Pioneer study of Scottish surfing – a modern classic

Kristin Lawler
University of Mount Saint Vincent, New York City

Matthew L. McDowell’s Surfing and Modernity in the North of Scotland is a comprehensive, exhaustively researched study of the contemporary history of surfing on Scotland’s north coast; it is the first such work on Scottish surfing and, like the most important works in the burgeoning field of surf studies, it tells a story that transcends the activity and the lifestyle of surfers themselves. Surfing functions as a lens through which to view social and historical transformations in a particular place; readers of this book will learn more about the post WWII transformations of the area and of the UK more generally than they will about the experience of surfing a reef break like Thurso, arguably one of the most perfect waves in Europe. The book takes its place among the classic community studies in sociology as it fills a massive gap in the surf literature concerning Scotland.

Scotland’s north coast is generally seen as remote, mysterious, off the beaten path. (A 1998 article in The Surfer’s Path portrayed the area in terms of what Jess Ponting calls “Nirvanafication” – “an ‘other’ to some kind of imagined modernity which ranged between desolation and romanticism.”) But McDowell’s work disturbs the easy spatial categorization of center and margins in the same way that surfers themselves do – riding waves for fun and adventure on the spatial and social fringes of “normal” workaday society, surf culture has, over its contemporary history, been heavily implicated in the culture and politics of those very places as it has spread, in utopian and in imperialist ways, over the paths trod by surfers themselves and the surf media they create.

This text will no doubt provide a touchstone for students of the region and for students of the economics, history, and culture of surfing for a long time to come.

And in fact, the book opens with an introduction entitled “The End of the Road.” North coast surfing is largely associated in global surf culture with the remoteness of the region. This has been especially due to its portrayal in Endless Winter, the 2012 film on British surfing that uses the classic surf metaphor of the journey to find the perfect wave in a remote location: here the Nirvana of British surfing is to be found at the end of the road, in Thurso. But McDowell’s work demonstrates that the region is by no means marginal: in challenging the image of the north coast as “a beautiful, arguably pre-industrial wilderness,” he counters that “one of the busiest shipping corridors in the world is not a wilderness. Neither is a coast with a decaying nuclear research station and radioactive contamination. Such judgments of Caithness and Sutherland [the two ancient north coast counties that are the subject of the book] can be seen as deeply unhelpful when residents (including surfers) have for decades been attempting to address depopulation, economic decline, and a loss of political power.” Still, surfers have, the author claims, also flipped the script on the image of the north as “bleak,” dark, and even “tragic,” reframing the area as a place of “leisure, and fun, and something very modern.” [Italics in original]. In one of the book’s nicest conceptual chapters, “Territory,” the author highlights the region’s overlapping and contradictory mappings – by the tourism-driven 2015 opening of the NC500 road, by local and global surf culture portrayals, increasingly digital, and by local surfers, organizations, landowners, authorities, and other stakeholders.

And it is the contradictions of modernity – of modernization, deindustrialization, “revitalization,” and their spatial enactments – that is the overarching subject of the book. This is the case in the long view of the history of the two counties, shaped by the “Clearances” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like “enclosures,” a euphemism for brutal dispossession of people, especially the increasingly racialized Celtic population, and forced migration of tenant farmers by landlords looking to increase the profitability of their agricultural land as the clan system was coming under external economic and cultural pressures. The Clearances shaped in- and out-migration (including to North America) as well as the fishing industry in the region. Later, a sense of reparation shaped central UK government and, after 1999, Scottish government investment in the region.

This came to include the Dounreay Experimental Reactor, constructed in the post WWII period. The reactor has had a contradictory relationship with surf culture: the settlement of its employees in Thurso is largely responsible for the development of surfing in the region, but pollution from the plant, including the presence of nuclear “hot particles” in the water, was featured in surf media and arguably served as a deterrent to surf tourism. McDowell’s chapter on “Environment” is particularly rich in seeing the long term, “ruthless” management and exploitation of Caithness and Sutherland through the lens of local surfers, the national anti-nuclear power and waste movement (which became central to the pro-independence narrative), and global organizations like Surfers Against Sewage, all of which attempted, with some success, to challenge the versions of modern “progress” imposed from without. It demonstrates the enduring contradiction between the stoke of surfing, an activity engaged in purely for its own sake (especially obvious when the water is icy cold and the weather is grim), and the industrial capitalist realities of work and waste made plain by the Dounreay pollution as well as by the contentious but literal name of one of the better waves – “Shitpipe.”

Surfing’s relationship to questions of work and of “sport,” post-Dounreay tourism infrastructure (and the lack thereof), localism and the lack thereof, the role of the internet, women in surfing, the relationship of surf and skate, the impact of three Eurosurf competitions and of depictions in the surf media on the region – all of these issues and more are quantitatively clocked and demonstrated and exhaustively analyzed here. This text will no doubt provide a touchstone for students of the region and for students of the economics, history, and culture of surfing for a long time to come. It will, no doubt, be a modern classic, as is the wave that ultimately fuels the culture the book describes. And although the author at the start claims that, since he is not a surfer himself, the book will not be about the phenomenology of wave surfing, in a study of surfing as comprehensive as this, some of that can’t help but come through. Although McDowell does a complex structural analysis of an important region through the lens of surfing, the fact that all of it is fueled ultimately by the pure stoke of surfing is never far in the text. Consider the letter Pat Kieran (Dounreay worker and institutionally acknowledged original 1970s Thurso surfer) wrote to the Northwest Surf Club of the wave:

…HELP! 1 OR 2 SURFERS WANTED TO SHARE PERFECT RIVERMOUTH BREAK. 6 – 12 FT GLASSY PEELING USUALLY OFFSHORE AT THIS TIME OF YEAR…EXPERIENCE OF SIMILAR SITUATIONS ESSENTIAL AS WAVE IS VERY FAST AND VERY HEAVY. REMUNERATION. BRAIN LOOSENING HOLLOW RIGHTS AND A PERMANENT ACHING TO SURF HERE AGAIN. CHARACTER MUST APPRECIATE PEACEFUL SURROUNDS WITH VERY LAID BACK INHABITANTS. SIMILAR WAVES OF COMPARATIVE PERFECTION WITHIN EASY REACH…

The author ends the book (“Riding the Wave of a New Scotland?”) discussing the way that contemporary Scottish and UK politics can be understood through the lens of surfing as well, and to what extent surfing can help communities to intervene more effectively and autonomously in the decisions that affect them. In considering the question by way of the contradictions of modernity that McDowell’s book illuminates, we might frame it in terms of the mapping of territory by the bleak forces of “development,” work, and waste, and the alternative mapping by the “very modern” forces of “leisure and fun” exemplified by the stoke of Kieran’s letter.

Copyright © Kristin Lawler 2025