generalised (i.e. national) agri-environment
schemes or policies, it rarely connects to the local or regional trends which are often
most significant to farmers. Here I will outline briefly the specific history of nature
conservation in Orkney, and discuss the significance of land tenure there, which, with
its Nordic heritage, has a udal as well as feudal heritage. The sense of ‘two
landscapes’ of farming and post-farming in rural areas like Orkney is produced
through the practical engagements and institutional arrangements associated with
each. To understand more carefully the roots of attitudes towards productivist and
post-productivist ruralities, we need to engage with specific rather than generalised
places, and particularly with how temporality is perceived in nature and landscape.
From generalised to specific histories of nature and landscape
Scholarly definitions of nature have tended to come in list form. Raymond Williams
identified three areas of meaning, which he said may overlap or be continuous. They
are: ‘i) the essential quality and character of something; ii) the inherent force which
directs either the world or human beings or both; iii) the material world itself, taken as
including or not including human beings’ (Williams, 1976, p. 219). An important
point is that nature in the spatial sense, the ‘material world’, has often been held to
exist outside ordinary human activity – nature is primarily that which is non-human.
Noel Castree replaces Williams’ ‘material world’ with the specifically ‘non-human
world’ in an otherwise similar triadic categorisation (Castree, 2005, p29). Peter
Coates meanwhile chooses five, splitting nature as non-human places from nature as
the collective phenomena of the world, and further adding nature as ‘the conceptual
opposite of culture’ (Coates, 2005, p3).
There are of course divergences in the approach, subject matter and conclusions
of scholars of nature in the humanities and social sciences, but there is also a common
desire to unpack the meaning and social relations of Western nature (e.g. Castree,
2005; Cronon, 1995; Eder, 1996; Haraway, 1991; Latour, 2004; Macnaghten and
Urry, 1998). Responding to popular tendencies, reflected the definitions above, to see
nature as essential and unchangeable, Castree and Braun (1998) write that ‘nature is
inescapably social’. It constitutes a discourse that does not so much hide the truth as
create it: ‘nature is defined, delimited, and even physically reconstituted by different
societies, often in order to serve specific, and usually dominant, social interests.’
(Castree and Braun, 1998, p3). Such ‘social natures’ have been put to work
analytically to greatest effect in describing how social institutions, often associated
with the state or in a quasi-state function, can designate certain spaces, entities or
processes as nature or natural. Institutions can import a symbolic load to the object of
concern through labelling or otherwise constituting them as ‘nature’. The papers in
Cronon’s Uncommon Ground contain many examples of this (Cronon, 1995), and
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contributors to Anderson and Berglund’s Ethnographies of Conservation (2003)
describe the struggles of indigenous peoples to continue their ways of life in the face
of state controls operating through nature conservation. Many of my informants do
encounter and often resist institutional definitions and uses of nature, and an
important dynamic is that where ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’ often become spatial
generalisations of the land through institutional designations, local responses invoke
specific places and distinctly local or regional processes.
Coates touches on a key point when noting the ‘deceptive simplicity and
ahistorical charm’ of nature (Coates, 2005, p. 1). The interrogation of the history of
the meanings of nature has generally not involved the kind of temporalities that are
invoked as descriptions of the world as ‘nature’ or natural occur. The idea of nature
does involve at its heart a particular kind of temporal as much as spatial perception.
One aspect of this is nature as ahistorical or timeless – entirely outside time, as Coates
suggests, reflecting the notion of nature as the non-human world, opposite to that of
culture. Nature presented through Christian theology, meanwhile, narrates episodes in
which nature is formed or made in the past, in the Garden of Eden, and then remade in
the Flood. Here nature is understood as made and then finished, and what we may
find now is a kind of record of that episode of making. Preservationist discourses may
often be predicated on this idea of nature completed, in which change is a diminution
of the resource of nature. Nature therefore is not just a spatialising quality but also a
powerful inherent temporality. If land is not just spatially outside the realm of culture
but also temporally in stasis or without history, what are the prospects for change and
progression in the present and future, or indeed awareness of change in the past?
