Scottish Areas

Stirling is a small city that punches above its weight historically. It sits at the point where the Highlands and Lowlands meet, and for a long time controlling it meant controlling Scotland, which explains the castle and the battles…

The towns along the south shore of the Clyde estuary don't get much visitor traffic, which is fair enough — they're not obvious tourist destinations. But they have their own histories and a certain unpretentious character that's worth knowing…

Perth and Kinross is the transitional county — Highland in the north, Lowland in the south, with the River Tay running through most of it. It's agricultural country for the most part, prosperous and well-maintained, with a series of…

Moray is one of the sunnier parts of Scotland, which sounds like a low bar but makes a genuine difference to how it feels. The Moray Firth coastline gets noticeably less rainfall than much of the country, the beaches…

The Scottish Borders are the long stretch of country between Edinburgh and the English border, and they have a strong sense of their own identity that’s quite different from the Highland image most people associate with Scotland. It’s sheep…

The Highlands take up a large chunk of Scotland and are about as varied as you'd expect from that. There's the west coast, which is mountainous and dramatic. There's the east coast, which is flatter and more agricultural. There's…

Argyll is where Scotland starts to break up into islands and sea lochs. The coastline here is complicated in the best possible way — inlets running deep into the hills, islands of all sizes, ferries threading between them. It…

Fife is a peninsula between the Forth and the Tay, and it has always had a slightly self-contained quality — its own identity, its own dialect, historically its own parliament. It's within easy reach of both Edinburgh and Dundee…

Ayrshire faces west across the Firth of Clyde towards Arran and, on clear days, Northern Ireland. It's primarily known for two things — Robert Burns and golf — and while that sounds like a narrow brief, both run deep…

East Lothian is the stretch of coast east of Edinburgh along the south shore of the Forth. It’s one of those places that Edinburgh residents have traditionally kept to themselves, which tells you something. Good beaches, good golf, good…

Lanarkshire and West Lothian cover the central belt south and west of Edinburgh — a mix of post-industrial towns, new towns and, tucked in among them, some genuinely interesting historical sites that tend to get overlooked. Linlithgow is the…

Angus is the county north of the Tay and east of the Grampians — farming country mostly, with a straightforward, no-nonsense character and a coastline of red sandstone cliffs and sandy beaches that doesn't get the attention it probably…

Aberdeen is a granite city in more than one sense. The buildings are built from the local silvery-grey stone and on a sunny day they catch the light well; on a grey day they match the sky rather too…

Dumfries and Galloway is the whole of the south-west corner of Scotland and it's more varied than its low profile suggests. The Gulf Stream keeps the climate mild — palm trees at Threave Gardens, subtropical plants at Logan Botanic…

Edinburgh is an easy city to like. It’s compact enough to walk most of it, the Old Town is genuinely old rather than just old-looking, and there’s usually something going on. The castle on its rock, the Royal Mile…

Some things about Scotland don't belong to any particular place. They're woven through the whole country — traditions, foods, animals and symbols that tend to come up in conversation with visitors because they're genuinely curious or genuinely confusing or,…

Glasgow is often described as friendlier than Edinburgh, and while that's a slightly tired comparison, it's not wrong. It's a bigger, louder city with a different energy — more industrial history, more of a working-city feel, and a genuine…