From The Moors To The Mountains, Alexander Kilian Captures Scotland

Scotland has a landscape that is both vast and disparate; moors and mountains, wild seas, lochs and endless skies. Last month, Berlin-based photographer Alexander Kilian traveled there to capture the unique nature of this country.

From the back streets of Glasgow, Kilian and his partner traveled to Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park. Here, they explored the vast bodies of water and the verdant countryside through the mist of a true Scottish rain. “The day could start with a grey sky and a haze that won’t let you see further than 15 meters,” Kilian tells us, “and five minutes later it’s sunny again and with a clear blue sky… People told me: If you don’t like the weather, just wait ten minutes, this really sums up my experience with the weather of Scotland.”

Further northeast, they traveled to the heart of the Highlands and the largest national park in Britain; Cairngorms. The park, with its elevated plateau and mountain ranges that were shaped by the ice age, is home to reindeer, ospreys, eagles, wildcats, and squirrels. Here, Kilian captured the ancient Caledonian forests that edge onto remote lochs, and the stretches of wild open moorland that lead up to the foot of the mountain range. “It was truly beautiful to see the landscape changing its mood within minutes,” Kilian explains. “Revealing only parts while others are still covered in clouds, showing its complete charm with a blue sky just to disappear completely in fog right after.”

From the Cairngorms, they went to Loch Ness, and after to the dreamlike Isle of Skye, of which Kilian says, “I felt like the island could give you the most compressed experience of Scotland in terms of its landscape. You could drive along and see the landscape changing from black mountains to brown busky valleys and then to green coasts within an hour.”