Anthropologists, archaeologists and geographers have shown that temporality is
integral to human landscapes, through rhythms of seasonality, human use and longterm change (recent syntheses of which are, for example, Ingold, 2000; Johnson,
2006; Wylie, 2007). Drawing on a phenomenological tradition (Heidegger, 1978) it
has become widespread in the humanities to convey landscape in the sense of
lifeworld, which might be thought of as the site of dwelling from the perspective of
the dweller (be it human or non-human), as a contrast to the objective qualities
conveyed by the term ‘natural landscape’. Kenneth Olwig, for example, focuses on
the political beginnings of the concept of landscape in Europe in the Middle Ages,
which was, originally, ‘a polity’s area of activity or place of action. It was, to use
Pierre Bourdieu’s term, a habitus, in which habit, custom and law are inextricably
linked through the practice of habitation and accustomation’ (Olwig, 2002, p.18).
Landscape as nature only become prominent from the 17th century, first in Britain,
then in America and later elsewhere. New forms of government and nation states
claimed the qualities of non-human nature – permanence and order, seen with a static
gaze – as a basis for governance (ibid., ch. 3).
In a reaction against these controlling qualities in the objectification of
landscape as nature, an alternative analysis would pursue the significance in the
landscape that can be felt by touch or through close and mobile presence. Even the
‘social nature’ renditions I would argue are rather different from ‘landscape’ as
lifeworld and associated temporalities of flow and rhythm: they seem to start from a
dichotomy of nature and society, and then attempt to meld them together (Descola and
Pálsson, 1996). I would rather use landscape to invoke describe the social and
culturally-based interactions with the environment, rather than trying to rehabilitate
‘nature’ analytically for the social sciences. In a further conceptualisation of
landscape, Werner Krauss writes: ‘A landscape is neither natural nor cultural; it
designates that activity which brings forth the “animated space” in which we can live
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our lives and live them as securely as possible’ (Krauss 2010, 199). He goes on to
espouse a regionalised approach to explore landscapes of wind energy in northern
Germany in which fishermen, farmers, nature conservationists and now wind energy
protagonists compete for the ability to carry out the activities each sees as most
appropriate. I certainly concur that landscape is neither cultural nor natural, but also
seek to explore temporality and movement in situations where designations of
‘nature’ are made. I want to help continue the move from the generalities of nature to
the specificities of landscape.
Institutional natures in Orkney
How might we begin to consider the development of these specific and regional
landscapes? I want to start by turning back to the wider discourse, particularly that of
ecological science, but still maintaining a regional perspective that fits with the
lifeworlds of actors. In northern Scotland, the classic study of human ecology is Frank
Fraser Darling’s West Highland Survey (Darling, 1956). It begins with the premise
that the Highlands is ‘largely a devastated terrain’, a non-functioning ecology
characterised by the loss of both human population and the ‘native habitat’ of tree
cover. For Darling, the Highland landscape had been stable but had its equilibrium
destroyed with the ending of the clan system at the defeat of the Jacobite uprising in
1746. The challenge for ‘development’ in Darling’s terms would be to return to the
equilibrium. Drawing on ecological science in the mould of Frederic Clements Plant
Succession (Clements, 1916), the encouragement of the ‘climax vegetation’ of native
tree species would help improve the soil and increase the productivity of crofting, the
small-scale diversified tenant agriculture of north west Scotland. Symbolically,
nature, including the crofters who were seen as living close to nature, needed to be
made complete and functional again.
Fraser Darling’s study resulted in the setting up of the Highlands and Islands
Development Board in 1965, which, uniquely amongst development efforts in
Scotland up to that time, had responsibility for community and social development as
well as economic progress. Through a series of grants the HIDB encouraged greater
productivity from the crofts and farms, rather than the ‘unnatural’ bare moorland that
had hitherto been developed in the large Highland estates for grouse shooting and
deer stalking. Farmers and crofters were encouraged to bring more of this land into
production. From the farmers’ and crofters’ point of view, ‘nature conservation’
began when these attempts to improve productivity from the hill land started to be
challenged.
FIGURE 1 HERE
I draw on my fieldwork in the Orkney Islands here in order to continue this
narrative. Situated just to the north of mainland Scotland, Orkney is an archipelago of
approximately 70 islands, 20 of which are inhabited by a population of around 20,000.
Nearly 2000 people are currently employed in agriculture (2009 figures; Orkney
Islands Council, 2010). I carried out ethnographic fieldwork there in 2000-2001 and
2005 for a total of fourteen months. Despite having relatively intensive cattle and
sheep farming that make Orkney economically and socially close to lowland north
east Scotland, the northerly latitude and varied topography mean that there are still
large areas of unimproved heather and peat, as well as coastal maritime heath, wet
land and other habitats which together support a distinctive array of biodiversity.
