Sited on the exposed coastal peat of Kentra, in the Western Highlands, Scotland, Contested Ground sets out a proposal for the conservation of the region’s eccentric bog system.

The project looks to the rituals and traditions of Highland Games, whose antecedent practices were rooted in the region’s agrarian past, to develop strategies that will defend their history and the landscapes on which they are performed.

A series of tools, fortifications, and accommodation sites for conservation workers on Kentra Bay are proposed that speculate on how these games might restore a peatland that is being slowly lost to coastal erosion. Gradually lifting the peat away from sea level and extending the bay’s sphagnum ecology through repetition of these adapted Highland Games.

Drawing their performance closer to the region’s antecedent practices of land management, a Highland Games on Ardnamurchan - that deals with conservation as much as it does culture - questions how architecture might enable modes of affective and embodied relationships with the natural environment; defending Kentra’s peatland whilst becoming attuned to its ground condition through the repeated playing of games.