Portal:Scotland/Selected article/2007
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Weeks in 2007
[edit]- Week 16
The Scottish Parliament general election, 2007, will be the third general election to the Scottish Parliament since the devolved legislature was created in 1999. Polling will take place on Thursday 3 May. The election falls two days after the tricentenary of the political union of Scotland and England.
Jack McConnell, as First Minister, will go into the election commanding a small majority (of 5 seats) consisting of a Labour and Liberal Democrat coalition government. The Scottish Executive coalition has been in power, with three different First Ministers, since the first Scottish Parliament election in 1999. Opinion polls suggest its majority could be lost in 2007, due to falling support for the Labour Party and rising support for the Scottish National Party (SNP). No single party is likely to acquire an overall majority. Nor is there an obvious alternative coalition ready to form a new Executive.
The SNP, currently second place behind Labour in terms of numbers of Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs), seems best placed to gain from shifting voting patterns should Labour lose seats, and, based on current projections based on recent opinion polls, there could be some possibility of an SNP-Liberal Democrat coalition, which may extend to include the Scottish Green Party. The other parties now represented in the Parliament are the Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party, the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), Solidarity and the Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party.
- Week 17
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Dundee (Scottish Gaelic: Dùn Dèagh)—originally called Alectum—is the fourth-largest city in Scotland, with a population of 143,090. However, if outer districts such as Monifieth, Birkhill and Invergowrie, joined physically but not politically, are counted, the number is around 170,000. It is located on the north bank of the River Tay's estuary and so is near the east coast and the North Sea. Dundee is known as the City of Discovery, both in honour of Dundee's history of scientific activities, and of the RRS Discovery, Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic exploration vessel, which was built in Dundee and is now berthed there.
Its history began with the Picts in the Iron Age and during the medieval period was the site of many battles. During the Industrial Revolution the local jute industry caused the city to grow rapidly. In this period Dundee also gained a reputation for its marmalade industry and its journalism, giving Dundee its epithet as the city of "jute, jam and journalism". Dundee's population reached a peak of nearly 200,000 at the start of the 1970s, but it has since declined due to outward migration and the council boundary changes of the 1970s and 1980s, which saw Dundee lose suburbs to the surrounding counties.
- Week 18
Anne, Queen of Great Britain (6 February 1665 – 1 August 1714) became Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland on 8 March 1702. On 1 May 1707, when England and Scotland combined into a single state, Anne became the first sovereign of the Kingdom of Great Britain. She continued to reign until her death. Anne was the last monarch of the House of Stuart; she was succeeded by a second cousin, George I, of the House of Hanover.
Anne's life was marked by many crises relating to succession to the Crown. Her Roman Catholic father, James II, had been forcibly deposed in 1688; her brother-in-law and her sister then became joint monarchs as William III and Mary II. Anne suffered from Hughes syndrome or 'sticky blood' which resulted in miscarriages. The failure of both Anne and her sister to produce a child who could survive into adulthood precipitated a succession crisis, for, in the absence of a Protestant heir, the Roman Catholic James Francis Edward Stuart (the "Old Pretender"), son of James II, could attempt to claim the throne. It was for this reason that the Parliament of England passed legislation allowing the Crown to pass to the House of Hanover. When the Parliament of Scotland refused to accept the choice of the English Parliament, various coercive tactics (such as crippling the Scottish economy by restricting trade, see Alien Act) were used to ensure that Scotland would co-operate. The Act of Union 1707 (which united England and Scotland into Great Britain) was a product of subsequent treaty negotiations.
- Week 19
Denis Law (born February 24, 1940, in Aberdeen, Scotland) is a retired Scottish football player, who enjoyed a long and successful career as a striker from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Law's career as a football player began at Second Division Huddersfield Town in 1956. After four years at Huddersfield, Manchester City signed him for a transfer fee of £55,000, setting a new British record. Law spent one year there before Torino bought him for £110,000, this time setting a new record fee for a transfer between an English and an Italian club. Although he played well in Italy, he found it difficult to settle there and signed for Manchester United in 1962, setting another British record transfer fee of £115,000.
