IF Sir Walter Scott is Scotland's neglected and forgotten novelist, then this week is when his country finally starts putting that right.
For the past two years, a restoration project has been ongoing at Abbotsford, Scott's home in the Borders, and yesterday it was un- veiled ahead of the official reopening by the Queen next week.
The mission for the team behind the £11.6million project was to restore the house near Melrose to the glory days when Scott lived there 200 years ago but also to res- tore the novelist's reputation and remind everyone of his extraordinary worldwide fame and his contribution to modern Scotland.
Working from drawings done at the time, the curators have restored the rooms to their early 19th cen- tury heyday. They have also carefully catalogued every object in Scott's remarkable collection of historical artefacts and curios. It includes Rob Roy's sporran, a lock of Napoleon's hair, and the crucifix Mary Queen of Scots is said to have been holding as she walked to the executioner's block.
As Jason Dyer, the chief executive of the trust that looks after the house, points out, many of the objects – which also include Rob Roy's blunderbuss – ended up feat- uring in Scott's novels. It means walking through the house, he says, is like walking through the great man's imagination.
In all, the work, which included a visitors' centre opened last year, has taken two years, with most of the funding coming from the National Lottery and a £1m contribution from the Scottish Government and public donations. The house will reopen to the public on Thursday, July 4, the day after the official reopening by the Queen.
Mr Dyer said the aim of the restoration was to get the house looking close to how Scott would have known it when he lived there. All the artefacts – 4000 objects and 9000 books – are where Scott left them and there are also signs of the writer's innovative streak. Abbotsford had an early version of underfloor heating and was the first house in Scotland to have gas.
"The house has been more or less reset to how Scott would have had it in 1832," said Mr Dyer, "It's a unique and diverse collection and one of only a handful of libraries in the order the collector intended. The books are in the exact order Scott wanted them to be in."
Among the collection is a first edition of Ivanhoe. Scott was the world's first global novelist and his novels had massive print runs (Waverley sold more in one year than Pride and Prejudice did in Jane Austen's lifetime). He is also hugely respected in Russia, where he is seen as an inspiration for Tolstoy and Pushkin, and loved in China.
In Scotland, however, it's a differ- ent story. He is no longer widely read and isn't on the school curriculum. Some believe that is because – by contrast to Burns – Scott is seen as a high Tory and unionist but whatever the reason, the team at Abbotsford want to restore his reputation and fame. We want to illustrate the role Scott played in the evolution of Scotland," said Mr Dyer. "He reinvented the nation through his novels and the work he did for the Royal pageant of 1822 - he turned Scotland into the tourist destination that it is today."
Curator Matthew Withey said: "I can sense a gradual change in attitudes," he says. "One of the problems we've had is that Scott isn't quite as cool or funky as Burns but I can sense that people are realising Scotland is big enough to have two great writers."
Mr Dyer also believes the newly restored house reveals Scott as a thoroughly modern figure, saying: "What's revealed is a very inquisitive man and one with an amazing amount of energy. You can see all this romanticism and imagination fusing together in what he called his conundrum castle. Seeing the house is like seeing his mind."
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