Land of my dreams
Art historian and Borders hill farmer Alan Tait reflects on his passion for houses and a sense of place
Can you tell us a bit about the Dr Barnardo’s collection box of your childhood which provided your first visualisation of “home” ? I suppose that my Dr Barnardo’s box was a physical form of security. The pennies it saved inside were a reassurance of a sort. Why I needed such a consolation I don’t now remember, but I think it must surely have been to do with the war and all the tensions it imposed on family life. Cottage life on the Solway Firth was all around us in its least sophisticated forms – no electricity, water fetched from the well, smelly and gloomy paraffin heaters – so the Barnardo’s cottage offered the alternative and a land of escape and make believe where the roses around the door were always in bloom. It was there, just around the corner and a little further along and I should keep going.
How did the Glasgow tenement you lived in in the 1960s compare with these youthful imaginings?
After digs and college rooms and all such things where the social world changed every year – and I had had eight years of it – it was a relief to find home in the tenement flat. It was of course nothing like my ideal Barnardo’s box – or much else when I come to think of. The social code of the tenement regulated life and was to be respected whatever you may have felt. It introduced me to a new form of responsibility that stood me in good stead for farming life later on.
Can you compare that Glasgow flat with where you live now?
Living in the country was always going to be different from life in a city – the more remote the more extreme the contrast – and I never did things by the half. Farming, as any farmer will tell you, is all about following the pattern set by animals and the seasons and on a hill farm, such as that we had acquired, it was a simple and straightforward way of life.
What are your thoughts on what makes a “home”?
To me a house or home has always seemed to be a place of retreat – though that probably sounds too religious. When we acquired the farm, it was after a great many stopping places along the way, so my view of what was needed and wanted was a clear one. Apart from my friend of function and form, there was my curious love of discomfort: I have always preferred a hard to a soft chair and so on and one picture rather than two.
You’ve lived in the Moffat Valley since the 1970s. How has the valley changed over the years, in ways both good and bad?
When we came here in the Seventies, the valley had seven working sheep farms: four remain. The rest have been divided and most of the hill land given over to forestry – largely the handiwork of the Forestry Commission. Consequently the number of shepherds is down to one full-time – shepherding is now a family affair or not at all – gatherings for dosing and shearing gone. The change has been to a mixed society for better or worse. I feel it could have been better managed. After all, hill farming could have been supported in the same way as crofting for it had much to offer too. But the valley looks better, houses cared for and gardens made, though the collies seem to have been replaced by labradors and we all have our mobiles.
What do you foresee for the future of the valley, and what do you consider your relationship with it?
The future for a valley such as this is fairly clear. There will be an increasing institutional presence, driving and directing the force of change. What was begun in the early Fifties with the Forestry Commission and continued with the National Trust and Border Forest Trust will move along in one way or another. All of them represent rule by committee and I have never found them to be either imaginative or democratic. So standing back and trying to look forward without over-balancing, my feelings are with the poet Norman Maccaig who wrote that “landscape is masterless and intractable in any terms that are human”. Making for Home: A Tale of the Scottish Borders by Alan Tait, Photographs by Andrea Jones,
published by Pimpernel Press at £30. www.pimpernelpress.com
To me a house or home has always seemed to be a place of retreat