The TRAVELER'S JOURNAL: July twenty-ninth, with a primer on Scotland.

The sovereign and increasingly independent nation of Scotland occupies the northern half of Britain's primary island, sharing a long and stormy history, with its English neighbor. Traditionally and topographically, the county is divided along an east/west line across its 100 mile wide "waist," with its two primary cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow, at the ends. To the south are broad fields and glacier flattened hills. The people and politics of Scotland's fertile low lands have been long and most strongly pulled by England's gravity.

North of that imaginary line, start the Scottish Highlands, a series of tangled mountain ranges, separated by rolling moors and glacier-gouged valleys, or glens, many brimming with long lakes, or lochs. While English is the primary spoken language, understanding a bit of Gaelic comes in handy when exploring the Highlands. It also helps to be able to negotiate narrow, twisting single lane roads while driving on the wrong side and shifting gears with your left hand.

Starkly bare and bleakly beautiful, vast stretches of the Highlands can be forbidding in their emptiness. The more accessible glens generally have small towns on the fertile flatlands at either end of its loch, with tiny villages and sylvan settlements tucked in nooks along the shoreline. Less accessible glens can be wild and remote, with few visible signs of humanity, other than wind-whipped sheep and the occasional jet fighter thundering low on practice runs over the landscape. The Highlands are a magnificent place to walk. That's what we'll do tomorrow.

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