Glencoe

Taking the hauntingly beautiful landscape of Glencoe as its central focus, this panel is an artistic telling of the dawn of our Highland landscapes. The surrounding journey stones, imbued with personal stories of the group, take this central theme and dive deeper into the nature, culture and heritage stories which have made Lochaber into the area we know and love today.

The Highlands is a region made from fragments. Hundreds of millions of years ago, when the Earth was young, its crust was in constant slow-motion flux. As volcanoes roared and flared over what became Ardnamurchan, Skye and Lochaber, and tsunamis thundered across the oceans, vast continents were moving, colliding, splintering and reforming. Sometimes bits broke off and these slivers of ancient rock were known as terranes. The Highlands was made from three of these distinct fragments of geology.

The angle at which these terranes collided is remembered by the Great Glen that stretches from Fort William to Inverness, and by the Highland Boundary Fault that runs from the southern shore of Loch Lomond to Stonehaven. They are parallel, angled from the south-west to the north-east. They are a memory of ancient collisions that still shape the journeys and the lives of modern Highlanders.