Introduction
As I understand it, the Scots Gaelic word dùthchas derives from “dú/dùth”, meaning “earth” or “land”. However, it has several related meanings. It can refer to hereditary right or claim, birthright, heritage, native or ancestral home, kindred affection, and innate quality, and it stresses the interconnectedness of people, land, culture, and an ecological balance among all entities, human and more than human. We have no equivalent in English, although there is a trace of its sense in a phrase like ‘hefted to the hill’.
I don’t believe we can “restore” dùthchas in its traditional sense, as a felt centre of gravity, in places where it has been lost. Rather, I see it as identifying a need and something to work towards by finding new variations, or reviving old understandings, to meet that need. That work is already under way in places where a living sense of dùthchas or a local equivalent is still present and where groups of like-minded people are working to build on those traces. Work that I see as related to “wild” forms of deep mapping and its offshoots, for example recent work by Dr Sally Wetherall in Somerset. If these forms of work can be connected with the desires articulated by novels like Zoe Gilbert’s Mischief Acts (2022) or Zakia Sewell’s travel in Finding Albion (2026), then maybe new equivalents to, or revivals of dùthchas and its equivalents will begin to emerge and cohere so as to feed into the urgent and fundamental changes we so badly need.
I was initially tempted to use this essay to enlarge on the tensions Julian Cooper identifies in relation to one of his paintings, tensions around the differing values, ‘the complexities and contradictions’, of a landscape he knows well. One in which there’s an increasingly uneasy coexistence between the Romanticism that underpins the National Park, the workaday world of ‘ordinary farm life’ and the ‘industrial activity along the coast’ of Cumbria. But that would have required a long a discussion of, for example, the various manifestations of Romanticism, the fragmentation of the (British) Isles, the long historical denigration of the rural population and its relationship to the land and more. I have neither the knowledge nor time to attempt that. Instead, I’ve written this piece with some of the activities of Syndikat Gefährliche Liebschaften, Dyffryn Dyfodol, Carreg Creative , and Utopias Bach in mind, which follows on from my attending a recent meeting at which each of these groupings was represented.
To begin to think about how we might work towards more contemporary understandings of dùthchas, or of the Welsh terms cymreig/cymraeg, we need to need to understand what, historically speaking, has undermined or marginalised them as living cultural experience specific to regions or other defined localities. That knowledge is, of course, already available to those who wish to engage with it.
The socio-environmental cost of elite entitlement
In the March 2026 edition of the London Review of Books, a review by Andrew O’Hagan offers a chilling insight into the amorality, greed and squalid activity of the recently disgraced member of the royal family, a man clearly incapable of registering anything other than his own sense of entitlement. The review, which also touches on Virginia Giuffre’s Nobody’s Girl, concludes with his sharing an exchange with Lady Victoria Hervey, daughter of the 6th Marquess of Bristol, half-sister to the 7th Marquess of Bristol and Lord Nicolas Hervey, a former model and socialite who has had relationships with both the former Prince Andrew and Boyzone member Shane Lynch, and who has referred to Virginia Giuffre as “a complete whore”. O’Hagan’s review nicely captures not only the small-minded contempt on which Hervey’s world view is predicated, but something of the mentality of entitlement shared by Jacob Epstein, Peter Mandelson, Lady Hervey, Donald Trump and his acolytes, and Ghislaine Maxwell. It also suggests that this mentality is not just that of “a few bad apples” but is indicative of a sense of entitlement bound up with extreme wealth and the ownership of land and other property as a sign of status.
A sense of entitlement with very real negative consequences for a whole range of very different life-worlds. One example of this appears in Madeleine Bunting’s Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey. This provides a sobering account of the devastating historical impact of just that sense of entitlement by referring to those whose who made their money exploiting the extractive possibilities of Empire. Exploitation justified by the Victorian Lord Leverhulme by claiming that:
‘the “universal law of self interest of the individual”, the “persistent, consistent and uninterrupted effort of every right-thinking man to better his condition … a principle as unvarying as the law of gravitation”’.
Much to Leverhulme’s anger, however, the inhabitants of the Isle of Lewis rejected his “progressive” views, refusing to go along with his plans to industrialise and physically re-shape their world in ways that would have entirely severed them from their culture, based as it was on dùthchas. Leverhulme believed he was entitled to impose his version of “progress” on the island simply because he had purchased in from the Matheson family, who had previously bought it with the proceeds of selling opium to the Chinese.
The underlying tenor of the values of that C19th Lewis community was, I suggest, in essence not dissimilar to that of the eco-social psychologist James Hillman who argues, in “Man is by nature a political animal” or: patient as citizen (1994), that Self is the interiorization of community, and so is constituted of communal contingencies. A viewpoint I see reflected in the orientation of Carreg Creative and Utopias Bach towards the communities and groupings from which they’ve spring and with which they work. The C19th Lewis community’s understanding of contingency required addressing a collective need for the crofting land on which they had always depended, using methods that allowed them to support themselves in relation to the demands of the island’s ecology. Madeleine Bunting’s account highlights the fundamental historical dishonesty of a book like Jacob Rees-Mogg’s The Victorians: Twelve Titans who Forged Britain (2019), written in a clumsy attempt to justify his own unjustifiable sense of entitlement.
Bunting’s is just one of a wide range of books that lays bare the sorry history of land enclosure, clearance and marginalisation of rural Britain that has left us with the socio-environmental crisis and growing risk of food poverty we face today. These range from John Prebble’s The Highland Clearances (1973), through Steve Humphries and Beverley Hopwood’s Green and Pleasant Land: The Untold Story of Country Life in Twentieth Century Britain (1999), to Corinne Fowler’s Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections (2020) and Nick Hayes’ The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us (2020). Some books on related topics include Bella Bathurst’s Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land (2021) and Colin Trudge’s Six Steps Back to the Land: Why we need small mixed farms and millions more farmers (2016), Aune Head Arts with Beaford Arts’ Focus on Farmers: Art and Hill Farming (2007) – not least for Lucy R. Lippard’s essay ‘A Frame for Farming’ – and Rurality Re-Imagined: Villagers, Farmers, Wanders, Wild Things (2018), edited by Ben Stringer, whose essay ‘Race, Nationalism, and Landscape Belonging’ anticipates something of the argument of Zakia Sewell’s Finding Albion. Sewell’s book might, in turn, be seen as a fascinating extension, from the perspective of someone deeply involved in music, of Caroline Lucas’ Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story (2024).
Carreg Creative identifies its new project – Iaith y Pridd – as aiming to bring together ‘people from two communities, Utopias Bach collective and the cymuned Fferm Henbant – staff, trainees, visitors, volunteers, neighbours, customers – over a year (April 2026 – March 2027) at Fferm Henbant, Clynnog Fawr. I see this initiative, like Utopias Bach’s involvement with the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference, as a practical engagement with the need to reanimate the spirit of dùthchas in a form appropriate to the time and place in which those involved find themselves.