He is best known for the eleven years that he spent at United, where he scored 236 goals in 409 appearances and was nicknamed The King and The Lawman by supporters. He won the prestigious European Footballer of the Year award in 1964, and helped his club win the First Division in 1965 and 1967. Law left Manchester United in 1973 and returned to Manchester City for a season, then represented Scotland in the 1974 FIFA World Cup. Law played for Scotland a total of 55 times and jointly holds the Scottish international record goal tally with 30 goals. Law is also United's second highest goalscorer behind Bobby Charlton.
- Week 20
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HMS Royal Oak was a Revenge-class battleship of the British Royal Navy, torpedoed in Scapa Flow by the German submarine U-47 on 14 October 1939. Launched in 1914 and completed in 1916, Royal Oak first saw action at the Battle of Jutland. In peacetime, she served in the Atlantic, Home and Mediterranean fleets, coming under accidental attack on more than one occasion. The ship became the centre of worldwide attention in 1928 when her senior officers were controversially court-martialled. During a twenty-five year career, attempts to modernise Royal Oak could not address her fundamental lack of speed, and by the start of the Second World War, she was no longer suited to front-line duty.
Royal Oak was anchored at Scapa Flow in Orkney, Scotland when she became the first of the five Royal Navy battleships and battlecruisers sunk in the Second World War. The loss of life was heavy: of Royal Oak's complement of 1,234 men, 833 were killed that night or died later of their wounds. The numerical superiority enjoyed by the British navy and its allies meant that the loss of the obsolete veteran of the First World War made little difference to the naval balance of power, but the effect on wartime morale was considerable. The U-boat commander, Günther Prien, became an immediate celebrity and war hero on his return to Germany; he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, the first Kriegsmarine officer to be so honoured. To the British, the raid demonstrated that the Germans were capable of bringing the naval war to their home waters, and resulted in rapidly-arranged changes to dockland security.
- Week 21
The Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle is an order of chivalry associated with Scotland. While its original date of foundation is unknown, James VII (also King of England as James II) instituted the modern Order in 1687. The Order consists of the Sovereign and sixteen Knights and Ladies, as well as certain "extra" knights (members of the British Royal Family and foreign monarchs). The Sovereign alone grants membership of the Order; he or she is not advised by the Government, as occurs with most other Orders. The sixteen members are required to be Scottish-born, though not the "extra" knights and ladies.
The Order's primary emblem is the thistle, the national flower of Scotland. The motto is Nemo me impune lacessit (Latin for "No one provokes me with impunity"); the same motto also appears on the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom for use in Scotland and on some pound coins. The patron saint of the Order is St Andrew.
Most British orders of chivalry cover the entire kingdom, but the three most exalted ones each pertain to one constituent country only. The Order of the Thistle, which pertains to Scotland, is the second-most senior in precedence. Its equivalent in England, The Most Noble Order of the Garter, is the oldest documented order of chivalry in the United Kingdom, dating to the middle fourteenth century. In 1783 an Irish equivalent, The Most Illustrious Order of St Patrick, was founded; since the independence of the greater part of Ireland the Order has fallen dormant (its last surviving knight died in 1974).
- Week 22
The history of Scotland in the High Middle Ages covers Scotland in the era between the death of Domnall II in 900 AD and the death of king Alexander III in 1286, which led indirectly to the Scottish Wars of Independence.
In the tenth and eleventh centuries, northern Great Britain was increasingly dominated by Gaelic culture, and by a Gaelic regal lordship known in Gaelic as "Alba", in Latin as either "Albania" or "Scotia", and in English as "Scotland". From a base in eastern Scotland north of the River Forth, the kingdom acquired control of the lands lying to the south. It had a flourishing culture, comprising part of the larger Gaelic-speaking world.
