Rannoch Moor

Fifty square miles of peat bog, lochan, and granite — the emptiest landscape in Britain, where the silence is so complete you can hear your own heartbeat on a windless day. Rannoch Moor defeated every attempt at cultivation and settlement, and in return it has been left alone.

Rannoch Moor is one of the last great wildernesses in Britain, a high plateau of blanket bog, scattered lochans, and glacial erratics that covers 50 square miles between Glencoe and Loch Rannoch. The West Highland Railway crosses the moor on a floating embankment — the engineers laid the track on a mattress of brushwood, tree roots, and ash because the peat was too soft to support ballast. No permanent settlement has survived here, though Bronze Age remains suggest people tried. The moor's combination of emptiness, geological drama, and weather extremes creates an atmosphere that writers from Robert Louis Stevenson to Irvine Welsh have tried to capture. Corrour station, at the moor's eastern edge, has no road access — the most remote railway station in Britain.