By James Hunter. Standing by an enormous picture window at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, an Isle of Skye college where students from all around the world take higher education courses through the medium of Gaelic, our American guest gazed across the wide waters of the Sound of Sleat in the direction of Knoydart, its snow-capped mountains glinting in the winter sun.

'This place,' he told us, 'could so easily be in our Pacific North West. My own home's on the San Juan Islands, not far from Seattle, and the view I have from there's just like the view you have from here.'

This visiting American's hosts, of whom I was one, had brought him to Skye in the course of showing him around the University of Highlands and Islands Millennium Institute. UHI, as it's known, extends right across the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Sabhal Mòr Ostaig is one of UHI's partner colleges. And next year, if all goes according to plan, Sabhal Mòr, like UHI's other campuses, will become an integral component of a fully-fledged University of the Highlands and Islands.

Since I'm a historian among other things, and since I've long had an interest in the many men from the Highlands and Islands who had leading roles in the North American fur trade of a couple of centuries back, I was able, that day at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, to provide our visitor with a direct connection between our part of the world and his.

We were looking out, as I mentioned, at Knoydart. Over there, around 1780, there lived a little boy called Finan McDonald. When he was still a child, Finan was taken by his emigrant parents to their new home in what is nowadays Ontario. When still a teenager, he joined the Montreal-based North West Company, a fur trading concern which, at the start of the nineteenth century, operated a hugely successful commercial empire extending all the way from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains.

Finan McDonald was one of the first whites to cross those mountains. Travelling mostly by canoe, he and his close companion, David Thomson, another North West Company man, mapped the enormous tract of territory drained by the Columbia River. Much of the area thus opened up to trade and settlement now comprises America's Pacific North West.

But the Pacific North West and the Scottish Highlands and Islands are linked by more than history. The tremendously dynamic economy that's developed in Seattle and its Pacific North West hinterland – a hinterland comprising Washington State, Oregon, Idaho and Western Montana – owes a great deal to this enormous region's highly attractive natural environment. When combined with the possibilities created by modern telecommunications and computer technologies, which jointly allow all sorts of businesses to be operated successfully in places which would previously have been considered remote and inaccessible, this environment has become the Pacific North West's key developmental asset.

Something similar is happening in the Highlands and Islands. From the late eighteenth century, when Finan McDonald and his family headed for Ontario, until the mid-twentieth century, when thousands of people from the Highlands and Islands were still doing much the same, the northern half of Scotland was a place where success was generally thought to be bound up with getting out.

That's no longer true. In the course of the last thirty or forty years, a period when the population of Scotland has been static at best, the population of the Highlands and Islands has grown by a fifth. The region's unemployment rate, once a multiple of its all-Scotland equivalent and a further multiple of the corresponding figure for Britain as a whole, has been below the Scottish rate for several years – and is now below the British rate as well.

The Isle of Skye, where our Seattle-based businessman visitor felt so much at home, exemplifies this upturn. From the 1840s until the 1960s, Skye's population fell year by year – and this dismal trend seemed set to continue indefinitely. Instead, the opposite has occurred. Skye's total population is up by nearly 50 per cent. The island is awash with new homes. And at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, which is central to Scotland's efforts to sustain and regenerate its age-old Gaelic culture, university-level educational opportunities are available to a community once thought doomed.

Today, in contrast, people living in the Highlands and Islands – established residents and new arrivals alike – are everywhere encouraged to take pride in our unique heritage which, along with our spectacular mountain and coastal scenery, is seen as basic to our recent economic success. This is why the Scottish government has designated 2007 Scotland's Year of Highland Culture. Throughout 2007, as a result, we'll stage a whole series of events and happenings – in the rest of Scotland as well as in the Highlands and Islands themselves – by way of celebrating what we've achieved and by way of underlining our commitment to achieving a whole lot more.

During one of the year's highlights, the Inverness Festival which will be held in July – and which will feature a military tattoo and the world pipe band championships as well as all sorts of concerts, ceilidhs and other events of that kind – our UHI Centre for History will stage its first summer school. In UHI's splendid headquarters building beside the River Ness and in sight of Inverness Castle, my colleagues and I will explore – entertainingly as well as informatively, we hope – the past, the present and the future of the Highlands and Islands.

Why not join us? You'll be made most welcome. And you'll be right at the heart of happenings designed to demonstrate to an international audience something that those of us lucky enough to live here have long known to be true – that the Highlands and Islands of Scotland are, in every way, one of the world's best places.

To find out more about the UHI Centre for History's 2007 Summer School, email Dr Rob Macpherson on: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Professor James Hunter is Director of the UHI Centre for History. The author of several books about the Highlands and Islands, he has also been active in the public life of the region and, for several years, chaired the board of Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the north of Scotland's development agency. His most recent book, Scottish Exodus, a study of the Highlands and Islands diaspora, was published last year by Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh.

Further Information:

Courtesy of Scottish Government - Scotland.org .

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