Perthshire is a vast historic county of central Scotland, its territory rising from the fertile carse land along the Tay to the high Grampian summits of Atholl, Rannoch and Breadalbane in the north, an eighteenth-century survey dividing the shire into these and other traditional districts across some sixty-two parishes. Countless rivers, the Tay, Earn, Tummel, Teith and Allan among them, rise in the county's misty interior heights and descend through widening, increasingly fertile vales, while the mountain of Schiehallion, measured at some 3,500 feet, ranked among the loftiest peaks in a region where the Grampians themselves begin their long sweep north-east toward Aberdeenshire.
Perth, the county town, had been swept away by a great flood in the early thirteenth century and rebuilt on its present site by the Tay; across the river stood the ancient palace of Scone, seat of the Viscounts Stormont, where Scottish kings were once crowned upon a stone chair since removed to Westminster Abbey, a single sentence that captured centuries of Scotland's constitutional history in one Perthshire landmark. Nearby at Luncarty, ground still occasionally yielding old weapons to the plough marked the site of a celebrated Scottish victory over Danish invaders in the tenth century.
The fertile Carse of Gowrie between Perth and Dundee was already, by the 1790s, farmed to a pitch its surveyor called the highest perfection of agriculture, its landowners grown rich on the soil's produce, while Dunkeld, seat of the Duke of Atholl, was celebrated for pleasure grounds and forest plantations of remarkable beauty along the Tay. Between Highland grandeur at Schiehallion and Rannoch, royal history at Scone, and lowland fertility in the Carse, Perthshire offered, within a single county, very nearly the full range of Scotland's landscape and history.