The Scottish Highlands are considered to be the mountainous regions of
Scotland north of the Highland Boundary
Fault. The
Highland Council manages a small part of this area.
The area is generally sparsely populated, with many mountain ranges dominating the region. Regional administrative centres include Inverness.
Culturally the area is quite different from the Scottish Lowlands. Most of the Highlands fall into the region known as the Gaidhealtachd, pronounced
Gailtahk, which was, within the last hundred years, the Gaelic speaking area of Scotland.
In traditional
British geography, the
Highlands refers to that part of
Scotland north-west of a line drawn from
Dumbarton[?] to
Stonehaven, including the Inner and Outer
Hebrides and the former county of
Bute[?], but excluding the
Orkneys and
Shetlands,
Caithness[?], the flat coastal land of the former shires of
Nairn[?],
Elgin and
Banff, and all East
Aberdeenshire. This area differred from the
Lowlands[?] by language and race, better preserving the
Gaelic speech. Even in a historical sense the Highlanders were a separate people from the Lowlanders, with whom, during many centuries, they shared nothing in common. The town of
Inverness is usually regarded as the capital of the Highlands.
The Highlands consist of an old dissected
plateau, or block, of ancient crystalline rocks with incised valleys and
lochs carved by the action of mountain streams and by ice, the resulting topography being a wide area of irregularly distributed mountains whose summits have nearly the same height above sea-level, but whose bases depend upon the amount of denudation to which the plateau has been subjected in various places.