After the twelfth-century reign of King David I, the Scottish monarchs are better described as Scoto-Norman than Gaelic, preferring French culture to native Scottish culture. They fostered and attached themselves to a kind of Scottish "Norman Conquest". The consequence was the spread of French institutions and social values. Moreover, the first towns, called burghs, began in the same era, and as these burghs spread, so did the Middle English language. To a certain degree these developments were offset by the acquisition of the Norse-Gaelic west, and the Gaelicization of many of the great families of French and Anglo-French origin, so that the period closes with what has been called a "Gaelic revival", and an integrated Scottish national identity. Although there remained a great deal of continuity with the past, by 1286 these economic, institutional, cultural, religious and legal developments had brought Scotland closer to its neighbours in England and the Continent. By 1286 the Kingdom of Scotland had political boundaries that closely resemble those of modern Scotland.
- Week 23
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The Scottish Parliament (Scottish Gaelic: Pàrlamaid na h-Alba; Scots: Scottish Pairlament) is the national, unicameral legislature of Scotland, in the Holyrood area of the capital Edinburgh. The Parliament, which is informally referred to as "Holyrood" (cf. "Westminster"), is a democratically elected body comprising 129 members who are known as Members of the Scottish Parliament, or MSPs. Members are elected for four-year terms under the mixed member proportional representation system. As a result, 73 MSPs represent individual geographical constituencies elected by the plurality ("first past the post") system, with a further 56 returned from eight additional member regions, each electing seven MSPs. A general election to the Parliament is being held on 3 May 2007.
The original Parliament of Scotland (or "Estates of Scotland") was the national legislature of the independent Kingdom of Scotland, and existed from the early 13th century until the Kingdom of Scotland merged with the Kingdom of England under the Acts of Union 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. As a consequence, the Parliament of Scotland merged with the Parliament of England to form the Parliament of Great Britain, which sat at Westminster in London.
Following a referendum in 1997 in which the Scottish people gave their consent, the current Parliament was established by the Scotland Act 1998 which sets out its powers as a devolved legislature. The Act delineated the legislative competence of the Parliament — the areas in which it can make laws — by explicitly specifying powers that are "reserved" to the Parliament of the United Kingdom: all matters that are not explicitly reserved are automatically the responsibility of the Scottish Parliament. The UK Parliament retains the ability to amend the terms of reference of the Scottish Parliament, and can extend or reduce the areas in which it can make laws. The first meeting of the new Parliament took place on 12 May 1999.
- Week 24
The Scottish Parliament Building is the home of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, within the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Edinburgh. Construction on the building commenced in June 1999 and the Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) held their first debate in the new building on Tuesday, 7 September 2004. The formal opening by Queen Elizabeth II took place on 9 October 2004. Enric Miralles, the Catalan architect who designed the building, died during the course of its construction.
From 1999 until the opening of the new building in 2004, committee rooms and the debating chamber of the Scottish Parliament were housed in the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland located on The Mound in Edinburgh. Office and administrative accommodation in support of the Parliament were provided in buildings leased from the City of Edinburgh Council. The new Scottish Parliament Building brought together these different elements into one purpose built parliamentary complex, housing 129 MSPs and more than 1,000 staff and civil servants.
- Week 25
St Kilda (Scottish Gaelic: Hiort) is an isolated archipelago situated 64 kilometres (40 mi) west-northwest of North Uist in the North Atlantic Ocean. The largest island is Hirta whose sea cliffs are the highest in the United Kingdom. The Gaelic-speaking population probably never exceeded 180 in number and was never more than 100 after 1851. Although St Kilda was permanently inhabited for at least two millennia and had a unique way of life, the local population was evacuated in 1930. The islands continue to be administratively a part of the Western Isles of Scotland.
They are a breeding ground for many important seabird species including Northern Gannets, Leach's Petrels, Atlantic Puffins, and Northern Fulmars. The St Kilda Wren and St Kilda Field Mouse are endemic sub-species.
The entire archipelago is owned by the National Trust for Scotland and became one of Scotland's four World Heritage Sites in 1986, and is one of the few in the world to hold joint status for its 'natural', 'marine' and 'cultural' qualities.
Parties of volunteers work on the islands in the summer months to restore the numerous and unique ruined buildings the native St Kildans left behind. They share the island with a small military base which was created in 1957.
