Angus, historically known as Forfarshire after its former county town, occupies Scotland's eastern coast between the Firth of Tay and the Grampian foothills, its landscape descending from bleak upland moor in the north-west to some of the most productively farmed lowland in the country along the shore. An eighteenth-century survey praised the thoroughness of this improvement: marl, lime, dung and seaweed spread as manure, lakes and morasses drained, and wheat, barley, oats, flax and turnips raised in careful rotation, all combining to make Angus, in the surveyor's judgement, a seat of the most flourishing agricultural industry in Scotland.
Dundee, already the effective capital of the county with some 24,000 inhabitants, carried on a brisk trade in linen, thread, glass and tobacco from a harbour handling some nine thousand tons of shipping, its ancient Cross Church, part of a twelfth-century foundation dedicated to the Virgin Mary, still dominating a townscape increasingly reshaped by new civic buildings. Along the coast to the north-east, Arbroath supported thriving sailcloth and coarse linen manufactures beside the majestic ruined abbey where, in 1320, Scottish nobles had famously asserted the kingdom's independence in the Declaration of Arbroath, while further on the cliffs of Red Head carried the ruins of yet another old fortress amid traces of ancient Danish encampments.
Angus produced an unusually distinguished roll of native sons in this period, among them Admiral Lord Duncan, the celebrated victor of the naval Battle of Camperdown, and George Dempster, long-serving member of Parliament for the Dundee burghs, whose portrait hung in the town house. Glamis Castle, ancestral seat of the Earls of Strathmore deep in the Angus countryside, added further to a county whose combination of rich farmland, historic ports and notable families gave it real weight among Scotland's eastern shires.