How the Potato Blight Built Roads in the Highlands

In the mid-19th century, a silent catastrophe crept into the Highlands of Scotland. Not with fire or blade, but with rot. The arrival of potato blight in 1846 plunged entire communities into hunger, destabilizing already fragile economies and triggering a humanitarian crisis across the rural north. While the Irish Famine commands most of the historical spotlight, the Highlands experienced a parallel disaster, one that permanently changed both its landscape and infrastructure.

But from the suffering came something unexpected: roads. This is the paradoxical story of how disease and starvation led to the construction of the very paths that now wind through Scotland’s wildest and most remote regions.