- Week 26
Dunnottar Castle is a ruined medieval fortress located upon a rocky outcrop on the north-east coast of Scotland, about two miles south of Stonehaven. Its recognizable architecture is 13th century, but an earlier castle was built on this site by Caledonian tribes by 84 AD. Dunnotar played a central role in the history of Scotland from the Middle Ages through to the Enlightenment, due to its strategic location overlooking the shipping lanes to northern Scotland and also being situated on a fairly narrow coastal terrace that controlled land movements, particularly the land access to the ancient Causey Mounth, the only medieval route from the coastal south via Portlethen Moss to Aberdeen. The site, now owned by private interests but open to the public, is visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists annually.
The ruins of the castle are spread over a three acre area virtually surrounded by sheer cliffs which drop to the North Sea 50 metres below. This L plan castle is accessed via a narrow strip of land joining the mainland and a steep path leading up to the massive gatehouse. The cliffs and headland formations which extend miles to the north and south are home to tens of thousands of pelagic birds, making this stretch of Scottish coast a notable bird sanctuary of northern Europe from the standpoint of total bird populations and diversity of species. The 1990 film Hamlet starring Mel Gibson and Glenn Close was shot there.
- Week 27
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Glasgow is the most populous unitary authority area. It is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands. A person from Glasgow is known as a Glaswegian. Glaswegian is also the name of the local dialect.
Glasgow grew from the medieval Bishopric of Glasgow and the later establishment of the University of Glasgow, which contributed to the Scottish Enlightenment. From the 18th century the city had become one of Europe's main hubs of transatlantic trade with the Americas. With the Industrial Revolution, the city and surrounding region grew to become one of the world's pre-eminent centres of engineering and shipbuilding, constructing many revolutionary and famous vessels. Glasgow was known as the "Second City of the British Empire" in the Victorian era. It is one of Europe's top twenty financial centres and is home to many of Scotland's leading businesses.
- Week 28
The economy of Scotland is closely linked with the rest of Europe, and is essentially a mixed economy. Scotland has the fourth largest GDP per capita of any region of the United Kingdom after London, South East of England and East of England.
Scotland was one of the industrial powerhouses of Europe from the time of the Industrial Revolution onwards, being a world leader in manufacturing and shipbuilding related industries, at the time, which today has left a legacy in the diversity of goods and services which the Scottish economy produces from textiles, whisky and shortbread to aeroengines, buses, computer software, ships, avionics and microprocessors to banking, insurance, fund management and other related financial services.
The British Pound Sterling is the official currency of Scotland, and the central bank of the UK is the Bank of England which retains responsibility for the monetary policy of the whole of the United Kingdom.
- Week 29
David Hume (April 26, 1711 – August 25, 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian. He is considered one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Although in recent years interest in Hume's work has centred on his philosophical writing, it was as a historian that he first gained recognition and respect. His The History of England was the standard work on English history for sixty or seventy years until Macaulay's.
Historians predominantly see Humean philosophy as a form of deep skepticism, but others argue naturalism is equally central to his thought. Humean scholarship has tended to oscillate between those who emphasize the skeptical component (such as the logical positivists), and those who emphasize the naturalist component (such as Don Garrett, Norman Kemp Smith, Barry Stroud, and Galen Strawson).
Hume was heavily influenced by empiricists John Locke and George Berkeley, along with various Francophone writers such as Pierre Bayle, and various figures on the Anglophone intellectual landscape such as Isaac Newton, Samuel Clarke, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Joseph Butler.
- Week 30
The production of renewable energy in Scotland is an issue that has come to the fore in technical, economic and political terms during the opening years of the 21st century. The natural resource base is extraordinary by European, and even global standards. In addition to an existing installed capacity of 1.3 Gigawatts (GW) of hydro-electric schemes, Scotland has an estimated potential of 36.5 GW for wind and 7.5 GW tidal power, 25% of the estimated total capacity for the European Union and up to 14 GW of wave power potential (10% of the EU capacity). The renewable electricity generating capacity may be 60 GW or more, considerably greater than the existing capacity from all fuel sources of 10.3 GW.
