Travel to United Kingdom: The North West Highlands

These pictures were taken in the late 1980s, during a quick loop from Inverness through Skye, Ullapool, Altnaharra, John O'Groats, Wick, and back.

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The population of northern Scotland hugs the coast, not merely because the best arable land is there but because the interior Highlands were forcibly cleared centuries ago by landowners forcing their clansmen to coastal homesteads, or crofts.

The coastal roads today are still lined with the crofter homes.

The brutality of the Highland Clearances has produced a landscape that is now a study in the picturesque.

Typically, crofts are laid out as strips perpendicular to the coast.

Many of the homes are now in very good shape, chiefly because the residents no longer rely on income from the croft itself.

Unretouched or gentrified.

For lack of wood, stone is the primary construction material.

It's used for fences, too.

Up by Wick, large pastures with round bales and barbed wire co-exist with anachronistic stone-slab fencing.

It runs on at lengths reminiscent of the endless ranks of tombstones in military cemeteries.

Old photographs show peat stacked outside crofters' houses. The stuff is still being cut.

In the Highlands, extraordinary roads--one lane, with periodic pullouts--wind across lonely landscapes. This just might be Glen Carron, northeast of the Kyle of Lochalsh.

Elsewhere in the world, such mountains might be portrayed as examples of utter devastation; here, the forests have been gone so long that it's easy to accept the denudation as natural.

The British themselves began replanting parts of the Highlands early in the 20th century. The results have become a favorite target for British environmentalists, who rail against the monoculture and clearcuts. Driving through these forests is like driving through a tunnel.