There is a set piece in John Galt's 1823 novel, The Entail, that illustrates the protagonist's tortured obsession with a plot of ancestral land. Following his dispossession as a young man, Claud Walkinshaw has made recovering his hereditary estate the ‘actuating principle of his life’. This is reflected in his visits to a viewpoint that overlooks the now-reclaimed Kittlestonheugh acreage:

Claud's ‘nausea of moral disgust’ prevents him from being able to look upon the estates he has idolised at such a high cost – a determination to secure this legacy having prompted him, among other things, to disinherit his first-born. Holding the ‘ivory-headed staff’ (p. 183) that we learn is adorned with the meaningful symbol of a lone silver eye, this pedlar-turned-Glasgow-grandee experiences a profound moral unease towards the end of a life of what Galt calls ‘gathering’ (p. 150): the accumulation of wealth. Claud is largely motivated by his fanatical pride in hereditary status, and the sense of just deserts in this passage is aimed primarily at that weakness via the one of simple avarice. Yet both faults serve a wider meditation in The Entail on the pitfalls and unintended consequences of improvement. In fact, this moment of shame emerges from a novel that deals with a whole series of social, political and moral anxieties occasioned by Scotland's Age of Improvement. Galt's writing is often characterised by its acute sense of the material advantages contingent upon the trajectory of modernisation. But while the project of The Entail sees his historical analysis vividly disintegrate – through both formal and thematic means – into pessimism, this is an amplification of tensions already inherent within his oeuvre, as demonstrated in the Annals of the Parish of 1821.