The Legend of Brigadoon: Architecture, Identity and Choice in the Scottish Highlands

Since the nineteenth century two distinct domestic architectural traditions in the Scottish Highlands have been interpreted in Britain as representative of Highland and Scottish identity. But Scotland’s positive national identification with both the indigenous turf-walled and thatched Highland blackhouse and the imposed white, regular forms of the ‘improved cottage’ and farmhouse of the eighteenth-century have failed to understand the historical relationships between the two architectural traditions and Scottish Gaels, or Highlanders. The aim of this paper is to examine these historic relationships, to consider the misinterpretations of Romanticism and the Folklorists, and to question the Scottish Government’s current regionalist planning policy.