The Highlands in Facts and Figures

The Highland Council area

The Highland Council area (Sgìre Comhairle na Gàidhealtachd in Gaelic) is a local government area in the Scottish Highlands and the largest local government area in both Scotland and the United Kingdom as a whole. It shares borders with the council areas of Moray, Aberdeenshire, Perth and Kinross, and Argyll and Bute. Their councils, and those of Angus and Stirling, also have areas of the Scottish Highlands within their administrative boundaries. The Highland area covers most of the mainland and inner-Hebridean parts of the former counties of Inverness-shire and Ross and Cromarty, all of Sutherland, Caithness and Nairnshire, and small parts of Argyll and Moray.

The area was created as a two-tier region in 1975, under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973, with an elected council for the whole region and, in addition, elected councils for each of eight districts, Badenoch and Strathspey, Caithness, Inverness, Lochaber, Nairn , Ross and Cromarty, Skye and Lochalsh and Sutherland. The act also abolished county and burgh councils.

In 1996, under the Local Government etc (Scotland) Act 1994, the Highland Regional Council and the district councils were wound up and their functions were transferred to a new Highland Council. The Highland Council adopted the districts as management areas and created area committees to represent them. However, the boundaries of committee areas ceased to be aligned exactly with those of management areas as a result of changes to ward boundaries in 1999.

Also, ward boundaries have changed again this year, 2007, and the management areas and related committees have been abolished in favour of three new corporate management areas, Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, Inverness, Nairn and Badenoch and Strathspey and Ross, Skye and Lochaber. The names of these areas are also names of constituencies, but boundaries are different.

Inverness City Centre

To many people within the area using the name Highland as a noun sounds wrong. Dingwall in Highland, for example, sounds very strange and is not idiomatic usage. To refer specifically to the area covered by the council, people tend to say the Highland Council area or the Highland area or the Highland region. Otherwise they tend to use the traditional county names, such as Ross-shire. Highlands sometimes refers to the Highland council area (as in Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service). More usually, however, it refers to a somewhat larger or overlapping area. Northern (as in Northern Constabulary) is also used to refer to the area covered by the Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service (which includes the island council areas of Orkney, Shetland and Na h-Eileanan Siar (Western Isles).

Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness

The Highland Council headquarters is located in Inverness with most previous district council offices retained as outstations.

As of mid-2006, the Highlands local authority area has a population of 215,310, a 3.5% rise on 1996 figures, with a projected growth of 9.6% by 2026, based on 2006 figures.

The geographical area - exluding open, inland water - measures 26,484 square kilometres, which equates to 34% of the area of Scotland, or 11.4% of Great Britain. It is ten times larger than Luxembourg, 20% larger than Wales and nearly the size of Belgium.

In terms of population size and density, Inverness is by far the largest conurbation, with 54,070 residents, followed by Fort William with 9,680; the seaside town of Nairn, with 28.3 persons per square kilometre, has the highest density, whereas rural Sutherland has a sparse 2.2 persons per square kilometre.