Portrait of Scotland [antikvár]

Intro duction How can you capture a portrait of Scotland on film? Only by travelling its length and breadth in every season. Scotland offers a variety of landscape and light out of all proportion to its size. Its story grows out of the very rocks of which it is made — from the gouging of glaciers in the not-so-long ago Ice Age, to the rock cuttings made for modern Highland roads. Its history and land use can be read wherever you travel in the countryside. There are contrasts at every turn. What could be more different in texture than the cool grey glint of Grampian granite from the warm honey sandstone of Edinburgh? Or the red blocks which build Orkneys cliffs from the pale quartz screes which stream off the ancient eroded peaks of the far north-west? And if the very building blocks of Scotland are so characteristic, then the landscapes they support reflect this, from the Southern Uplands' lush river-valley woodlands to the endless boggy moors of Caithness. Rock, wood, pasture and moor are overlaid with a pattern of land use which tells both of Scotland's past and its present. The ruins of ancient castles are the most obvious signs of a martial story. But there are also more subtle signs to look for, from the faint stripes of the lazy-beds of a long-vanished rural Highland population to the random, marbled pattern of an eastern Highland grouse moor after years of annual heather burning. There are few other places where such a sense of continuity is woven into the landscape. The Scots pines, with their open understorey of juniper and blaeberry, surviving in places like Rothiemurchus below the Cairngorms, are the descendants of trees which sheltered bear and elk. The western seaboard, where the horizon-profiles of far-flung islands alternately dissolve and re-appear as the Atlantic squalls pass over, looks the same now as it did when the Viking raiders and traders named the high peaks of the island of Rum. Rock forms, land use and a sense of permanency are only some of the elements in the portrait. Yet another factor is plain from a glimpse of a map of Europe. Scotland is a tiny country, up at the bows of the Continent, butting into the north Atlantic. On one side are the mild but moist weather patterns sailing in from the south-west. (This is why the lushest and most exotic gardens are in the west, while many eastern extremities of Scotland get less rain than, say, Rome.) The high pressure and more stable systems of the Continent lie