Argyll and Bute unites the historic county of Argyllshire, its mainland cut through by sea lochs and its territory scattered across dozens of Hebridean islands, with the smaller neighbouring county of Bute in the Firth of Clyde, a combination first made administratively in 1975 and continued as a single unitary council area since 1996. An eighteenth-century survey of Argyllshire alone praised Ben Cruachan as one of Scotland's loftiest summits, described the near-severing of the Kintyre peninsula from the mainland at the narrow isthmus of Tarbert, and found Inveraray, seat of the Duke of Argyll, transformed by a castle of striking blue-grey stone and extensive pleasure grounds few places in Scotland could equal.
Campbeltown, at Kintyre's southern tip, already supported some 5,000 people through herring fishing and whisky distilling carried on in great quantity, an industry that would later make the town, alongside Islay within the wider combined area, one of Scotland's most concentrated centres of malt whisky production. Bute, separated from the Argyll mainland by narrow straits, contributed Rothesay, historic seat of the title Duke of Rothesay still held today by the heir to the British throne, and the island of Arran's dramatic granite peaks, a landscape the same era's writers likened to a miniature version of the wider Highlands.
Sheep farming, introduced by Lowland settlers over the closing decades of the eighteenth century, was rapidly displacing the black cattle that had traditionally dominated Argyllshire's pastoral economy, while the burning of shoreline seaweed into kelp added a further source of income along a coastline where, even before formal administrative union, Argyll and Bute's constituent territories already shared deep economic and cultural ties across the waters of the Firth of Clyde.