World Heritage Sites in Scotland
Scotland currently has seven World Heritage Sites. On this page you can get a brief overview of each site, plus links to find out more.
The Antonine Wall
The Antonine Wall runs across central Scotland and marked the most northerly – and most complex – frontier of the Roman Empire nearly 2,000 years ago.
Roman soldiers built the Antonine Wall for the Emperor Antoninus Pius around AD 142. Their efforts are commemorated by a unique group of distance slabs.
The Old and New Towns of Edinburgh
Edinburgh’s Old and New Towns form one of the most beautiful cityscapes in the world. The city’s unique character springs from the contrast between the medieval Old Town, with its pattern of distinctive narrow passageways, and the 18th-century New Town, the best-preserved example of Georgian town planning in the UK.
St Kilda
St Kilda is a group of remote islands and sea stacks 100 miles off the west coast of Scotland. They host the largest colony of seabirds in Europe as well as unique populations of sheep, field mice and wrens. Evocative cultural remains chart some 4,000 years of human habitation up until the mass evacuation of the islands in 1930.
New Lanark
New Lanark is a restored 18th-century cotton mill village situated in the narrow gorge of the River Clyde. Social pioneer Robert Owen was renowned for his enlightened management of the mill – the biggest cotton mill in Scotland and one of the largest factory sites in the world.
The Heart of Neolithic Orkney
Skara Brae, Maeshowe, the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar together make up one of the richest surviving Neolithic landscapes in Western Europe. Their impressive domestic and ritual monuments are masterpieces of Neolithic design and construction. They give us exceptional insights into the society, skills and spiritual beliefs of the people who built them.
The Forth Bridge
The Forth Bridge is a 2.5km-long, 110m-high cantilever bridge that links Edinburgh and the Lothians in the south with Fife and the Highlands in the north. The building of this masterpiece of human creative genius conquered a natural barrier of a scale and depth that had never before been overcome by humans.
The Flow Country
Scotland's only World Heritage Site inscribed purely for its qualities as a peatland ecosystem. It stretches across the northernmost parts of mainland Scotland and is the most outstanding example of a blanket bog ecosystem in the world.
What is World Heritage?
Find out more about how and why UNESCO introduced World Heritage Sites, what it means to be a World Heritage Site and how these special places are managed in Scotland.