There's plenty to say about why The Traitors has become such a hit. The casting is genuinely excellent, a proper mix of people who are characters but not unhinged. It's an old-fashioned whodunnit at heart, and we've never really stopped loving those. Claudia herself, her deadpan delivery, her Scottish knitwear, the whole persona, is doing an enormous amount of work too. All of that matters and none of it should be underplayed.
But I think there's another reason sitting quietly underneath all of that, one that doesn't get talked about as much. The castle, the hills, the weather closing in. Scotland is doing a huge amount of the work here too.
Why the Scottish highlands is the read star of The Traitors
Ardross Castle isn't dressed up for the cameras the way a film set would be. It's a working Highland estate that happens to have turrets. The grandeur is real, but nobody's polishing it for you. Contestants go from black tie at the round table to squelching over a hillside in the same twelve hours, and that contrast is a huge part of the appeal. It's closer to Balmoral than Versailles. History you can actually put your boots on.
Even the American version films here, which speaks volumes. Alan Cumming in his tweed, same castle, same weather, same sense of being somewhere properly remote. If you needed proof this particular landscape has a pull all its own, that's it.
Why is Scotland so popular right now?
Once you notice it, you can't stop noticing it. Tartan was all over the AW25 and SS26 runways. In 2025 Dior staged a show at Drummond Castle. Every fashion brand with a big enough budget seems to have shipped a crew to the Highlands for their latest campaign, whether or not the clothes have anything remotely Scottish about them.
Some of this romance has been deliberately built. Anders Holch Povlsen, the Danish billionaire who now owns a significant chunk of Scottish real estate, has spent the last 20 years turning old shooting lodges and cottages into what people are calling Scandi-Highland hospitality. Fires, sheepskins, tasteful dashes of tartan.
The kind of holiday cottage many of our families used to stay in as children was nothing like this, all threadbare carpets, kitchen lino and temperamental immersion heaters. Povlsen has taken that same basic idea, a stone cottage in the middle of nowhere, but given it a sort of a Scandi-Highland makeover (no more draughty rooms!) and made it something people will pay a lot of money for. It's glamorous now. And plays into that fashion shoot vibe of the lochside-misty-jetty-in-your-pyjamas photo.
Then there's Banjo Beale, who's just finished renovating a derelict mansion on the tiny island of Ulva for the BBC, turning it into a hotel with his husband Ro with all the dramas that entailed. Different budget to Povlsen but the same instinct. Somewhere remote, somewhat falling down, made beautiful again. Another bit of the Highlands getting the spotlight turned on it.
Add the North Coast 500 turning road trips into their own genre of holiday, and the summer of 2026 where Scotland's cool and drizzly climate suddenly felt like the sensible choice rather than the consolation prize, and you've got a country having a proper moment. Not a fluke. A convergence.
Scotland gives us the escape we are craving
It's true that Scotland is wonderful, of course it is. But I think there's something underneath all of this - The Traitors included - that's less about Scotland specifically and more about what people are craving right now. We're all slightly exhausted. Digital overload, AI anxiety, the general low hum of too much happening too fast. Old stone, big skies, a place with no signal and no particular hurry about anything, that's not nostalgia so much as relief. Timelessness as an antidote.
The weather's even flipped from being a joke to being the point. For years the line about Scotland was always some version of "well you don't go there for the weather..." Now a jumper and a decent pair of boots feels like the better option than another 35 degree heatwave down south, not to mention across most of Europe.
Discover the real Scotland behind the fantasy
What's being sold, on telly, on the catwalk, in the glossy hotel brochures, is a curated version of Scotland. Empty glens, everyone walking around in tweed, a castle minus all the usual country clutter. It's not a documentary of how most of us actually live here. And it's worth saying that a lot of this romance has been shaped from outside Scotland rather than by the people who live in it. While they're great supporters of Scotland, the Outlander books came out of Arizona. The Fife Arms is Swiss owned. Povlsen is Danish. And Outlander aside, creating high end experiences most of us can't afford.
But I don't think that makes it hollow. It works precisely because it's rooted in something true, while still being just attainable enough to sell. You can actually book a stay somewhere like this. You can actually buy the blanket. That's a different kind of fantasy to the usual celebrity gloss, because there's a version of it you can genuinely have a weekend of.
What I like to think is that hopefully the fantasy gets people here, the castle and the tartan and the misty photograph, and there's nothing wrong with that as a way in. But the best outcome is when people stay long enough to bump into the real thing sitting right next to it. Not everyone flies in Traitors style in a blacked-out Land Rover, plays the laird for a weekend and flies straight out again.
It was an endearing story last year when Jimmy Fallon was up at the Fife Arms in Braemar and got spotted by a group of army lads from the barracks nearby while he was walking across an old bridge. Instead of a selfie and goodbye, they invited him to dinner in their officers' mess. By the end of the night Fallon was saying he felt like the most Scottish person in Scotland, despite not being remotely Scottish.
Is this a Traitors effect or a Scotland effect?
My honest read is that the casting and the format and Claudia herself explain a great deal of why this show works. But Scotland's landscape and history and identity were already doing something interesting in fashion, in hospitality, in travel, long before this latest series. The Traitors simply found the most watchable way to film it, and gave the rest of us the shorthand to talk about it.
Which is the space Made Scotland has been working in for a few years now. I try to walk the line between showcasing the beauty and the captivating nature of Scottish places, without overly romanticising the place into something it isn't. Hopefully by showing everyday life on Made Scotland's social media and by telling the stories of makers and products here, I can bring something both appealing and authentic to the table.
But I am really excited about the start of The Traitors this week, time to block out Thursdays and Fridays in the calendar for the next few weeks!
