A Century of Changes in the Scottish Landscape

Communities in rural Scotland often resist proposals for developments which involve major changes to familiar landscapes, for example those associated with windfarm developments, however they are less concerned about gradual or incremental changes in familiar landscapes which, through time, can be even more significant.

Recent research by a team at the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute in Aberdeen aims to reveal the types and extent of changes in the Scottish landscape over the past century through a systematic comparison of historical and contemporary photographs. The team is also interested in discovering how people perceive these changes. Do most people focus on changes in cultural features like buildings or on semi-natural features like woodlands, and how do they describe the changes?

There is a wealth of historical landscape photography available through the archives held in several Scottish Universities, for example the Adam and Valentine collections at the University of St Andrews and the George Washington Wilson collection at the University of Aberdeen.

Careful re-photographing the scenes of old photographs with support of modern image processing technologies allow us to digitally match these historical images with contemporary images taken from approximately the same viewpoints. These can then be superimposed. This enables us to identify where changes have occurred and also to calculate how extensive these changes have been. By showing these historical and contemporary images to a wide range of people and asking them to ‘spot the differences’, the team will be able to better understand what people perceive as significant differences and test various ideas about what makes some changes more or less acceptable.

Join us at the Royal Highland Show, Ingliston, Edinburgh on 25th-28th June 2009 to play an active part in the research project by doing a ‘comparison' exercise on two views of the small west coast township of Arnisdale taken in 1896 and 2006.

(images copyright RCAHMS and Dr Rick Rohde).

*Thank you to all the visitors to the Royal Highland Show who completed our 'spot the difference' exercise. The winners of the Amazon vouchers have been selected, and have been informed.

Visit the official Royal Highland Show website.