Do the Borders matter?

by - 18:10 on 02 April 2007

There was a time when all you had to do was to say the name of a town or village in Scotland and I could tell you in which of the old area tourist boards it belonged. Kinda sad really. But all that was thanks to an apprenticeship dealing with these administrative groupings charged with promoting their, and only their, area. And all this in a wee place liked Scotland. Woe betide me if a gazetteer entry appeared which was – heaven forbid – on the wrong side of their border. It was a kind of ‘local councillor’ or ‘parish-pump’ mentality.

Of course you have to have some dividing up of the country – we do it ourselves on this site. But I’m sure that no visitor to Scotland is very much aware of, say, passing out of Angus and into Aberdeenshire/Grampian, or the precise point in the rolling uplands that the Scottish Borders become Galloway.

And sometimes it just isn’t logical. Touring visitors may see the country in a completely different way, which is why if you’re trying to get people in tourism to work together, you sometimes have to cross administrative borders to create sensible visitor touring experiences. This is the rationale behind www.greaterspeyside.co.uk It takes the theme of the River Spey and widens this out as far as, westwards, Culloden, the famous battlefield near Inverness which overlooks the inner Moray Firth, and, in the east, the fishing town of Macduff, with the Spey itself somewhere in the middle. And does it matter that Culloden is in Highland and Macduff is in Aberdeenshire? Of course not.

But it does mean that you get a good idea of what’s available in a slice of Scotland which includes both the high granite hills of the Cairngorm National Park, as well as the rugged and unspoilt sea-coast, with some of Scotland’s finest malt whiskies distilled in between. It’s a logical package with a huge choice things to do and see. And it’s all on one website. Take a look.

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