Revealing hidden stories in the Scottish landscape
Scotland’s landscape is often imagined as wild, remote, and untouched — but the reality is far more complex. What Lies Beneath explores the marks of human presence that shape the land, from agriculture and infrastructure to energy and field sports.
Our understanding of landscape is shaped not just by what we see, it is filtered through education, tradition, economics and personal bias. What we notice and value is often as much about culture as it is about place.
By pairing traditional landscape photography with drone images taken from directly above the same locations, the project reveals a dual perspective: the view we’re used to, and the one we rarely see. Together, these images offer a new way to look at familiar terrain — and invite reflection on how the land is used, valued, and changed over time.
Images / Text / Site © Richard Cross
With a background in documentary photography, I started photographing landscapes as a way to engage with the natural environment. Using a drone to shift perspective, these images are part of an ongoing project exploring conflicts and tensions within Scottish landscapes.
Thoughts on What Lies Beneath
From above, the Highlands unfold like a patchwork — stitched with old lines, scored with paths and tracks, scattered with the remnants of stone enclosures. The drone reveals what the eye on the ground often misses: the traces of time written into the land itself.
It’s easy to think of the Highlands as wild. That’s the story many of us grew up with — vast, untamed spaces, where nature rules and people are few. But the longer I spend here, and the more I look — really look — the more I realise that the landscape is full of interventions. The hand of the human is everywhere, and once seen it’s impossible to un see.
Forests that once stood for millennia now exist only in isolated fragments. Rivers have been straightened. Peat bogs drained. Deer fences and tracks cut across the hills like scars. And yet, for all this, the land endures. It holds memory in the pattern of its vegetation, in the way light hits a ridge, in the plants that return when given a chance.
That’s what What Lies Beneath is really about for me: learning to read the land differently. Not as a postcard or a playground, but as a living archive of change — ecological, economic, and societal. Some of what’s hidden is painful. But some of it is hopeful too.
Of course, history is part of that story too. The emptiness of many glens isn’t natural, and the way we manage land today — for deer, for aesthetics, for energy — still echoes older hierarchies. But what gives me hope is that the conversation is shifting. More people are asking: who is the land for? What do we want it to become?
If we’re serious about restoration — real restoration, not just a greener version of control — then we have to listen. Not just to scientists, but to the land itself.
Photography helps me do that. It helps me see what’s been overlooked — not just damage, but resilience. Not just loss, but possibility.
The Highlands are not just scenery. They are alive, complex, and still becoming. What lies beneath the surface is not just the past — it’s the future too.
Richard Cross – 2025