Inverness-shire, by far the largest historic county in Scotland, stretched from the Moray Firth across the Great Glen and the Grampian and Monadhliath mountains to the Atlantic coast, its territory including Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Britain, and Loch Lochy, sounded by one eighteenth-century survey at a depth of some 500 fathoms in its deepest reach, later measurements suggesting a more modest but still considerable average of over 100 fathoms. Sheep, goats and small hardy horses ran semi-wild across its higher moors, while black cattle, reared to three or four years old before being sold to Lowland drovers, formed the backbone of a pastoral economy that same survey judged less skilfully managed here than in neighbouring Argyllshire.
The county's improvement, where it had occurred at all, was credited chiefly to deliberate government policy aimed at pacifying a population still remembered for its turbulence following the Jacobite risings, with Cromwell's soldiers said to have first introduced several basic practical arts to the region over a century earlier. Fort Augustus, a small four-bastioned garrison at the head of Loch Ness between the Tarff and Oich rivers, anchored the military road running the length of the Great Glen, a route so remote in the district of Badenoch that the surveyor noted the entire stretch possessed no surgeon, mason, baker or jail.
Culloden Moor, scene of the final defeat of the Jacobite rising of 1745-46, lay along the road approaching Inverness itself, the county town and a royal burgh of considerable antiquity with over 10,000 inhabitants, tanneries, linen and thread manufactures, banking houses and a newly established academy teaching subjects useful for trade, the army, the navy or the life of a gentleman farmer, evidence that even Scotland's wildest and most extensive county was, by the 1790s, being steadily drawn into the commercial and educational currents of the wider Lowlands.