Paper short abstract:

The theme of this paper is to analyse the way in which hill sheep farming people produce a sense of emplacement and belonging through their farming activities in what to outsiders is the foreboding and relatively unproductive landscape of the Scottish borderlands.

Paper long abstract:

The theme of this paper is to analyse the way in which hill sheep farming people produce a sense of emplacement and belonging in what to outsiders is the foreboding and relatively unproductive landscape of the Scottish borderlands. This sense of home is the produce of three level of movement and consequent attachment to the land that results in a consubstantial relation between person and place. The first level is the way in which generations of hill sheep move over particular locales in the hill grazing, giving birth to and nurturing their lambs and in doing so genetically adapt to the specificities of the landscape. The second level is the organisation of shepherding such that a single herd is responsible for the care and quality of a group of sheep inhabiting a defined area of the hills. As a result of this care which involves a herd's movement around the area inhabited by the sheep, they are seen to embody the stockmanship and skills that define the social personhood of a shepherd. Third, the way in which a matriline of sheep become adapted and bond to the land on which they reside is used as a genetic metaphor for the way a farming family bonds to the land of the farm such that family and farm are experienced as consubstantial.