Kinross-shire, one of the smallest historic counties in Scotland, lies entirely inland, surrounded by Perthshire on almost every side and touching Fife only briefly at its eastern edge. An eighteenth-century account noted its unusual constitutional arrangement with neighbouring Clackmannanshire, the two tiny counties sharing a single seat in Parliament between them, returned alternately at successive elections, a peculiarity found nowhere else in Scotland at the time. The county is dominated by Loch Leven, one of the largest lowland lochs in the kingdom, its waters draining east into Fife by way of the River Leven and long celebrated for their trout.
On a small island near the loch's eastern shore stood Loch Leven Castle, already a ruin by the 1790s but forever associated with the imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1567 and 1568, where she was compelled to abdicate the Scottish crown in favour of her infant son before her celebrated escape across the water briefly revived her cause. Kinross itself, the modest county town on the loch's western bank, gave its name to the shire and served its small farming population, the surrounding Vale of Kinross reckoned fertile and well cultivated despite the county's diminutive size.
Kinross House, built in the classical taste by the architect and politician Sir William Bruce as his own residence overlooking the loch and its ruined castle, was counted among the finest early classical buildings in Scotland, a striking architectural statement for so small a county. Bounded by the Ochil Hills to the north and the Cleish Hills to the south, Kinross-shire's compact, entirely landlocked territory offered a genuine variety of loch, hill and farmland within one of the tightest county boundaries in the country.