5
Notable species include the Orkney Vole (a sub-species of Microtus arvalis) and the
Scottish Primrose (Primula scotica), together with substantial sea bird, raptor and
migratory goose populations.
The history of nature conservation in Orkney can from one perspective be linked
to the overall history of nature conservation on wider national and international
scales, as ‘wild’ and remote places came to be valued for their natural qualities
(Evans, 1997). But there is also a more regional history: North Sea oil has since the
mid-1970s been enormously influential economically and socially in Orkney and its
northern neighbour Shetland, but it also heralded the rise of specific environmental
concerns. The installation of an oil terminal on the island of Flotta resulted in frequent
visits by oil tankers to the notoriously dangerous waters of the Pentland Firth between
Orkney and mainland Scotland. Contingency plans for oil spills have been in place
since the beginning of the oil developments. Orkney Field Club, founded in 1961 in
the interest of the ‘natural and cultural heritages of the county’ still maintains a survey
of birds that are found oiled on beaches in Orkney, as a check on pollution from Flotta
oil terminal and the tankers.
For particular people in Orkney, and especially farmers, nature conservation
often became present even more abruptly as an institutional presence. An account
from my fieldwork will illustrate this. I made a visit to a particular farmer, Mr Fraser,
who was known for being involved in a number of different ‘environmental’ projects
in Orkney. We walked around his farm and he showed me some of the types of
environmental land management that he undertook. These were mostly done in return
for some form of compensatory subsidy payment (the details of which have changed
over the years), although there was also a piece of wetland that he maintained as his
‘own contribution’ as he put it. He went on to tell me the story of his first practical
contact with nature conservation.
Around 1984-5, Mr Fraser said, he had intended to drain some wet land and
convert it to arable using funding from a particular scheme run by the HIDB. An
official from the Department of Agriculture came for an inspection prior to the grant
being awarded, as was usual. But the official said, according to Mr Fraser, ‘well I
don’t think we can give money for this, it’ll not be good for the environment.’ Mr
Fraser continued: ‘And it was like he was talking a different language. I didn’t
understand what it was about.’ It turned out that the funding scheme for the first time
had provisions for ‘the environment’ and any agricultural ‘improvements’ made
would have to take account of their effects on it. By such means, from the 1980s
onwards, the farmers’ land was discursively made over from their actual
surroundings, the fields, hills and water courses, into an object that was being
damaged by the actions of farming. Through its incorporation into agri-environment
schemes, the land became ‘nature’, an identifiable and static non-human world
(Castree, 2005; Coates, 2005) from which, farmers often felt, any departure or change
would seen as be detrimental.
Alongside the loss of subsidy for farmers wanting to work on unimproved land,
new legislation in 1981 put the onus on farmers to inform a state agency, the Nature
Conservancy Council, of any ‘Potentially Damaging Operations’ that they intended to
undertake on land specifically designated by the Conservancy as a Site of Special
Scientific Interest. One significant effect of this was to require landowners to consult
on any proposed changes of land use within the SSSI, which in Orkney is a full onethird of the land area – much more than other parts of the country. Many of the SSSIs
are on hill land, and farmers felt that they would be unable to alter sheep stocking
rates or to drain or change the management of what they often saw as under-used
6
parts of their land. From their perspective it seemed completely unreasonable to
attempt to limit their own management of the land, summed up by the reckoning that
their own on-going practice of farming had actually made the land as it was. How
could restricting their practices improve the land from its current state? Although the
legislation only formally required consultation rather than entirely banning drainage
or reclamation, the example above shows that the new principles did begin to have
concrete effects on farms.
In local discourse as remembered my informants, and frequently in the local
newspaper, those involved in promulgating such schemes and regulations were called
‘nature conservationists’ as a group – a name that reflected the way farmers felt their
land was being defined as nature by them. At the height of the arguments in 1984
meanwhile, what were thought to be effigies of two of these nature conservationists
were found hanged from a telegraph pole near one of the contested areas of hill land
(The Orcadian, 10/5/84). Even in my first fieldwork in 2000, a set-piece debate on
whether Orkney farmers should move toward organic agriculture took place that also
turned on notions of nature conservation. The speaker ‘for’ the motion set his
argument firmly in the global narrative of nature conservation (Ingold 1993), referring
to Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring to evoke a sense of the fragile nature of the
planet. He was well beaten in the debate by a local college lecturer who outlined an
alternative notional ‘Orkney Organic’ label that would recognise the care for the land
displayed by Orkney farmers but would allow the quantities of inorganic fertiliser
seen as necessary to keep the land in good production. It is nature as defined by what
were felt to be non-local interests that has been so fiercely resisted by many Orkney
inhabitants.
