To most outsiders, the hills of the Scottish Borders are a bleak and
foreboding space - usually made to represent the stigmatized Other, Ad
Finis, by the centers of power in Edinburgh, London, and Brussels. At a
time when globalization seems to threaten our sense of place, people of
the Scottish borderlands provide a vivid case study of how the
being-in-place is central to the sense of self and identity. Since the
end of the thirteenth century, people living in the Scottish Border
hills have engaged in armed raiding on the frontier with England,
developed capitalist sheep farming in the newly united kingdom of Great
Britain, and are struggling to maintain their family farms in one of the
marginal agricultural rural regions of the European Community.
Throughout their history, sheep farmers living in these hills have
established an abiding sense of place in which family and farm have
become refractions of each other. Adopting a phenomenological
perspective, this book concentrates on the contemporary farming
practices - shepherding, selling lambs and rams at auctions - as well as
family and class relations through which hill sheep fuse people, place,
and way of life to create this sense of being-at-home in the hills.