In northern regions of the UK, ‘ruins’ tend to be valued and understood according to romantic tropes and/or industrial aesthetics. In southern regions, however, they have increasingly been examined using expanded understandings of materiality and temporality, including the use of speculative approaches from across the arts and humanities to explore how they are visually and materially entangled in contemporary global human and non-human relations. Using anthropological approaches and analogies from film and ‘contemporary archaeology’, this article considers two ‘ruins’ sites in Scotland in relation to current discourses and conditions, including futurity, value, ethics and neoliberalism.