The Rough Bounds have been used, in their fashion, for a very long time. When archaeologists from the University of Edinburgh and Headland Archaeology surveyed a six-kilometre realignment of the A830 road near Arisaig in 2000-2001, they found a Bronze Age kerb cairn, turf buildings, and shieling huts that had been reused continuously from medieval to post-medieval times. The shieling huts sat directly on top of Bronze Age remains - the same patches of ground favoured by herders three thousand years apart. Peat cores told a longer story: a slow, continuous decline in woodland from about 3200 BC to the present, the land thinning out under wind, salt, and grazing across five thousand years.

After the Vikings, this area belonged to the Norse Kingdom of the Isles, and then through the Norse-Gaelic figure Somerled to a kingdom of his own making. After Somerled's death the territory that became the Rough Bounds, along with Uist, Eigg, and Rum, formed Garmoran, ruled by the MacRory faction of Somerled's descendants. The 1266 Treaty of Perth made Garmoran a Scottish crown dependency. The Lordship survived under MacRory and Clan Ranald until 1427, when violent feuding between Clan Ranald and the Siol Gorrie - both descended from Ranald MacDonald - prompted King James I to execute the Siol Gorrie's leader at Inverness and declare the Lordship forfeit. By the late 16th century the name Garmoran had quietly dropped out of use. The land remained, but it was no longer anyone's named possession.

When the Statutes of Iona attempted to enforce the Scottish Reformation across the highlands in 1609, the Rough Bounds simply refused. The area remained resolutely Roman Catholic and sided with the Royalists in the Civil War. In the following century, Jacobite sympathy ran so deep that the locals burned down Tioram Castle themselves to keep it out of anti-Jacobite hands. After the failed Jacobite rising of 1745, the Rough Bounds gave Bonnie Prince Charlie his last sanctuary on Scottish soil. He left from this country into exile in France on 20 September 1746, and the men who went with him are commemorated by the Seven Men of Moidart - seven beech trees planted in a line near Kinlochmoidart, of which only a few survive.

Moidart did not get its road - the A861 - until 1966; before that, you walked in or sailed in. That remoteness made it perfect for secret things. During the Second World War, the Special Operations Executive established its Scottish headquarters just outside Arisaig, building paramilitary training bases throughout the Rough Bounds. Resistance fighters from across occupied Europe came here to learn small-arms warfare, demolition, and survival in a landscape of bog, mountain, and sea loch. At Moidart, HMS Dorlin trained Royal Navy Beach Signals and Royal Signals operators. The same remoteness preserved the language: the 1881 census showed around 90% of the population speaking Gaelic and over a third unable to speak English. By 2001 the Gaelic share had fallen below 15%. The country is still rough, still mostly empty - but the languages that filled it have grown quieter.