Outcomes

National Scenic Areas: Scottish Natural Heritage's Advice to Government

Scotland's Landscapes & their Conservation

The importance of Scotland's scenery
Safeguarding Scotland's landscapes
The basis of designation

The importance of Scotland's scenery

Scotland's fine scenery is a great national asset. It is the main attraction for our visitors and thus is of substantial economic value to the nation. It is an essential element of our heritage, contributing to our national identity and self-image. It is important to our quality of life in providing the settings within which the people of Scotland live, work and play. And it is an intrinsic element of the package which helps to make Scotland an attractive place for inward investment.
Scotland's scenery has great diversity, which derives from its very varied geology and its geomorphological history. These determine the landform and, ultimately, the uses which the land can support. Our natural vegetation patterns and their associated wildlife also reflect this geological base, but are governed too by the sometimes harsh climatic influences associated with Scotland’s location at high latitudes on the Atlantic seaboard. There is a strong cultural influence in our landscape which reflects how people, past and present, have made use of its natural resources. This influence is most evident in the patterns of land use, of settlement and communications. There is also a strong cultural contribution to the character of Scotland's landscapes, which is manifested in the vernacular built tradition, and in the historic elements, including the archaeological record.
As a nation we have not always looked after our fine scenery as well as it deserves. Some of the adverse effects of this neglect have arisen from extensive land use changes or from losses to the natural land-cover, from major built structures or developments, and from the inheritance of past heavy industry. Other changes, such as the inappropriate siting or design of buildings and other constructions can be quite small-scale in themselves, but cumulatively (and sometimes individually) these blemishes detract from the quality of our landscapes. Often the consequences of these small-scale changes are only widely recognised when the loss of landscape quality is already well-advanced.
The quality of local scenery affects the quality of people’s lives throughout Scotland. The aim therefore should be to raise the standards of care and design everywhere. Concerted effort to enhance the landscape is especially justified where the countryside around towns is still blighted by the industrial past, and by the rapid post-war change to our patterns of settlement and industry. A great deal of good work has been done to address these problems. However, close to and within the major urban areas, particularly in central Scotland, more needs to be done to enhance the quality of those landscapes, where most people live and work.
The priority that these near-urban areas deserve should not, however, blind us to the need to care better for those places which are regarded as being special because their scenic quality is important to the whole nation, and is often of international renown. These special places are of such outstanding quality that great care should be taken to ensure that their essential qualities are securely protected and, where necessary, enhanced for the future. Many of these special landscapes are highly sensitive to even small-scale physical change, which can lead to a diminution of the special values and importance which people attribute to them.
SNH has recently completed a comprehensive review of the whole of Scotland's landscape character. In 29 surveys the essential features of our landscapes are described and appraised. These surveys provide as objective an analysis as is possible of the factors which give different parts of the Scottish countryside their essential and distinctive character. The individual survey reports provide guidance on the sensitivity of different landscape types to change, and give general advice to ensure that change is promoted in ways which best accord with local landscape character.

Safeguarding Scotland's landscapes

The focus of this review lies with those special places considered nationally outstanding for their scenic qualities, and where protection is necessary to maintain these qualities. This aim stands alongside the need to promote the appreciation and care for all of our landscapes, including the enhancement of those which specially require it. Our broad approach to landscape protection will be based on these two aims and it will be founded on the following propositions.

A landscape-wide approach - SNH recognises that all landscapes are of some value, and that all require more care to ensure that change to them takes place in ways which respect their character and the values which people attach to these places.
Some landscapes have special value - Scotland has a great deal of scenery of both national importance and international renown. These areas should be awarded high recognition so that their essential qualities are safeguarded for the long-term.
Landscapes are dynamic - Landscapes are continually changing as the result both of natural processes and (usually more rapidly) because of the changing demands placed upon them by those who live and work in rural Scotland. Many of our valued landscapes are the cumulative outcome of human actions over a long period of time. But our ability to cause rapid change to the land has increased greatly in recent decades, and this calls for a more active approach to landscape planning and management by the public and private sectors alike.
A common responsibility - All public bodies involved in land-use change have a responsibility to ensure that such change is managed sensitively through the range of regulatory systems or incentives controlled by them and through the management of their own land.
A need for higher standards - Examples of good design in new development are to be found throughout Scotland. But there remains a need to raise overall standards of design and the appropriate siting of built development, recognising that good design requires innovation as well as respect for the past.
Some landscapes need to be enhanced - While much good work has been done to remedy the inheritance of damage to Scotland's landscapes from our industrial past, continued effort is needed to restore and enhance those landscapes which provide the setting where most people live and work - especially in central Scotland.
The importance of public support - Public appreciation of and commitment to the quality of Scotland's scenery - whether locally or nationally - is the most powerful means of fostering continued support and action to care for this vital resource, and this appreciation should be awakened and promoted.

