The Little Book of Scotland

INTRODUCTION

Oh, ye’ll take the high road,

and I’ll take the low road,

And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye.

You probably know these lines – they’re from the famous traditional Scottish song ‘The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond’. So well known is the song that it gave its name to Take the High Road, a Scottish daytime soap opera that ran from 1980 to 2003. The series was filmed on Loch Lomond – the very place celebrated in the song’s lyrics: ‘For me and my true love will never meet again, On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.’

Nobody really knows how old the song is, nor what the lyrics mean. The song has usually been interpreted as a lament related to one of the Jacobite rebellions. Other people think it may have something to do with a criminal due to hang in England, or perhaps a tale of the supernatural – is the ‘low road’ the land of the dead? All these interpretations, however, may be wide of the mark. Quite simply, this beautiful, emotional and universally known ballad is a complete mystery.

That, to me, sums up Scotland. A country of worldwide fame, with a distinctive culture and a strong heart, it is nevertheless something of an enigma.

Some parts of Scotland’s story are universally celebrated or championed, while other aspects have been neglected, even obscured. It is widely perceived as a romantic land of castles and mountains, and yet the vast majority of its people live in modern cities. A simplistic view of continual tension with its southern neighbour clouds a much more complex history of shifting allegiances and enmities within Scotland itself, often reflected in the fundamental geographical and cultural difference between the Highlands and the Lowlands. Even the elements that commonly define Scottish identity – the kilt, the bagpipes, tartan – have changed their meaning so much that a visitor from, say, just two centuries ago, would struggle to understand how it is they mean so much to modern Scots.

And so here you will find many surprising, hidden and quirky aspects of Scotland, from history to hovercrafts, from whisky to wine, and from extreme food (haggis, anyone?) to some extremely odd sports.

Welcome to a Scotland that is strange, marvellous, madcap, dark, glorious, peculiar, and spectacular – often all at the same time.

Take the high road.

1

PLACES – HERE & NOW, THEN & THERE

PREHISTORIC DAYS

The oldest calendar in the world was constructed by nomadic hunter-gatherers in Aberdeenshire 10,000 years ago. Twelve wooden posts set up at Warren Field near Crathes Castle mimicked the phases of the moon and recorded the lunar months, allowing the seasons to be followed. The Mesolithic device is almost 5,000 years older than the first recognised formal calendars known from ancient Mesopotamia.

Aberdeenshire contains approximately 10 per cent of all the 900 stone circles in Britain.

The Ring of Brodgar on the mainland of Orkney is the third largest stone circle in the world. The numerous prehistoric monuments in the area are collectively listed as a World Heritage Site known as the Heart of Neolithic Orkney.

Callanish on Lewis in the Western Isles is one of the most elaborate prehistoric sites in Britain. Featuring a stone circle with a cross-shaped series of stone rows, the complex is focused on the 18.6-year cycle of the moon across the heavens.

Lewis also has the tallest standing stone in Scotland. The Clach an Trushal monolith is over 19ft in height.

One of the most spectacular prehistoric sites is at Machrie Moor on Arran, where seven stone circles stand in close proximity to each other.

A prehistoric monument unique to Scotland is the broch, a cylindrical stone defensive/residential proto-castle that looks like a scaled-down power station cooling tower. Double-skinned, the walls were honeycombed with internal stairs and chambers. Brochs survive to a reasonable height in Lochalsh, Skye and the Western Isles. The best is at Mousa in Shetland.

The mysterious stone monuments of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages were still regarded with awe into the modern age. Many burial mounds were thought to be the home of fairies or spirits. Women visited various stones thought to promote conception and/or a safe childbirth at Darvel (East Ayrshire), Pitreavie (Fife), Dingwall (Ross & Cromarty, Highland) and Clach-na-bhan (Aberdeenshire). Such visits continued until at least the mid-nineteenth century.

WHAT DID THE ROMANS EVER DO FOR US?

Hadrian’s Wall did not mark the limit of the Roman Empire. There are two (far less well-known) Roman frontiers further up Scotland: the Antonine Wall (AD 142–144), parts of which can still be seen on the narrow neck of land between Glasgow and the River Forth; and the Gask Ridge, a true ‘Wild West’ frontier of forts and watchtowers running from Camelon in Falkirk District north-east through Stirling District and Perth & Kinross to Stracathro in Angus.

