Impact on the Countryside
The
reduced travelling time and the proliferation of rural lines meant
that tourism in Scotland flourished. The west coast line, running
from Glasgow to Fort William and completed in 1894 at a cost of
£700,000, opened up some of Scotland's most beautiful and
dramatic countryside to visitors, and the Highlands, with its
bracing fresh air and magnificent countryside, became a popular
holiday destination for the better off.
It wasn't only the scenery which attracted visitors - the chance
to get a taste of the rural lifestyle was appealing too. Callander,
for example, was the gateway to the Trossachs, where wealthy city
dwellers could indulge in their favourite pursuits like deer stalking,
shooting and fishing. For others the attraction of gentler pursuits
like refreshing walks and wildlife held sway, but it didn't take
long for a downside to be realised.
During the 1890s came the first concerns that tourism was spoiling
the region.
In 1892, the introduction to The Wild Sports and Natural History
of the Highlands spelt the problem out: The
railways driven far into wastes of trackless bog and heather,
now admit countless tourists to the most retired districts. Their
taste for shooting and fishing, and the charm of a freer life
than can be found in the great cities, have planted castles and
shooting lodges all over Scotland. But it has pressed with great
severity upon all wild life especially birds and beasts like the
osprey, kite and pine marten, that are rapidly approaching extinction.
The
conservation-against-progress arguments continued and do so today,
but for a middle-class Victorian population obsessed with Walter
Scott’s fiction, ‘tartanry’, and romantic visions
of the highlands, the appeal was too strong. People could live
out their fantasies with the help of the railways.
The fact that,
within a generation of the railway opening, people were blaming
it for the extinction of animals, that it was instrumental in
changing people’s diets through the faster delivery of food,
that a whole new industry in locomotive construction developed
in Scotland, dominating Europe by the end of the century, that
it democratised travel for many people and opened up trade routes
all over the world, all this meant that the railways formed the
nerve centre of Victorian life.