Udal land tenure: the significance of a regional tradition
A specifically local landscape history shaped the responses to nature conservation and
agri-environmental schemes. Of particular relevance here is the fact that appeals
against the nature conservationists were sometimes made by farmers by invoking the
udal land tenure system, which historically was present in large parts of Orkney as
part of the islands’ Norse heritage. Udal tenure was a form of private land ownership
that was based on an unwritten right to occupy the land and in which land was
transferred by partible inheritance (split equally between siblings) rather than
according to primogeniture (where the whole estate goes to the first-born) as in the
Scottish feudal system which began to be introduced in the 16th century. In Nordic
udal systems, if the first-born male does have rights to the main farm, he has to
recompense his siblings either financially or more commonly in other parcels of land,
resulting in a characteristically fragmented pattern of land ownership (Thorsteinsson,
2008). In Orkney I was told by a number of farmers and other amateur historians – a
kind of common local knowledge – that the udal rights applied ‘from the top of the
hill to the bottom of the foreshore’: the full extent of the landscape, in other words,
including even the sea shore that elsewhere in the UK is Crown property.
Discussions of the rights have cropped up over the years in popular discourse,
often hosted by the local newspaper, The Orcadian (on 21/4/1949 and 18/4/1985, for
example, and more recently on the status of the foreshore in Orkney). Farmers
sometimes contended that udal rights also precluded what they saw as incursions into
their hill land by nature conservation interests – the ‘top of the hill’ clause as they
understood it. Sometimes the udal rights have been directly invoked in disputes, as
this (summarised) tale, told to me in 2000, shows.
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Mr Scott: In Evie, there were I think about a dozen small farms that had land as
I do, right up the hill, to the next parish boundary, which would have been
Birsay in that case. One elderly person was going to sell their land, I think they
were just retired, beyond farming and had no family to succeed them. And they
discovered that all their hill land had been confiscated. And, the [nature
conservation organisation] had the title deed for it. So they had obviously
spoken to their neighbours, and totally unknown their neighbour’s land had all
gone as well. Well, you see, being udal land, there was no title deed necessary,
no physical title deed necessary. The organisation cottoned onto this, and they
thought this was land with no titles, no-one owned it, and they’d deliberately
made no local enquiries, and they went and registered a title for it. And so all the
owners came to the Council, extremely perplexed, and er, the organisation were
summoned to the Council to explain themselves, oh and they were so arrogant,
they wouldn’t admit they were wrong. So, [the organisation were taken to
court]. And they wouldn’t even then back down. [In the end the cases were won]
and all the landowners got their land back.1
For Mr Scott and his neighbours, the actions of the nature conservation
organisation were certainly intrusive. Aside from the legal aspects, one characteristic
of the intrusion was that it attempted to make the land over as nature, outside inherited
and historic activities of farming in the udal tradition. What the farmers saw as their
outright ownership of all their land meant that there could never be any ‘nature’
existing ‘out there’ in a spatial sense, as if apart and separated from the land they
worked. However, rendering the land as nature effectively prohibited its continuing
development in time as part of the farm. For some people in Orkney, udal rights
functioned as a historical resource with which to resist the idea of nature being
brought to the islands.
Udal land tenure has not always been looked upon fondly by farmers, however.
A paper by the Orcadian historian J. S. Clouston in the Journal of the Orcadian
Agricultural Discussion Society (one of the many ‘improvement’ local associations in
Scotland from the 19th century onwards), describes runrig land ownership and its
accompanying udal system of inheritance, taking every opportunity to castigate it for
lacking the possibility of progress and improvement (Clouston, 1927). Clouston
argued that because in runrig systems good and bad land were shared out equally and
many farming tasks were organised communally, udal tenure was the most
‘mischievous barrier in the way of agricultural development that the wit of men ever
devised’. Discussing records of Orkney landholding from 1683, he concludes: ‘again
we see the same principle at work. No enterprise allowed. No getting up earlier in the
morning than your neighbour, or taking one step in advance of the easiest-going of
them. He set the pace and you had to follow, otherwise it would not have been “fair”.
