After World War Two, the Scottish Highlands was widely described as a ‘semi-derelict region’, a land in a ‘coma’ from which it might never recover. Although some of this torpor was the result of the War, the illness was much more long term—depopulation, absentee landlords, and lack of economic investment had maintained this region as an artificial wilderness for well over a century, the results of traumatic and repeated assaults on Highland culture first during the Hanoverian pacification after the Jacobite rebellions and second due to the Clearances of ‘uneconomic’ crofting tenants through the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century the region simply dwindled, losing voice and memory through re-education and through continued emigration. But in the decade after 1946 the impetus of post-war reconstruction did appear to offer the promise of cultural and economic regeneration, notably and most ambitiously in the Hydro-electric schemes proposed right across the region. These schemes had been attempted before, but had been opposed by various strange conglomerations of wealthy landed privilege and Lowland-industrial socialist trade union agitation. The post-War Labour government, however, offered real investment and regional planning as ‘help for the Highlands’. The enormous hydro-electric construction projects of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board (NOSHEB), would, it was hoped, provide not only employment, but also, through electrification, would connect up remote, impoverished glens and crofts with the modern world. This paper, with focus on the cultural significance of the favoured architectural style for hydro projects such as Cruachan and Glen Affric schemes in the Scots nationalist style of modernist ‘Traditionalism’, will consider the elegiac monumental versions of ‘Celtic’ culture being debated in the Highland region in the period of post-War reconstruction, and the re-articulations of longstanding conflict.