Last year, my wife and I drove the North Coast 500 route around the Highlands of Scotland.
For someone who grew up in southern England who used to gaze at the chalky North Downs from the school playground, the Highlands are on a vast scale.
Scenery like this is commonplace:
There is no other expanse of land that size with so few people or human activity anywhere in Britain. This is especially true of England, which is far more densely populated than Scotland or Wales.
A common way we describe something as isolated is to relate it to its environment. ‘It’s in the middle of nowhere’. ‘There’s nothing around for miles’. ‘It’s miles from anywhere’. And so on.
But how true is that, really? How much of Scotland really is miles from anywhere?
To find out, I ran some analysis of Ordnance Survey Zoomstack data for Scotland. The area in yellow in the map below shows land at least one mile from any:
urban areas
roads
railway lines
power lines
airports
On the Scottish mainland the true wilderness can mostly be found in the northwest portion of the Highlands with a secondary cluster around the mountainous area of the Cairngorms National Park.
The west coast of Jura is completely barren, as are large parts of Skye and the Outer Hebrides. I would have expected more empty land in Orkney and Shetland, but there are only a few places where that is the case.
In the Lowlands there are just a few pockets of empty land here and there.
You might have noticed that I didn’t include buildings in my analysis. I didn’t do this for two reasons:
It would have added another huge layer of complexity to an already complex analysis that stretched my computer’s processing power.
My hypothesis is that the vast, vast majority of buildings are in fact within a mile of a road anyway, even in the Highlands, so it wouldn’t actually make this map much more detailed at all.
Here is the same map, only with the radius set at one kilometre rather than one mile:
In England, there is almost nowhere with this kind of space. Here is the same map at one kilometre for Herefordshire:
Can you see the spots of yellow? There are just a handful of them, in one of England’s most sparsely populated counties.
To find a place that truly fits the description of ‘nothing for miles around’, you need to head to the Scottish Highlands. If, like me, you are fascinated with wild, remote places, it truly is a special place to go.
Further reading: Nobody Lives Here: United Kingdom by Georgia Corr