Having been built between AD 70 and AD 80, forty-two years before the start of building works on Hadrian’s Wall, the Gask Ridge is the earliest fortified land frontier in the Roman Empire. It effectively separated the fertile plains and important harbours of the Lowlands from the less valuable (and more difficult to control) Highlands – perhaps the first political recognition of the fact that Scotland has two distinct geographies. The tensions and differences between the Highlands and the Lowlands have remained a factor of Scottish life ever since.

In the first century AD the Roman army briefly penetrated even further north, reaching Aberdeenshire, Moray and as far as present-day Inverness.

The idea that everyone in Iron Age Scotland painted themselves with blue woad, lived a wild but free life and hated the Romans is a myth that has its roots in misguided nineteenth-century romantic patriotism. Some Lowland Caledonian tribes were more than happy to take bribes of silver and luxury Mediterranean goods (like wine) in exchange for not disturbing the Pax Romana. And a number of Lowland farmers did very nicely selling grain and other agricultural products to the hungry Roman troops. Even Hadrian’s Wall wasn’t the military exclusion barrier it has been portrayed as – many of its gates were open most of the time to allow the passage of goods and animals for market – goods and animals, that is, sold by the local tribes.

Roman influence in Scotland ebbed and flowed, depending largely on what was happening elsewhere in the Empire. After AD 211, with a few exceptions, the Romans largely withdrew to Hadrian’s Wall.

In 1772 the pioneering traveller Thomas Pennant was given a Roman coin which had been found on the shore at Greshinish on Skye. The Romans never reached the area, leaving us to wonder how a denarius bearing the image of the Emperor Trajan (AD 98–117) reached this remote spot.

The belief that an entire Roman legion was annihilated in AD 117 somewhere in Scotland has inspired a number of works of fiction, notably Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth and the films The Last Legion (2007), Centurion (2010) and The Eagle (2011). The story, however, is nothing more than a modern myth: the supposedly vanished Ninth Legion was still in existence after the alleged Scottish battle, and it disappears from the records only after a later, unknown, conflict in the eastern part of the Roman Empire.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

You would think the name Scotland means ‘the land of the Scots’, the Scots of course being the indigenous people of the country that lies north of England. Nothing, however, is ever that simple.

To the Romans, the area north of Hadrian’s Wall was called Caledonia, and at least some of the people who lived there in later times were known as the Picts. The Scots, meanwhile, were actually a tribe from Ireland, the Dal Riàta, who didn’t arrive until the sixth century, long after the Romans left. Initially the Gaelic-speaking Scots only controlled the western seaboard of their new country, while most people still called the place Pictland. Had they not won their generations-long conflict with their Pictish neighbours, the Scots may well have disappeared from history and the national anthem would today be ‘Pictland the Brave’.

But never mind the Scots coming from Ireland; Dark Age Scotland was nothing like the Scotland of our times. The south-west was part of the Kingdom of Strathclyde, stretching from north-west England as far as Glasgow, and home to a Brythonic (Celtic British) people who spoke Old Welsh. The south-east – including Edinburgh – was meanwhile occupied by the Angles of Bernicia (whose Anglo-Saxon language became the basis for the modern Scots variant of English). And the Northern and Western Isles were the stamping ground of the Vikings, who introduced numerous Norse-speaking settlements. With various ethnic peoples speaking Welsh, proto-English, Gaelic, Pictish or Norse, the idea of ‘Scotland’ as a unitary nation in the seventh and eighth centuries was ludicrous.

The Scots eventually became the dominant people in much of the central part of the country, creating a kingdom known as Alba. Pictish as a language and a cultural identity disappeared, replaced by the Gaelic culture and language of the new overlords. Over time, Alba of the Scots became referred to as Scotia, and by the early eleventh century there was finally a country which almost everybody called Scotland.

CASTLES

Conflict creates castles. If there are men with sharp pointy things coming to kill you, then it makes sense to defend yourself in the best way possible. There are records of perhaps 2,000 castles in Scotland, of which around 1,200 still exist today. Some ‘castles’ are really nineteenth-century luxury houses with twiddly bits, while others are the full-on medieval real deal.

The most common Scottish castle is not the vast, hugely expensive royal fortress such as those found at Edinburgh or Stirling, but the family stronghold, a relatively modest tower house designed to protect a small number of kinsmen from marauders.

