People in Scotland invest considerable meaning and significance in landscape; they see it as iconic of Scotland.
The association of landscape and national identity is not unique to Scotland, but takes on particularly powerful forms here.
We do not experience landscape directly, but through ‘ways of seeing’, which are culturally and socially charged. Landscapes are terrains of power.
From the 18th century, Scotland has been reinvented as a ‘land out of time’, and the Highlands as a ‘peopleless place’.
This has come about through its gentrification in the 19th century, and association with monarchy and aristocracy; and in the 20th century, with tourism.
