ABSTRACT
It is a measure of the rate of recent progress in research on the Scottish landscape that when, in 1973, the author first considered a collection of papers to take stock of progress in this field, there was hardly sufficient material to warrant the task. There has been a move from a descriptive to a more analytical study of the past, with greater emphasis on function than on form, and with the explanation of landscape change being sought in changes in underlying technological or institutional processes. The concern to understand these processes has inevitably drawn the historian and geographer more firmly to the study of contemporary documents and has confirmed what was long suspected — that an excessive reliance on retrospective, printed sources of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has painted a misleading picture of the Scottish rural economy of earlier times.
