I travel around the north of Scotland for my inspiration. I particularly like the bleak bareness of the Flow Country. This is the last great wilderness, bogs have lain here for thousands of years, and there are many remnants of old civilisations, such as brochs and standing stones which remind me that as Lewis Grassic Gibbon wrote 'Nothing endures but the land'.
The infamous Highland Clearances of the 18th and early 19th century was when the crofters were forced off the land in order to allow the more prosperous business of sheep-farming. As a matter of fact, sheep were not the money-spinner that Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland thought it would be. The land soured and was not suitable for crops.