HLAmap
Compare modern-day land use and past land use across Scotland using this interactive online map.
HLAmap is a Scotland-wide view of land use in modern and past times. It uses simple annotated maps to show how the landscape has changed over time, giving the user a tool to decipher the broad elements of the historic environment.
It maps both activities like industrial farming or ski areas that are current today and land use activities from the past, such as charcoal burning or prehistoric agriculture and settlement. Work began in 1997 as a partnership between Historic Scotland (HS) and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) and was developed in response to a need for landscape-wide spatial data relating to the historic environment. Coverage was completed in 2015, a year that also saw the merging of the two organisations into Historic Environment Scotland.
As well as using current and historical OS maps, HLA researchers reviewed the All Scotland Survey of vertical aerial photographs taken in 1988, and other vertical and oblique aerial images available in the archive of Historic Environment Scotland (HES). They studied the existing records of the extent of archaeological sites, held by HES and by Local Authorities, as well as seeking information from Government and others' websites.