Social Life and Culture
The culture of the Highlands retained a Celtic-Norse character well into the 18th century, and the ways in which this region thought and acted long were defined by the clan or family system and by a rural and agrarian non-money economy. There was a general isolation from the faster moving and very different life and institutions to the east and south. Highland culture remained verbal, with information transmitted by verse or story. Old religious ideas, loyalty to a chief and clan, the wearing of tartan and the kilt, and the playing of bagpipes and fiddles, all reflected a region which held on to the past with a fierce determination. Only with the forced change after 1746 did the Highlands abandon at least some of their older culture.
