{"id":6842,"date":"2013-03-17T11:38:58","date_gmt":"2013-03-17T11:38:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/?p=6842"},"modified":"2013-03-17T11:38:58","modified_gmt":"2013-03-17T11:38:58","slug":"what-the-scottish-highlands-could-have-been-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/what-the-scottish-highlands-could-have-been-like\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Scottish Highlands could have been like"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><figure style=\"width: 240px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/humpalumpa\/4959398215\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm5.staticflickr.com\/4124\/4959398215_8896d88ba6_m.jpg\" alt=\"Scotland - Grampian Highlands\" width=\"240px\" class=\"size-thumbnail\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/humpalumpa\/4959398215\/\">Scotland &#8211; Grampian Highlands<\/a>, a photo by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/humpalumpa\/\">Humpalumpa<\/a> on Flickr.<\/figcaption><\/figure>Iain Macwhirter recently wrote an interesting <a href=\"http:\/\/iainmacwhirter2.blogspot.co.uk\/2013\/03\/the-pyrennees-are-just-like-highlands.html\">blog posting<\/a> comparing the Scottish Highlands with the French Pyrenees.<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s bemoaning how the latter is still populated and full of affordable housing.  As he ways, &#8220;[o]ne of the reasons I love the Pyrenees is that it&#8217;s what I imagine the Highlands of Scotland would have been like had the people not been cleared from the land to make way for sheep and deer.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This sentiment reminded me of a song by <a href=\"http:\/\/gd.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/M%C3%A0iri_Mh%C3%B2r_nan_%C3%92ran\">M\u00e0iri Mh\u00f3r nan Oran<\/a> that we learnt when I attended the Gaelic summer school at the University of Edinburgh a few years before I moved to Scotland.  I&#8217;ve forgotten the exact words, but I still remember her despair at seeing perfectly viable farms with replaced with sheep.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know how realistic it would be to reverse the process, but it shouldn&#8217;t be dismissed out of hand.  The Central Belt is overcrowded, and it would be great if people started moving back to the Highlands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Iain Macwhirter recently wrote an interesting blog posting comparing the Scottish Highlands with the French Pyrenees. He&#8217;s bemoaning how the latter is still populated and full of affordable housing. As he ways, &#8220;[o]ne of the reasons I love the Pyrenees is that it&#8217;s what I imagine the Highlands of Scotland would have been like had the people not been cleared from the land to make way for sheep and deer.&#8221; This sentiment reminded me of a song by M\u00e0iri Mh\u00f3r nan Oran that we learnt when I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,110,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-geography","category-scotland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6842\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}