Making North Britain: infrastructure projects and the forcible integration of the Scottish Highlands

The bridge crossing the River Tay at Aberfeldy in Perthshire connects southern Scotland to the Highlands. It is an important piece of historic transport infrastructure. More than that, however, built in the 1730s by British military engineers serving under General Wade to a design by leading Scottish architect William Adam, it is an architectural monument to the making of North Britain. It marks the beginning of a process of that through the next century transformed the Highlands from a geographically and culturally distinct place into the northern part of North Britain. A multi-centred, multifaceted process of political, economic and cultural colonization that can be read in the relationship between landscape and built environment: military pacification brought forts, roads, bridges and inns; land clearances removed indigenous peoples and introduced new settlement patterns and house forms; and, then, cultural tourism brought hotels and shooting lodges. Drawing comparisons with colonial activities in Ireland and North America, this chapter will present the inns, farms, hotels, villages, roads, bridges and harbours of the Scottish Highlands as interconnected acts in the expansion of the British frontier to the northern edge of the British Isles.