Ossian’s Hall of Mirrors Nature, Artifice, and the Environmental Imagination

Abstract

This essay describes the story of a small, mirrored viewing house, located in an eighteenth-century picturesque landscape known as the Hermitage outside Dunkeld in Perthshire, Scotland. A well-known tourist destination, Ossian’s Hall allows visitors to experience the spectacular Black Linn Falls from the comfort of its mirrored interior. The foil backing of the mirrored glass is printed with references to a third-century bard named Ossian, creating the effect that fragments of image and text insert themselves between one’s own reflection and that of the furious water beyond. The resulting experience is an act of imagination, slipping between outside and inside, nature and artifice, reality and illusion, blurring the relationship between the interior and interiority.

With interiority, nothing is what it seems. Ossian was a fiction of the romantic imagination, and the viewing hall as experienced today was built in 2007 not 1806, as the little section painted on one of the mirrors suggests. What is maybe less obvious is that the landscape it looks out on has been subject to its own interiority, being simultaneously a ‘natural’ woodland and an eighteenth-century romantic picturesque landscape, while, for its original owners, the Dukes of Atholl, it was an expression of power and the trees a commercial crop. The landscape is as designed as the little mirrored hall. Why is it so difficult for us to think of nature in this way?

In answering this question, I explore Ossian’s Hall and the Hermitage using a combination of historical and archival research, autoethnography and fieldwork. I describe what I find in three layers titled history, self, and nature, that like the reflections in the mirrored interior hover over one another, which I follow with a reflection. This essay is an experiment in applying interior thinking to environmental storytelling.