Imagine the NC500 in days gone by

It is easy to look across one of the great landscapes of the North Highlands and reach for words such as beautiful, romantic or stunning. When travelling with guests, however, I often encourage them to imagine the same place before roads, bridges and reliable maps, when a journey crossed pathless ground and an unbridged river could bring it to an abrupt halt. Forests concealed wolves as well as strangers, weather could erase the way ahead, and nobody was coming to recover a traveller who made the wrong decision. The landscape may have been physically magnificent, but magnificence offered little comfort when it had to be crossed on foot or horseback.

For much of the eighteenth century, outsiders tended to judge mountains according to their usefulness. Steep ground obstructed travel, produced little food and placed settlements beyond the easy reach of government. Remoteness suggested poverty, lawlessness and political danger, particularly after the Jacobite rising of 1745. Military roads and stronger state authority gradually made parts of the Highlands more accessible, although the same period also brought estate reorganisation, rising rents and the displacement of communities as landowners pursued what they called Improvement.

As travelling became safer, visitors began to value the very qualities that had once repelled them. Wildness could inspire awe when exposure to it was temporary and chosen, while poets, artists and travel writers taught their audiences to admire mist, rock, waterfalls and apparently empty glens. Walter Scott later filled the Highland landscape with romance, heroic loss and historical drama. Meanwhile, improved roads, canals, steamships and eventually railways allowed visitors to experience an adventure without becoming entirely dependent upon the country through which they travelled.

By the nineteenth century, sporting estates, royal visits, guidebooks and organised transport had helped turn the Highlands into a place of escape. Yet the romantic view concealed as much as it revealed, because ground presented to visitors as timeless and empty might recently have been cleared of people. A lonely glen could still contain the remains of homes, while a peaceful river might once have stopped travellers for hours. The Highlands did not suddenly become beautiful. Safer travel and changing ideas taught outsiders how to describe them that way, and seeing the landscape through both sets of eyes makes the modern journey immeasurably richer.

To learn more, book one of our North Coast Explorer private tours.