1 - Introduction

Summary

In view of a recent pronouncement that ‘the production of a major summary of Scottish historical geography must lie a long way in the future’ this book may well appear to constitute a dangerous and presumptuous literary adventure. The arguments for caution are well founded since much early documentary material has been lost, and with the sparsity of cartographic evidence of any kind before the great eighteenth-century military survey by General Roy there is a formidable contrast in the quality and availability of source material for the periods before and after c. 1750. Furthermore, the limited effort made by historical geographers working on Scottish topics has been made still less effective in terms of potential for a general synthesis by a tendency to concentrate on a rather limited range of issues. Studies of rural settlement evolution are certainly hampered by a lack of continuity, arising from the particularly radical changes made at the time of the improving movement, but there seems little justification for the strange neglect of urban, industrial and transport themes where promising early studies have not been developed. The lack of diversification cannot be attributed entirely to the absence of data, because economic historians have made very substantial contributions in this neglected area over the last ten years. The imbalance in Scottish historical geography is all the more unsatisfactory because there are very few general reviews. Back in 1913 W. R. Kermack wrote the first and, so far, the only Historical Geography of Scotland, but this publication is significant only in the use of the term ‘historical geography’ because it was written as a ‘geography behind history’ and has very little potential as a stimulus for a modern version.