How the Appalachians and Scottish Highlands Became Long-Lost Siblings

Rural Appalachia and the rolling Scottish Highlands may now seem worlds apart, but believe it or not, the two regions were once part of the same mountain range. So how, then, did the two long-lost relatives drift so wildly apart, and what are the origins of their relation?

300-400 million years ago, a series of collisions between the landmasses that are now known as Africa, North America, and Europe created a supercontinent known as Pangaea, in which all the land on Earth was combined into one singular mass.

The massive collision between the continental tectonic plates caused Earth’s crust to buckle, thicken, and fold at the point of collision, creating a huge range called the Central Pangean Mountains, in a phenomenon known as orogeny.

Orogeny can perhaps be most prominently seen today in the Himalayas. When the Indian subcontinent collided with the Asian tectonic plate, the crust in the zone of collision was forced upward, creating what are now the world’s highest mountains. Believe it or not, the Central Pangean Mountains, which reached their peak around 295 million years ago, are estimated to have been just as tall as the modern-day Himalayas, given current geological estimates.

Within the last hundred million years or so, the North American and European plates began to drift apart, as the North Atlantic Ocean filled the gap between them. This divided what was formerly the largest mountain range on Earth into two distinct pieces: the Appalachians, and the Scottish Highlands/Scandinavian Mountains.

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Today, while the two regions may feel quite distant from one another in many respects, they still share many key characteristics. First, they’re both made up of the same types of metamorphic rock, such as granite, gneiss, and schist, which can be traced back to the Pangean days. Second, fossils of very similar prehistoric species have been found in both mountain ranges.

Both areas also have certain aesthetic similarities. The Scottish Highlands and Appalachians are alike in that the ranges appear gradual and rounded — signs of the old nature of both, worn down by hundreds of millions of years of erosion. In fact, the two regions bear such striking aesthetic similarities that film crews have been known to shoot on-site for one area when attempting to depict the other, as was done in 2005’s “The Descent,” filmed in the Scottish Highlands while being set in Appalachia.

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Finally, beyond simple geographic similarity, the two regions today are home to people of very similar ancestry. In fact, in many Southern Appalachian counties specifically, most inhabitants to this day are descendants of Scottish immigrants. Be this sheer coincidence, or because the rolling Appalachians reminded Scots of home, it draws another interesting parallel between the two regions.

Even now, with several thousand miles of ocean separating the two regions, the Scottish Highlands and Appalachian Mountains still bear a striking resemblance to one another — serving as proof that no matter how far the two drift apart, they will always be linked by a shared, prehistoric past.