I am currently working on a podcast series about the Highland Boundary Fault. As part of this I recently interviewed Clare Cooper and Marian Bruce in Marian’s farmhouse on the edge of the town of Aylth, north-west of Perth.
The three of us are well versed in bioregioning, having been on an international training course in 2021 which resulted in Clare and Marian co-initiating Bioregioning Tayside.
I was on a journey exploring the Fault and had already spent time at Innellan on the Clyde Firth, Balmaha and Loch Lomondside, and the town of Comrie, birthplace of the science of seismology – all of which sit on (or very close to) the Fault. I’d spoken at length to a geologist and learned how significant the Fault is in landscape terms, in the sense that it divides Scotland into the Highlands and the Lowlands.
I came that day with a question: how come the Fault does not form any part of the boundary of the Tay Bioregion, despite its manifest importance as not only a landscape feature in its own right, but as a landscape-definer?
We looked out from Marian’s farmhouse kitchen south over the low fertile plain of Strathmore (part of the Lowlands) and considered the land to the north of us, becoming increasingly hilly to rise up eventually to the high plateau of the Cairngorm (the Highlands). Yet we were still sat well inside the Tay bioregion, nowhere near its boundary.
The answer seemed to be that, yes, the Highland Boundary Fault is still very important, but more important still are the eight rivers that flow out of the Highlands and into the Lowlands, coming together to form the Tay. These provided water power to Lowland towns like Rattray and Blairgowrie, which went on to become industrial textile centres. They also formed essential transport links between villages, towns and cities.
The Tay bioregion provides bioregioners with a puzzle, presenting contrasting landscape features that compete to define it. In this case, the River Catchment wins out over the Fault, though of course the Fault is still vitally important in that it clearly splits the region into Highland and Lowland areas. Have a look at the map that heads up this post: you can clearly see in red the form of the Tay catchment with its complex drainage pattern heading east, south and even south-west, plus the black line of the Highland Boundary Fault as it slices through the region (the town of Aylth is located on the Fault, close to where it meets the north-eastern boundary of the catchment).
So, a big thank you to Clare and Marian for hosting a lively and fascinating discussion. Clare is one of the principal figures behind the Cateran Eco-Museum, a “museum without walls” embedded in over 130 places in the landscape largely to the north of Aylth, running up to the Cairngorm, whilst Marian and her husband run an award-winning distillery named “Highland Boundary.”
Lastly, a caveat that river catchments do not always define bioregions, this being the case for the West Coast rainforesgt bioregion where I live. Here, rivers are generally short and brisk, but sea lochs are long and peninsulas are many, as are islands, so we are a coastal bioregion defined by our proximity to the sea, rather than by the rivers flowing through us.
bioregioning 