Modern Homes for Modern People: identifying and interpreting the Highland Building Boom, 1700 – 1850

The dramatic landscape of the Scottish Highlands is punctuated by the well-ordered presence of over 300 white, two-storeyed ‘neat and regular’ farmhouses that were built through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These farmhouses were key elements in the process of agricultural improvement that permanently transformed the Highland landscape (an area of over 39,000 square kilometres). This paper explores the potential of Scotland’s Statutory Lists of Buildings of Architectural or Historic Interest to elucidate the scale and rapidity of the Highlands building boom, and offers suggestions as to the potential of this source for high-level thematic building analysis.