A day of enlightenment and a question

 LotH was battling with the soft furnishing departments of the Edinburgh stores so I withdrew and  took the opportunity to visit a place I had always meant to go but, because it is so easy to  reach, had never done so.

Hailes Castle in East Lothian

Hailes Castle was the home of the Dalrymple family so, when David Dalrymple purchased the Palladian mansion near Musselburgh from its architect, James Smith, it became New Hailes and, eventually, Newhailes.

It typified the move of the Scottish aristocracy from the tough defenders of embattled strongholds against both local and cross-border attackers in various combinations and alliances, to cultivated men of educated tastes and interests. 

Newhailes

 The Union of the Parliaments and the creation of Great Britain in 1707 created a peaceful environment for learning to flourish and led on to the phenomenon of the Scottish Enlightenment

In Scotland, the wide base of literacy, and a collaborative spirit among the key thinkers of the day, meant that when world class philosophers emerged, their ideas were taken on board, developed, and - most importantly - applied by others whose interests ranged from economics through medicine, engineering, geology, law, archeology, physics, chemistry, biology, history and more. The result was astonishing and has since been described as the greatest outpouring of intellectual and scientific accomplishment seen in any nation at any time in history.

New Hailes and David Dalrymple, the 3^rd Baronet were part of this great interaction of enquiring minds. The library with its huge collection of books was described by Samuel Johson as “the most learned drawing room in Europe”

The Library now denuded of books

The gardens and grounds were designed to stimulate the senses with outstanding views and specific features added such as the grotto which was associated with thought and contemplation. The poet and satirist, Alexander Pope, had a grotto dug at his Palladian villa in Twickenham.

The Shell Grotto

A more mundane tunnel was excavated at Newhailes to allow servants access to the house from their separate quarters without the upper classes having their contemplation spoiled by the coming and going of the lower orders!

The walkways and viewpoints are still there but the hoi polloi now have the freedom to roam the paths and the views have been somewhat marred by the march of progress.

The chimneys of Cockenzie power station providing a different sort of enlightenment for the masses

The spread of ideas from the philosophic to the practical with the work of Hutton in geology: Black in chemistry and physics: Cullen in medicine, chemistry and agriculture: Watt in steam engineering: Murdoch in gas lighting; Walker in natural history, resulted in changes in society that those who inspired them could never have foreseen.

The windows of the great library, and many others in the house are now blind, mainly as a result of internal alterations. Somehow they seem symbolic of the intellectual blindness that followed that most glorious time when the Enlightenment finally succumbed to religiosity and romanticism.

Blind windows

 Would that eighteenth century outpouring of  philosophic and scientific thought that came to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment and that influenced western society to this day, have happened without the Act of Union?       We will never know.