Like football, Scotland is a country of two halves: the highlands and the lowlands. These terms are appropriate because the highlands really are higher. Most of the population centres are in the lowlands: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee and some might count Stirling as well. The only city in the Highlands is Inverness, which is smaller than Dundee. The difference between Highlands and Lowlands is geological: the Highlands are composed of hard rock known as metamorphic rock which is older than the softer sedimentary rock which composes the Lowlands.
The first interesting thing about Scotland is that the big cities lie in a rift valley. Rift valleys are cool, and I know this because I saw the Great African Rift Valley when I was in Kenya. The idea of a rift valley is that you have some big cracks in the earth's crust, and these separate a block of land from the land around it. This block of land, having separated from its surroundings, displays a remarkable propensity to rise or sink on its own. If it sinks, it forms a rift valley, and at its edges you can expect sheer cliffs where the cracks in the earth's crust run. The cracks are called faults in geo-speak. The two fault lines for the Central Lowlands are called the Highland Boundary Fault and the Southern Uplands fault, and they are roughly 60 miles apart.
Now, I don't expect these faults to provide scenery as dramatic as the Great African Rift Valley, but I do expect to find some big cliffs and some steep roads. So that's going to provide a little bit of fun for my Fig and I. Let's see if I can find a dramatic crossing of the Highland Boundary Fault as I leave the Lowlands and enter the Highlands.
Another major fault that we need to know about is the Great Glen Fault which runs from Fort William in the south-west to Inverness in the north-east. Loch Ness lies on this fault-line, and this is why Loch Ness is exceptionally deep (230m). The Caledonian Canal allows passage along the Great Glen Fault, being designed by Thomas Telford and built at the start of the nineteenth century. These are all interesting things we could visit.
It comes as no great surprise to me that there should be all these major fault-lines in Scotland. If you look at the islands, you can see where they used to fit against the mainland. The land-masses are clearly moving apart. It seems to me that that this part of the earth's surface is being stretched out, and so cracks are going to appear.
So Scotland is segmented into four bands, and as I drive north in my Fig I will start in a slice called the Southern Uplands, pass over a fault into the rift valley of the Central Lowlands, pass over another fault into the Grampian Highlands, and then over the Great Glen fault into the Northern Highlands. No cracks in my plan so far, then.
I could present a map of Scotland showing my route, but I think it's probably better to assume the reader has a map of Scotland available to him.
Another thing to realize is that Scotland and England were officially two different nations until 1707 when they were merged in the "Act of Union". The main reason for this was economic: the Scottish decided that being part of England would give them excellent access to the markets that England guarded, and also English gave them a big wad of cash as a sweetener. However it should be noted that James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603 and thus the two countries had shared a common rule for a century already. It's probably also worth noting in this context that both countries were Protestant, whereas much of Europe was under the control of the Catholics.