THE BASICS OF SCOTLAND'S LANDSCAPE AND HISTORY

 Pitlochery is an exceptionally picturesque town in the Scottish Highlands. For the geographically challenged, the increasingly sovereign nation of Scotland occupies the northern half of Britain's primary island, sharing a long, often antagonistic, sometimes symbiotic, history with its English neighbor.  Traditionally and topographically, Scotland has been divided along an east/west line across its 100-mile-wide "waist." Its two primary cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow, are situated along this line.

To the south, broad fields and flat hills are dotted with occasional stumpy ranges of ancient volcanoes, ground nearly to the horizon by passing glaciers.  The people and politics of Scotland's fertile low lands have been long and strongly pulled by England's gravity.  North of that imaginary line start the Scottish Highlands, a series of tangled and mountainous ranges generally running from the southwest Atlantic Coast northeast toward the North Sea.  Individual peaks, or Bens, as Scots call them, stand from a few hundred feet to mighty Ben Nevis, at 4,400 feet. (In fact, Scotland's Highlands have 284 peaks higher than 3,000 feet, collectively referred to as munros, after Sir Hugh Munro, the avid walker who compiled the first list of them in 1891.)  Highland ranges are separated by rolling moors and glacier-gouged valleys, or glens, many brimming with long lakes, or lochs. While English is the primary spoken language in Scotland, understanding a little Scottish makes a big difference when finding your way around the Highlands country. It also helps to be able to negotiate narrow, twisting roads while driving on the left side. Did I mention that it's a standard transmission, which requires shifting gears with the left hand? It's a good thing there are few roundabouts in the Highlands.  The Highlands' densely forested moors and mountains had been stripped bare by the 17th century and covered by low vegetation such as heather, gorse and broom too tough even for sheep to eat. Starkly bare and beautiful, vast stretches of the Highlands can be forbidding in their emptiness. In spring, when the gorse blooms, Highland hillsides turn into tapestries of green and gold; by late summer, when the broom and heather take over, the palate's primary colors shift to royal blue and purple.  Scotland's Highlands are also famous as the realm of the clans, the collection of extended Gaelic families/tribes who ruled the various glens for eons before being subdued by English forces 250 years ago. The stony ruins of clan castles and medieval relics still bristle from the Scottish landscape, both on lonely loch promontories and in the middle of modern cities.  The more accessible glens typically have small towns on the fertile flatlands at either end of the loch, with tiny villages and sylvan settlements tucked in occasional nooks along its shoreline. Less accessible glens can be wild and remote places, with few visible signs of humanity other than the occasional, wind-whipped sheep and the sporadic jet fighter thundering low on practice runs over the landscape, its deafening growl rolling over the glen, like the roar of the lion found on so many Clannish shields.