Mapping the Historic Landscape: Historic Land-Use Assessment in Scotland

Abstract

This paper discusses the recent completion of Scotland’s Historic Land-use Assessment (HLA) project, a long-term partnership between Historic Scotland and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) (now merged as Historic Environment Scotland) to map time-depth within the present-day landscape was completed in 2015. This paper places HLA within the wider context of historic landscape characterisation (HLC) in Europe and outlines some of the new insights and perspectives that this resource provides for Scotland’s landscapes. In particular, the historical complexity and time-depth inherent within the Scottish landscape is emphasised, along with the importance of HLA’s landscape-scale data and nationwide coverage. The paper finishes with a discussion of some of the possibilities and challenges for the future of HLA and HLC projects in general, concluding that HLA/HLC data have a significant part to play in understanding and communicating the role of the past in the formation of current landscapes and, in partnership with multidisciplinary data, helping to shape future landscapes.