Most northerly of the four parts of the United Kingdom

Religion

Scotland is relatively free from ethnic and religious strife. The Church of Scotland, Presbyterian in structure and Evangelical in doctrine, is the established religion and largest communion, though membership has been steadily declining. It is controlled by a hierarchy of church courts, from the kirk session (governing the affairs of a congregation) through the presbytery (covering a group of parishes) to the General Assembly, at which clergy and lay representatives meet annually in Edinburgh to discuss key issues relating to Scottish society. The Roman Catholic Church is organized into two archdioceses and six dioceses. The Scottish Episcopal Church is also significant, and there are congregations of other denominations, such as the Free Church of Scotland, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Unitarians. Faiths other than Christianity are also practiced, especially by ethnic minority groups; for example, Glasgow has several synagogues and mosques and a Buddhist centre.

Settlement patterns

In earlier times mountains, rivers, and seas divided the Scottish people into self-sufficient communities that developed strong senses of local identity. This sense has been eroded by social mobility, modern transport, broadcasting, and other standardizing influences and by a general shift from rural to urban ways of life. Yet vestiges of regional consciousness linger. The Shetland islanders speak of Scotland with detachment. The Galloway area in the southwest, cut off by hills from the rest of the country, has a vigorous regional patriotism. The Gaelic-speaking people of the Hebrides and the western Highlands find their language a bond of community. The northeast has its own local traditions, embodied especially in a still vigorous Scots dialect, and Borderers celebrate their local festivals with fervour. The most thickly populated rural areas are those with the best farming land, such as in East Lothian and in the northeast.
The Highlands once nourished a large population, but “Highland Clearances” (a series of forcible evictions) and continuous emigration since the 18th century have caused it to dwindle. Now settlements in the Highlands are mostly remnants of crofting townships—that is, irregular groupings of subsistence farms of a few acres each. The old pattern of crofting was one of communities practicing a kind of cooperative farming, with strips of common land allotted annually to individuals. Examples of the old system survive, but now crofters have their own arable land fenced in, while they share the common grazing land. In East Lothian and other areas of high farming, the communal farm has long been replaced by single farms with steadings (farmsteads) and workers’ houses. Scotland noticeably lacks those old villages that evolved in England from medieval hamlets of joint tenants. Some planned villages were built by enterprising landowners in the 18th century.
Burghs, often little bigger than villages, were mostly set up as trading centres, ports, or river crossings or to command entrances to mountain passes. Many small towns survive around the east and northeast coast that were once obliged to be self-contained in consumer industries and burghal institutions because they lacked adequate transportation systems. The growth of industry and transport has helped produce urbanization. Edinburgh, Dundee, and Aberdeen are centres of administration, commerce, and industry for their areas, but only central Clydeside, including Glasgow with its satellite towns, is large enough to deserve the official title of conurbation (metropolitan area).