The Lee MacLellan Family Story
The Land and Economy in Scotland
Scotland is small, comparable in size to South Carolina. It has but 19 million acres of land, of which only four million (24%) is considered arable. Another 10 million, over ½ of the total acres, is mostly suitable for cattle and sheep, especially in the craggy Highlands of northern Scotland.
Lowly sheep have played an important role in Scotland's history and its' economy. The British drove the Highlanders from their land (a part of Scottish history called the Highland Clearances) in part because they wanted the grazing land for their sheep.
So is Scotland only a land of sheep? Hardly. It has a population of over 5 million people. Its two major cities, Glasgow on the west coast and Edinburgh on the east coast, are hubs of education and public research.
And like a lot of other industrial countries, its seen its manufacturing sector shrink from 19 to 9% percent of its overall economy. And it's service sector grew to 76% of the total economy in 2015.
Major industries include tourism, food and agriculture, and oil extraction and related engineering. The oil extraction and related activities come from the eastern coast, in the North Sea. The Scots have benefited from the oil resources there.
On our family trip to Scotland in 2018 we saw wild salmon farms operating in almost pure water; in my biased and limited experience the Scottish wild salmon is the best in the world. Salmon is a main stay in many Scottish households.