SNH will add greater detail to these general statements through the development of its policies for landscape. This will be developed, in particular, through our Zonal Programme. Through this programme, SNH aims to promote a more integrated and strategic approach to its work, which is less dependent than in the past on designation as the main tool of safeguarding the quality of our natural heritage.
The basis of designation
The enjoyment of scenery is one means whereby people most readily come to value the natural heritage. The main experience of people enjoying the scenery is a visual one. Individuals will enjoy other qualities in the landscape, especially as they spend their leisure time in them - qualities such as solitude, tranquillity, wildness, exhilaration and challenge. People will also vary in their understanding of the cultural and natural values inherent in any one landscape. Each person will have his or her own preferences and feeling for the land, which stem from personal experience and sensitivity. Exactly how and why people derive their own values for different places is a complex matter, on which there is no general agreement amongst the specialist analysts of landscape. But why and how people enjoy different places may be less important than the facts that most people respond strongly to the appeal of certain types of scenery, and that there is a good measure of commonality in their preferences for certain kinds of scenery. For most people therefore, the evaluation of scenery or scenic values involves a statement of preferences.
The trained landscape architect is able to take a more objective approach to the analysis and classification of landscape, through its individual components - whether natural or cultural - and this provides a more professional basis for evaluation and assessment. SNH’s own landscape character assessment survey follows this approach, as does Historic Scotland’s Historic Landuse Assessment. These are excellent means of communicating more specialist information, analysis and judgements to those involved in planning or other kinds of land-use allocation or management.
So there are options for either a scenic or a landscape character approach to designation: the former is more concerned with people’s perceptions and valuation of place, the latter is more strongly underpinned by professional understanding and analysis. The scenic approach has merit in reflecting a more popular approach to the enjoyment of Scotland's best landscapes, but it is more subjective, being based on preferences. Both approaches are valid: each has its own strengths and each can give support to the other.
In the establishment of the NSA, the former CCS took a wholly scenic approach, as described in Scotland’s Scenic Heritage in the following words:

"... we have deliberately not analysed scenery in terms of its geology, geomorphology, pedology, climate, natural history or cultural history. This is not because we think these things are unimportant in their influence on the scene, but because we believe that the enjoyment of fine scenery is based on a perception of the whole, which does not depend on more formal analysis."

Conventionally in Britain the scenic approach has been followed, while some other European countries have favoured a more specialist basis to analysis and selection of special landscapes. All selection for designation, however, involves value judgements, and the question then becomes one of whose judgements, on what basis are they made, and how they are endorsed.
In the consultation paper, we asked whether respondents thought that the NSA should continue to be based on natural beauty and amenity - the scenic approach - or whether there was some other basis of choosing areas for designation. The great majority of respondents favoured the scenic approach as being more comprehensible to the general public and more likely to command their support. But many respondents recognised that high scenic value is often founded on the separate elements of landscape and their intrinsic quality - and that landform, ecological value, cultural and recreational values could be better recognised in the way in which selection of areas is made. However, there was little detailed commentary in the responses on how this might be done in a consistent manner. A stronger acknowledgement of the cultural elements of landscape would be logical, given that any extension of the NSA series might bring in more lowland landscapes where cultural features will often be dominant in the scene. Exactly how this might be done is not yet clear, although the matter is raised later in Chapter 4, in discussion on search and selection for possible expansion of the present series.
A related question asked whether the basis of the NSA should continue to be an accolade - as is implicit in the basic description in Scotland’s Scenic Heritage of the present NSA series "... areas of unsurpassed attractiveness which must be conserved as part of our national heritage". Here we offered respondents three options. First, the NSA should simply be seen as a general accolade without regard to the kinds of landscapes involved in selection, that is, a selection of the very best. Second, (and more likely in SNH’s view) is a modified accolade approach which recognises that expansion of the series would have to be more generally representative in future of the different kinds of outstanding landscapes for which Scotland is most renowned. Third, we could follow a fully representative approach, without attribution of special value to the areas chosen.
In the responses, there was general support for an accolade approach. A very few voices expressed a preference for a representative approach in selecting new areas (one view being that this was more objective because preferences change over time). But most respondents recognised that Scotland’s scenery is diverse and that much of it has renown - whether it be mountain, moorland, coast or fine lowland landscapes - and that the selection of the best should, therefore, also capture some of this diversity.
A few responses suggested that a different approach to designation be followed, reflecting in particular a concern that (as mentioned above) the conservation of the cultural landscape resource was not well served by the scenic approach. A small number went still further and advocated a designation designed to capture the full range of natural heritage interests. The proposed National Park designation does of course represent a move in this direction, but were this approach to be applied generally, then the present designation system would have to be substantially re-invented. It would also be difficult conceptually to bring together different value systems, namely those concerned with nature and founded in the natural sciences, those based on the cultural heritage, and those which place more emphasis on people’s response to their surroundings and draw more heavily on aesthetics and the social sciences.
SNH's recommendations on the most appropriate approach for the NSA designation is that:

it should continue to be a scenic designation based on preferences for natural beauty and amenity;
it should remain as an accolade designation; but
it should be more comprehensive in its recognition of the diversity of Scotland's best scenery than the present series of 40 areas.