Castles first make their appearance in the eleventh century, with the earliest stone-built castles dating from about 1200. This means that Macbeth (king from 1040 to 1057), for example, would have never walked a stone battlement or entered a great hall made from anything other than earth and wood. Filmmakers, take note.

The most visited castle in Scotland is Edinburgh Castle, which receives more than 1.3 million visitors a year.

Even if a castle is in ruins, there is usually one feature that survives: the garderobe, or toilet, which typically projects outward from the wall – and is often placed directly above the moat. You can imagine the consequences.

The most northerly castle is the sixteenth-century Muness Castle on the island of Unst in Shetland. Like most Scottish castles, it is modest in size, and its history is stained with blood.

Castles, of course, attract legends. When visiting ruined Duntulm Castle on Skye, for example, you might be told that the castle was abandoned because a nursemaid accidentally dropped the heir to the MacDonald chiefdom onto the jagged rocks below. You might even be informed that the window where the accident took place still exists, and that any young woman who looks through it will be cursed with a barren womb. Before swallowing this story hook, line and sinker, it might be worth knowing that exactly the same story is told of at least six other castles throughout Scotland.

Scottish castles are also famous for being haunted, and guides tend to get a bit fed up of being asked, ‘Where are the ghosts?’ Whisper it quietly, but some castles have been known to keep visitors happy by inventing the odd ghost or two …

THE MARCH OF TIME – LOST COUNTIES

There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and changes to local government boundaries. In Scotland, the many variations inflicted on the various county councils mean that names that were once part of the landscape and culture are now largely lost, and what used to be one place is now an entirely different place – which is confusing if you’re trying to find the modern map location for somewhere mentioned in family history research, a historic document, or a Walter Scott novel.

To be fair, the situation before the reforms of 1890 was at times baffling and bizarre. There were thirty-four counties, some of which, curiously, had ‘offshoots’ in other counties, leading to all kinds of administrative craziness when it came to registering births and deaths, or paying taxes. The northern county of Cromartyshire, for example, was actually nine separate enclaves entirely surrounded (and separated) by the much larger Ross-shire. Nairnshire had colonies in both Inverness-shire and Ross-shire. Lewis was governed by distant Ross-shire, while Harris – part of the same island – was the responsibility of Inverness-shire. In the Borders, a tiny part of Selkirkshire nestled inside neighbouring Roxburghshire. And in the heartland, Clackmannanshire cut both Perthshire and Stirlingshire into two parts each, while Stirlingshire itself sliced Dumbartonshire in half. It was, frankly, a right pig’s ear of a system.

The situation after 1890 became a little more sensible, but there were still some name changes to come. Haddingtonshire became East Lothian, while Linlithgowshire transformed into West Lothian. Forfarshire was now Angus, and Dumbartonshire changed one letter to become Dunbartonshire. Zetland, meanwhile, became Shetland.

In 1975 the thirty-three former county councils were reorganised into just twelve regions: Borders, Central, Dumfries & Galloway, Fife, Grampian, Highland, Lothian, Orkney, Shetland, Strathclyde, Tayside and the Western Isles. Some of the regions were ungainly, clumsy creations – Strathclyde Region, for example, stretched from the metropolis of Glasgow to the remote islands of Coll and Tiree, whose combined population would barely fill a Partick tenement. In 1996, when the regions were abolished in the most recent shake-up, Strathclyde Region was broken up into no less than twelve councils.

Although the regions were little loved as administrative units, their names (and catchment areas) are retained in official bodies such as Strathclyde Partnership for Transport or Tayside Fire & Rescue.

Several counties disappeared in the 1996 reforms. In the south-west, the names Dumfriesshire, Kirkcudbrightshire and Wigtownshire vanished, as did the Borders counties of Peebles-shire, Selkirkshire, Berwickshire and Roxburghshire, plus Nairnshire in the north. Banffshire and Kincardineshire became subsumed in greater Aberdeenshire. A large part of Perthshire was shifted into Stirling District, and then Perthshire was married to Kinross-shire to become Perth & Kinross. In practice, most people still use the original names – even the tourist board prefers ‘Perthshire’ to ‘Perth & Kinross’.

There are currently thirty-three council areas in Scotland, and these are the ones referred to when indicating locations in this book.

The smallest county on the mainland is Clackmannanshire, where around 50,000 people live in just 60 square miles: hence the nickname, ‘the Wee County’. The largest county by far is the Highland Council area – which is bigger than four of the next largest counties put together – so often a subsidiary, more usefully local