Perth and Kinross unites the historic county of Perthshire, one of the largest in Scotland, with the tiny neighbouring shire of Kinross, a combination first made administratively in 1975 and continued as a single unitary council area since 1996. Perthshire alone, an eighteenth-century survey noted, spanned from the fertile carse land along the Tay to the misty Grampian heights of Atholl, Rannoch and Breadalbane, its rivers rising among peaks such as Schiehallion, measured at some 3,500 feet, before descending through vales of increasing richness toward Perth itself.
Perth, rebuilt after a great flood swept away its earlier site in the thirteenth century, faced across the Tay to the ancient palace of Scone, where Scottish kings were once crowned upon a stone seat long since removed to Westminster Abbey, one of the most resonant royal sites in the country. Kinross-shire, entirely surrounded by Perthshire on all but one short Fife boundary, contributed Loch Leven and its island castle, famous as the prison from which Mary, Queen of Scots made her celebrated escape in 1568, along with the classical mansion of Kinross House built by Sir William Bruce overlooking the loch.
The fertile Carse of Gowrie east of Perth, already farmed by the 1790s to what one contemporary account called the highest perfection of agriculture, and the ducal forests and pleasure grounds of Dunkeld further north, gave this combined territory a sweep from rich lowland farming to true Highland wilderness within a single, historically layered council area, its constituent shires' boundaries still clearly legible beneath the modern administrative map.