Board 9

What Crockett Saw — Environmental Awareness and Loss

MacTaggart the forester in The Loves of Miss Anne cannot bring himself to mark the trees. His employer — the 'Improving' Sir Tempest Kilpatrick — sees them as a cash crop. MacTaggart sees living beings. Crockett presents this as moral conflict, not agricultural dispute, and in doing so anticipates an environmental consciousness that would not become common currency for another century. He was writing this for a popular audience — serialised fiction, read by ordinary working people, many of them only a generation from their rural roots.

Elsewhere in the same novel, the Drumglass Old Orchard declines not by axe but by neglect — spotted leaves, sparse fruit, wasps working through what is left — while landlord and tenant litigate over ownership, neither caring about the trees themselves. Crockett frames this as destruction by indifference. The orchard is a casualty of an argument that has nothing to do with it.

The pinewoods of the Duchrae, remembered from earliest childhood, were already gone by the time he wrote Raiderland. The silver birch at Carlinwark had fallen in the great storm. The Bogle Thorn had been cleared. His writing is, among other things, an inventory of what was lost and who failed to notice.

This is the exhibition's final claim: Crockett's fiction is the archive that formal history did not keep. Reading him is a way of reading the past of this landscape — and of staying in relationship with it now. Find your nearest tree. Climb it if you can. And take a Crockett book to read while you’re up there.