The Scottish Highlands and Loch Ness: Europe's Great Northern Wilderness

Introduction

There are few places in Europe where the ancient and the elemental assert themselves with such force as they do in the Scottish Highlands. Occupying the northern and western portions of Scotland and covering approximately 47,000 square kilometers, the Highlands constitute one of the last great wildernesses of the European continent — a landscape of mountain, loch, glen, and moor that has been shaped by forces of geological and human history stretching back billions of years. Here the oldest rocks on earth are exposed at the surface, bearing silent witness to processes that predate the existence of life itself. Here the wind cuts across treeless moorland in ways that seem to belong to the world before history. And here, in the deep cold waters of one of the largest lakes in Britain, the most enduring and beloved mystery of the modern world makes its ambiguous home.

The Scottish Highlands are not simply a geographical region; they are a state of mind and a dimension of the human imagination. For more than three centuries, since the first romantic travelers began making their way north in the eighteenth century to witness landscapes that seemed to embody the Sublime as no more domesticated European scenery could, the Highlands have exercised a powerful hold on the imagination of people from every corner of the world. The tartans, the bagpipes, the ruined castles, the ancient clans, the tales of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the tragedy of Culloden, the haunting melodies of Gaelic song — all these elements combine with the landscape's raw physical beauty to create an experience of place that is unlike anything else in Europe.

But the Highlands are also a place of deep and sometimes painful history. The people of the Highlands were among the most cruelly treated of any European population in the modern era, dispossessed of their land in the great Highland Clearances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, subjected to the systematic destruction of their culture and language after the suppression of the Jacobite risings, and driven in their tens of thousands to emigrate to the New World and the southern hemisphere. This history of loss and displacement is inscribed in the empty glens and the ruined blackhouses of the Highlands just as surely as the beauty is inscribed in the mountains and the lochs.

This article explores the Scottish Highlands in their full complexity: their extraordinary geology, their landscape and wildlife, the long human history of the region from the Picts to the present, the famous legend of the Loch Ness Monster, the tragedy of Culloden and the Clearances, the survival and revival of Gaelic culture, and the Highlands as they exist today — a region of great natural beauty and significant economic challenges, drawing millions of visitors every year while struggling to sustain viable communities in some of the most remote inhabited areas in Britain.

The Geology of the Highlands: the Oldest Rocks in the World

The Scottish Highlands sit upon some of the most ancient geological formations anywhere on the surface of the earth. Along the northwest coast of the Scottish mainland, and across the Outer Hebrides, exposures of Lewisian Gneiss — named after the Isle of Lewis where they were first studied — have been dated to approximately 3 billion years old, making them among the oldest exposed rocks anywhere on the planet. These ancient metamorphic rocks predate not only all animal life on earth but most plant and microbial life as well, having been formed in conditions of extreme heat and pressure deep in the earth's crust during the Archean Eon, when the earth itself was less than half its current age.