As the glaciers of the last Ice Age receded humans ventured into the far north exploring a wild fertile territory. Nomadic hunter-gatherers at first they made the decision to stay for good
- to farm & to build. The landscapes they lived on were remarkable in their diversity. Vast forests of pine & birch ran through one of the worlds oldest mountain ranges
- once as high as the Himalayas but over millennia scoured & compressed by sheets of ice a mile thick. On hundreds of islands around a saw-edged coastline communities flourished linked to each other & the wider world by the sea the transport superhighway of ancient times. It was a place of challenges & opportunity. A place we know today as Scotl&. Over the past 10 000 years every inch of Scotland
- whether remote hilltop fertile floodplain or storm-lashed coastline
- has been shaped changed & moulded by its people. No part of the land is without its human story. From Orkneys immaculately preserved Neolithic villages to Highland glens stripped of nineteenth century settlements from a Skye peninsula converted to an ingenious Viking shipyard to a sheer Hebridean clifftop used as the site of a spectacular lighthouse Scotlands history is written into its landscapes in vivid detail. Scotlands Landscapes" tells the enduring story of this interaction between man & his environment. stunning new imagery from the National Collection of Aerial Photography comes together to build up a picture of a dramatic terrain forged by thousands of years of incredible change. These are Scotlands landscapes as you have never seen or understood them before."