Highland Scotland

The Gaelic Highlands and Islands — a separate nation within Scotland. Descended from the Gaelic Dál Riata and the Picts, it kept a clan-based, Gaelic-speaking, often Catholic or Episcopalian society long after the Lowlands turned Scots-speaking and Protestant. The Crown deliberately broke that world after the 1746 defeat at Culloden, and the Clearances then emptied the glens for sheep. Romanticised in the 19th century even as it was destroyed, it bequeathed tartan, the clan system and the bagpipe — later adopted as emblems of Scotland as a whole — and remains a sparsely peopled land of crofting, whisky, deer estates and tourism, with a fragile but reviving Gaelic.

• Existed: 843 CE – present
• Type: Entity