Geography, Culture and Heritage

Geography, culture, and heritage is a degree that examines the relationships between place, identity, and the human past, asking how landscapes, environments, and built environments carry meaning and how cultures and communities understand and use their heritage. Geography provides the spatial and environmental analytical framework, examining how physical and human processes shape places and regions. Culture and heritage studies ask how societies construct, preserve, interpret, and contest their cultural inheritance, from ancient monuments and historic buildings to living traditions and contemporary cultural landscapes.

At the University of the Highlands and Islands, this four-year full-time programme is taught in an environment of exceptional geographic and cultural richness, located in a region with a deep and distinctive heritage spanning Celtic, Norse, and Gaelic traditions and extraordinary natural landscapes. You will study both the physical and human dimensions of geography alongside cultural heritage theory, heritage management, and the policy and legislative contexts within which heritage is protected and promoted. The programme's location makes it a genuinely distinctive place to study this combination of disciplines.

Graduates work in cultural heritage management, museums and galleries, historic environment bodies, tourism, local government, conservation organisations, community development, and research. The combination of geographical and heritage knowledge is particularly relevant in Scotland, where questions of landscape, cultural identity, and heritage management are of deep social and economic importance. Many graduates continue to postgraduate study in heritage management, cultural geography, or related disciplines.