In fact, runrigism was fairness gone clean daft.’ (ibid., p. 78).
Clouston’s attitude towards Norse udal inheritance varies from the common
renditions of the Orkney ‘Golden Age’ of the Norse Earldoms in the 9th – 13th
centuries. Usually, the important position of Orkney in Norse world is emphasised
together with the heroic deeds of the protagonists in the Orkneyinga Saga, and
Clouston himself promulgated this view of Orkney in his historical writings
(Clouston, 1932). More recently however, historian William Thomson argued that it is
possible in Orkney to ‘reveal other “Periods of Greatness”, notably the truly heroic
struggle to reclaim land and modernise farming in the nineteenth century’ (Thomson,
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1987: xiv), and it is this discourse that Clouston joined in his JOADS paper. While
udal land tenure can be viewed in different ways in Orkney, what comes through in
many cases is the way it is used to underline farming values. In the positive
renditions, it is a symbol of independence and local strength. Clouston’s negativity is
unsurprisingly not widespread in Orkney discourse, yet even that was presented in the
name of ‘good’ farming values. In my fieldwork, even those who disagreed with the
standard historical interpretation of udal land rights, and those who had no overt
interest in the subject at all, maintained a similar reckoning of the importance of
customary use and habitation of land in Orkney, in contrast to what was perceived as
a legalistic intrusion by outsiders.
While Orkney and Shetland were incorporated into Scotland in 1468, udal land
tenure diminished gradually. Land was owned by the Crown and by the church, and
feudal tenure, involving the payment of duties to the feudal superior rather than
outright ownership, came to dominate. Although feudal tenure was formerly abolished
by the newly constituted Scottish Parliament in 2000, rural Scotland retains a highly
concentrated pattern of land ownership in which large proportion of the land is owned
by relatively few people (Wightman, 1996). These forms of land tenure are relevant to
the discussion of nature conservation and farming in both direct and symbolic senses.
An association exists between the Highland estates and the emergence of a wilderness
nature ethic, can be tied discursively to the ‘Clearances’ of many crofter communities
from their land in the 19th century (Mackenzie, 2006; Richards, 2000). Nature
conservationists can easily be perceived by current local populations to take on the
trappings of colonialism, as Mr Scott describes in the story retold above (cf Anderson
and Berglund, 2003). In the context of the estates, the landowners’ self-identification
with the seemingly natural and timeless qualities of the land has served to support
certain forms of land management – especially sporting interests in game shooting –
while reducing the possibility for others (Lorimer, 2000). In Orkney, however,
another dynamic exists: the continuing claims to a udal heritage mirror the symbolic
independence of the farmers, and plays into the construction of difference between
Orkney and Highland Scotland.
Moving in farm landscapes
Through the course of their work, farmers are keenly aware of the land around them.
As they move, they observe, or to put it another way, their attentive observations are
made in and through movement. In conceptual terms we can note how observation on
the move contrasts to a static gaze as if from a hilltop; where the latter produces a
single image, the former is about depth and sensory integration (Lee and Ingold,
2006; Wylie, 2002, see introduction to this volume). If bodily movements enable the
sensory perceptions that the farmers engage in, do they also ground the senses of
landscape described in the previous section? Can we say that the udal landscape exists
not just in history books and discourse, but in the material qualities of the land and the
interactions the farmers have with it?
In an immediate sense, ways of moving on the farm correspond of course to the
type of work being carried out. For farmers, looking after cattle or sheep requires a
mobile, close-up attention to the animals and their land, and while tractors or quad
bikes are sometimes used for transport, farmers also spend time walking around
through their fields. Joining some of them on their short journeys around the farm, I
saw how they dealt with their environments in an immediate fashion, always
responding to the specifics of their land. One farmer with cliff-top fields, Mr
9
Davidson, undertakes a daily walk when his sheep are in that area, and together on
one occasion we checked the windy cliffs and field drains for any sheep in trouble.
We knelt down and let the sheep approach us to better see their condition: a pause in
our movement to encourage the animals to move in the way we wanted. During our
walk the farmer noted the quality of the grass and the kinds of plants growing their –
again, not always referring to species as such, but broader categories of rough grass
(also described as ‘nutritious heath’ at one point) and green, sugary grass. A balance
is needed between them for productive sheep farming, Mr Davidson said, reflecting
once more the sense of contrast in the landscape that Orkney farmers feel is
appropriate. At the same time farmers also keep an eye on the state of gates, fences,
ditching and other features of the farm landscape on these journeys.
