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The choice of a summer shieling site or temporary summer habitation would have been governed by easy access to running water and well drained, fertile soils favouring grasses palatable to grazing animals. Once shielings had been established, the long-term effects of pasturing animals and their manure would change vegetation patterns. Cutting peats for fuel at the shieling would alter drainage regimes and cause erosion. Thus the layers of a landscape interact in a circular and continuous manner over time.

Processes of landscape change can originate and conclude in one layer. As humanity has moved from a hunter-gatherer to a global communications culture, with technology able to overcome many past constraints on activities, the origins, relationships and consequences of landscape change now mostly exist in the topmost cultural layer of landscape. In contrast, more traditional societies, like past shieling dwellers of the Highlands, were more dependent on vertical processes in the landscape coming from living and non-living layers. Today, the dominant cultural layer is increasingly disjointed, as modernist influences spread virally from culture to culture through mass media. Sometimes this is expressed in the naming of streets after Hollywood movie stars, and the many squares and places commemorating African or American presidents throughout the world; and even earlier by British street names commemorating battles in the Napoleonic, Crimean and Boer wars.