This article will examine the interaction of landscape aesthetics, ideas of cultural and national identity, and notions of progressive modernism in the cultural politics surrounding the design and construction of the South of Scotland Galloway hydro schemes of the 1930s. I argue that we see a form of modernity derived not simply from the growth of cities, but nurtured by earlier, more agrarian projects of national improvement (and indeed Scottish assimilation to the Union) derived from pastoral schemes of improving landowners in the Georgian era.