Mr Scott had been keen to impress on me that at one time at least in Orkney,
‘every farmer was a naturalist’, citing the influence of the well-known Orcadian
naturalist and poet, Robert Rendell. Although my fieldwork with contemporary
farmers suggested that this is no longer always the case, with relatively few being
interested in the particular bird or flowers on their land, there is a widespread notion
that farming has created the landscape in Orkney in the way that it is, which includes
all the non-human life to be found there. The farmers certainly do appreciate and
value the qualities of the land, but in terms of natural history they more usually refer
to (and appreciate) a grouping such as ‘songbird’ rather than a particular species such
as a corn bunting. The sensory attachment to songbirds in particular is clear. On the
other hand, they also recognise and are involved with particular species that they see
as affecting their farming. Hooded crows may on occasion attack sheep, various types
of geese eat grass intended for grazing or silage, leatherjackets (crane fly larvae) eat
the roots of grass, while a variety of weeds such as thistle can also be damaging in
specific ways. This is not to suggest that farmers oppose a categorical understanding
of some wildlife with a species-specific understanding of others (such as pests). But
their lack of a distinction between human and non-human worlds fits best with
Williams’ (1976) broad sense of nature as ‘material world’, which I find best to
characterise as landscape. They deal with non-human and non-agricultural plants and
animals primarily through their mobile and close-up work on the farm.
Mr Davidson called the particular walk I joined him on his ‘business walk’,
marking out a difference from a recreational stroll. In similar journeys farmers indeed
were not likely to spend much time admiring views or bird watching, and tractor work
also virtually precludes those kinds of activities. But this is not to say that there is a
completely strict division between the categories of work and recreation. Mr
Davidson later talked about how he judged whether his young daughter could walk
out to these cliff tops on her own, a judgement made in part according to the
experience of the land gained during the ‘business walks’. When the weather allows
the whole family picnics amongst these cliffs and bays, an area which is also popular
amongst the wider community. Orkney farmers are very aware that others are likely to
be moving around their land, ranging from predominantly locals with some tourists in
Mr Davidson’s situation, to potentially large numbers of tourists in other parts of
Orkney.
The sensibilities towards landscape that these journeys in farmland by nonfarmers involve are important. As mentioned earlier, EU farm subsidies have been
moving for some time towards the provision of environmental services from farm
land, while at the same time increasing the influence of the market upon the farm
economy (Sutherland, 2010). The UK Single Farm Payment system fixes the amount
of subsidy each farm receives on the basis of recent management with the proviso that
10
environmental standards are met. Increasingly, environmentalists recognise that
nature conservation should not take place just for abstract ends, but also for the
improvement of particular places where people live and move.
Linked to this are the recent outdoor access reforms also introduced by the
Scottish Parliament, this time as part of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 (Sellar,
2006). Farmland thus is potentially part of the broader landscape through which
people are able to move for recreational or practical reasons. Farmers in Orkney
varied in their responses to the prospect of the new access rights, which at the time of
writing are still in the process of being fully implemented. Some were apprehensive
about a new influx of people inexperienced at moving through farm land and amongst
animals, either worrying that they would be liable for any accidents people had on
their land, or that farming operations would be disrupted. More rarely expressed,
though sometimes implicitly present, was more fundamental opposition to public
access, perhaps from a reluctance to shift from the ‘outright ownership’ model of
landscape in udal tenure. Most were more phlegmatic, either figuring that the public
would not often actually want to walk through the square, open fields that make up
most of the farm landscape, or that the subsidies available for new paths might
provide a handy addition to income (much in the same way that agri-environment
schemes can be looked upon instrumentally). In Mr Davidson’s case, there was even
satisfaction that much better access to locally-valued land could now be provided.
Walkers themselves have taken advantage of these new rights only gradually.
Far from an invasion of access-takers, access to farmland still happens largely
according to accepted norms. I have found some Bed and Breakfast owners who act
as intermediaries between tourists and farmers in rural areas, suggesting local walks
that were acceptable to the farmers, or making a phone call to check on farm
operations. I spoke to one regular local walker who lives near Kirkwall in Orkney
who emphasised the familiarity that the farmers have built up with him: the farmers
say to him ‘you’re ok, we know it’s you.’ He and his walking companion both wear
bright orange jackets which became easily recognised by the farmers. Other locals
and indeed tourists join the Orkney Rambling Club where the walks are quite
carefully controlled. Walking guides and route maps are also available and there are
leaflets and booklets promoting the new access rights.
