| Summary: | The problems relating to transport and communications in large, sparsely populated areas are here examined in the context of the Highlands and Islands, north and west of the Great Glen. The concept of 'accessibility' is of particular importance. The work has two inter-related themes: the description, mainly in cartographic form, of regional patterns of accessibility within the Highlands and Islands, and also a comparative assessment of the practical value of the range of analytical techniques available for doing this. Due to the great size of the region, the bulk of the thesis is concerned with the regional, aggregate scale. Accessibility has a great variety of interpretations, and a physical rather than a behavioural view is taken here. A selection of elementary structural measures is applied, before resorting to the more complex procedures of network analysis. The former includes a survey of the coverage of the settlement pattern by transport services, and reveals a very high standard. The application of network analysis for high-resolution networks entails severe problems of definition and scale. A program is constructed for the manipulation of very large networks and a series of accessibility surfaces is generated; the degree of flexibility which the method proves to have must be appraised in the light of the computing problems encountered. Overall, fourteen accessibility indices are proposed in the thesis, and these reveal a fairly high degree of consensus on the spatial patterns of relative advantage within the region. To complement the main theme, a local scale study considers the concept of 'isolation' and suggests a methodology. In the Highlands, as in other rural areas, public transport must be seen in relation to the general issues of rural service provision and settlement policy.
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