I wrote something once, I think it was contained in the blog post ‘Posthuman’, about how nature, scenery, landscape is given a different spin when you put a human element into it. Almost nothing is pure and untouched wilderness nowadays. There is precious little of that on the planet left, maybe only in places like middle Russia, northern china, Australia, Canada, Argentina etc.
Here, despite the lack of actual roads connecting the Highlands, there is always hydroelectric roads and forestry tracks. We are never far away from that. How much is a wood scene enhanced by an old stone wall, signs of bygone days; no modernity though, that sucks. The road going through Glencoe gives a sense of scale to the glen from the mountaintops. The windfarms a sense of distance, or one of size if you’re closer.
These monstrosities do need to be capped thought. There are a lot of them now and if these big renewable energy companies are as environmentally friendly as their public face they wouldn’t be big energy corporations. They are not interested in protecting anything, merely putting out another industry for theirs. An industry that provides less workforce. Another issue but we’ll leave it here with the abandoned doocots, cow sheds and yes, homes from the land as an image, adding only to the beauty of outdoor scenes and enhancing nature’s capabilities in showing us awe and the sublime.