FIGURE 2 HERE
The ‘nature’ perceived by these walkers is, perhaps unsurprisingly, mobile,
dynamic and close at hand and is thus similar that of the farmers’. The Kirkwall
walker mentioned above spoke to me of the pleasure of being in a relatively ordinary
landscape in which, nonetheless, ‘things are different every year’. That year, he said,
had been a particularly good one for dandelions, not usually thought of as spectacular
but during walks they had collectively made an impression. Walking amongst
swallows as they swoop and fly around you, and noticing the birds of prey, the
bonxies (Great Skua) and the rarer flowers too, were for him experiences to be
enjoyed for their transience. Nature for him, and for similar walkers, is not so much a
contrast with the domestic world, as if separated from the sphere of culture (cf Coates,
2005, p3), because in Orkney many of these flowers and birds can be found in and
around houses, especially outside of town. But it is also very much not a static or
fixed designation that is forever the same. Although Orkney has a designated ‘Area of
Outstanding Natural Beauty’ (Selman and Swanwick 2010) in the West Mainland and
Hoy, I have rarely felt that either tourists or locals were seeking out the scenic views
11
or vistas that are more usually associated with nature in the static sense in Highland
Scotland. Rather than flocking to a ‘honey-pot’ site (as popular visiting spots are
known in the recreation industry further south), walkers in Orkney are as likely to
pick a way along a piece of coastline to a beach, or along some farm tracks to a
prehistoric burial cairn. Nature is to be found in small, sometimes seemingly ordinary
encounters, and is likely to be tied up with the heritage of farming and the landscapes
of human habitation.
It is, I think, worth including the voices and perspectives of these non-farmers in
thinking about the value and management of farm land and agri-environmental
schemes. In western Norway, Eiter notes differences in landscape preferences
amongst farmers and walkers: features in the land that prevent movement may be
disliked when needing to move past them yet appreciated in other contexts as scenery
(Eiter, 2010). In Orkney discussion tends to be centred less on the grand features of
mountainous areas and more on the qualities of the land itself and what kinds of
plants and animals live or are grown there. While farmers themselves may vary in the
extent to which they are formally knowledgeable about biodiversity, they are needless
to say extremely attentive to their land, and also aware of other people who may wish
to access it. A case could be made not so much for pushing farmers along a
continuum from passive to active participation in agri-environment schemes (Morris
and Potter, 1995), but in encouraging local populations (including their families and
neighbours) and tourists, to take part in similar ways of appreciating the land,
including its regional traditions, as well as the biodiversity, as they do.
In this, perhaps, walking even shares some characteristics with the old udal land
tenure of Orkney farmers. Ownership in this case is collected together on the ground,
in the landscape, rather than planned hierarchically through a bureaucracy. It is shared
out equally (with fairness) as it changes hands. The land is divided or gathered again
at each generation, and so, unlike an institutional nature, it is never really complete in
time or space. In both walking and farming, the participative activity of humanenvironment relations is important, in contrast to the static spectacle of completed
nature. So where institutional reckonings of nature have often closed off the powerladen relations of land ownership and management, personal engagements with nature
have the potential to explore, disclose, and connect to the richness of the contexts in
which they are still situated. The farmers and walkers I describe here would not,
therefore, feel the need to overcome a nature-culture dichotomy, but farmers are often
still searching for ways to resist the intrusion of a variety of nature that is alien to their
own experiences of landscape, while walkers may not pay any attention to whether an
area is designated as ‘natural’ or not. They have to deal with the institutional
representations and designations of nature while being infused with the pleasures and
difficulties of actual contact with the non-human world.
Conclusion
There is therefore a tension between the accounts of responsiveness and openness in
the walkers’ and farmers’ landscape and how the institutional senses of nature are
perceived. For many farmers the latter speak primarily of closure and completedness,
which is at odds with the openness and senses of contrast and balance that they
perceive and appreciate. While the farmers and walkers discussed here appreciate
contact with the non-human world, they perceive change and movement in the
environment in ways different to the more rigid temporality often implied in ‘nature’.
