Making for Home: A Tale of the Scottish Borders Tait, Alan

As a child living in a bleak coastal village on the Solway Firth during World War II, Alan Tait’s Dr Barnardo’s papier mâché collection box, with its thatched roof and chimney, represented a different world, a bright and safe one, and inspired him to imagine the homes that might lie in his future, and to invent the rooms he might inhabit. From such simple beginnings grew a lifelong obsession with houses and collecting. In Making for Home, Alan Tait traces his journey from childhood imaginings to a tenement flat in Glasgow in the 1960s to the Moffat Valley, in the Scottish Borders, where he bought a remote farmhouse in the 1970s, since when he has overseen its restoration and renewal during four decades of continuing change. Making for Home is at once a memoir, a meditation on the nature of buildings and home, and a history of this unique place, from earliest times, through the hunting of the Convenanters in the 1680s and the agricultural revolution, to the arrival of the Forestry Commission, which changed the landscape of the Valley forever, and beyond. The result is a lament, but not a dirge—for the valley will always move on and give shelter to men and animals.  

Alan Tait is an art historian with a particular interest in the history of landscape. He is the author of The Landscape Garden in Scotland 1735-1835 and A Garden in the Hills.