It may very well be that a shift has occurred in the Western understanding of nature
12
that emphasises manipulation of the non-human world. For example,
Sivaramakrishnan and Vaccaro (2006, p. 303) argue that the ‘postindustrial problem
of nature (...) is of wilding and taming nature at the same time, and doing so for a
growing human population, spread across different classes of society, for whom there
are no stable referents for nature in their remembered past or in spatial proximity to
their living environment.’ Without stable referents for nature, it is perhaps not
surprising that environmentalists who the farmers here deal with have moved to a
discourse both more specific and temporal – processes of wilding and taming – than
than the stasis usually implied by ‘nature’. Such changes are in keeping with shifts in
ecological science. As part of a ‘new ecology’, mathematical concepts of nonequilibrium theory and non-linear systems have provided the basis for much more
specific and contingent histories of our environments, involving progression without
simple regulatory feedback mechanisms (Scoones, 1999). The ecology of Darling and
Clements was structural-functionalist in outlook – the climax community was held to
function like an organism maintained by its connected organs – and an analogy can be
drawn between the new non-equilibrium ecologies and the emergence of poststructuralist theorising of nature in the social sciences (Barbour, 1995; Massey, 2006).
In West Highland Survey, Darling’s crofters were to be saved both by increasing
agricultural productivity and a return of forest wilderness, a beguiling but still
totalising grand vision.
The search for non-deterministic, partial and contingent accounts of nature is a
significantly better fit with how people in Orkney – including, increasingly, the
environmentalists – actually understand their lifeworlds. For farmers in particular, hill
land should be well within the routine movements and rhythms of work that are
antithetical to the completedness of nature. As they work their land and animals, they
bring the marginal landscapes that are often designated as nature into their ordinary
world of lived-in time. One result of the conflict between farmers and
environmentalists over previous decades is that now it is actually very rare to hear any
reference to ‘nature’ from the people in Orkney who used to be known as nature
conservationists. Instead they speak and write of ‘biodiversity’, ‘habitat’ and
‘sustainability’, a new terminology which, they hope, does not have the connotation
of either separation from the people living there (reified as ‘the community’) or a
blanket preservation against change. Environmentalists too, therefore, seem to
recognise that nature in these institutional forms stands apart from ordinary progress,
ordinary movement, in time as well as space. In conversations with me, they
recognised these shifts in language and practice in dealing with farmers and other
local residents, attempting to work ‘with’ individuals and communities as much as
‘on’ the nature they find around them.
For the farmers, there is in fact no inherent contradiction between an agricultural
landscape and one that is available for recreation and replete with ‘nature’ – no
contradiction between the two landscapes I identified at the start of this paper. The
divergence was only ever caused by institutionalised nature conservation discourses
that separated the lifeworld of farmers from the physical environment in which they
live, from the 1980s onwards. While farmers both then and now did not deny that
farming had sometimes gone ‘too far’, what they continue to seek is a landscape of
contrasts where highly productive land sits easily alongside the rough grass, the
heather and the coast. Drawing on their udal heritage, they speak of a regional
landscape tradition which agri-environmental schemes find it difficult to engage with,
even where local implementation allows for a certain amount of negotiation (Morris
2006, Sutherland 2010).
13
Finally, the way that people move through the land in Orkney is intrinsic to their
understandings of it. Through their close-up sensorial experiences, farmers and
walkers both attest to the significance of landscape rather than nature. Noting changes
in the state of the land and the plants and animals that inhabit it with them, they
appreciate their own role in making and maintaining the land and keeping good
relations with all aspects of it. A conservation ethic that denied these roles would
certainly be met with resistance. Schemes that promote active management of the
land, good public access and the maintenance of regional landscape traditions are
much more likely to find success than those which do not.
Note
1. A version of these events was recorded in The Orcadian 11/7/1985, and in
subsequent issues. Mr Scott did name the organisation but I choose to keep it
anonymous here.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all those in Orkney who gave their time to help with this
research, especially Mr Davidson and his family. I also thank the anonymous referees
for their comments on previous versions of this paper. Its first incarnation was
presented at the ‘Performing Nature at the World’s Ends’ seminar hosted by the
Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo in 2007. Funding for the
research was provided by the University of Aberdeen and the UK Economic and
Social Research Council (RES-000-23-0312).
14
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Figure 1: Fence, field, loch and hill in West Mainland, Orkney.
Figure 2: Recreational walking in Orkney.
19