Much of this potential remains untapped, but continuing improvements in engineering are enabling more of the resource to be utilised. Fears regarding 'Peak Oil' and climate change have driven the subject high up the political agenda and are also encouraging the use of various biofuels. Although the finances of many projects remain either speculative or dependent on subsidies, it is probable that there has been a significant, and in all likelihood long-term change, in the underpinning economics.
- Week 31
The fauna of Scotland is generally typical of that of the north west European part of the Palearctic ecozone, although several of the larger mammals were hunted to extinction in historic times. There are a diversity of temperate ecologies and today there are 62 species of mammal living wild in and around Scotland, including a population of Wild Cats and important numbers of Grey and Harbour Seals.
There are diverse populations of moorland birds including Blackcock and the famous Red Grouse, and internationally significant nesting grounds for a variety of seabirds such as Northern Gannets. The Golden Eagle is something of a national icon, and White-tailed Eagles and Ospreys are recent re-colonisations. The Scottish Crossbill is the only endemic vertebrate species in the British Isles.
Of the 42 species of fish found in Scottish fresh waters, only half have arrived by natural colonisation, although there are nearly 400 genetically distinct populations of Atlantic Salmon in Scottish rivers. It is estimated that the total number of Scottish marine species exceeds 40,000, and the Darwin Mounds are an important area of cold water coral reefs discovered in 1988.
- Week 32
Dál Riata (also Dalriada or Dalriata) was a Gaelic kingdom on the western seaboard of Scotland and the northern coasts of Ireland, situated in what is now Argyll and Bute, Lochaber, and County Antrim. The traditional view that Dál Riata was an Irish Gaelic colony in Scotland has lately been questioned, largely on archaeological grounds, but it is not clear that a consensus view has yet been reached. The inhabitants of Dál Riata are often referred to as Scots, from the Latin scotti, a word which came from the Low Latin scottis, which came from the Greek language word σκότος meaning darkness, and later came to mean Gaelic-speakers whether Scottish, Irish or otherwise. They are referred to here as Gaels, an unambiguous term, or as Dál Riatans.
The kingdom reached its height under Áedán mac Gabráin (r. 574-608), but its expansion was checked at the Battle of Degsastan in 603 by Æthelfrith of Northumbria. Serious defeats in Ireland and Scotland in the time of Domnall Brecc (d. 642) ended Dál Riata's Golden Age, and the kingdom became a client of Northumbria, then subject to the Picts. The kingdom finally disappeared in the Viking Age.
- Week 33
James Clerk Maxwell (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was a Scottish mathematician and theoretical physicist. His most significant achievement was aggregating a set of equations in electricity, magnetism and inductance — eponymously named Maxwell's equations — including an important modification (extension) of the Ampère's Circuital Law. It was the most unified model of electromagnetism yet. It is famous for introducing to the physics community a detailed model of light as an electromagnetic phenomena, building upon the earlier hypothesis advanced by Faraday (Faraday effect).
He also developed the Maxwell distribution, a statistical means to describe aspects of the kinetic theory of gases. These two discoveries helped usher in the era of modern physics, laying the foundation for future work in such fields as special relativity and quantum mechanics. He is also known for creating the first true colour photograph in 1861.
Maxwell demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space, in the form of waves, and at the constant speed of light. Finally, in 1861 Maxwell wrote a four-part publication in the Philosophical Magazine called On Physical Lines of Force where he first proposed that light was in fact undulations in the same medium that is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.
- Week 34
Ben Nevis (Gaelic: Beinn Nibheis) is the highest mountain in the British Isles. It is located at the western end of the Grampian Mountains in the Lochaber area of Scotland, close to the coastal town of Fort William.
Known simply as "The Ben" to many walkers and climbers, it attracts an estimated 100,000 visitors a year, around three-quarters of whom use the well-constructed Pony Track from Glen Nevis on the south side of the mountain. For climbers and mountaineers the main attraction lies in the 700-metre-high cliffs of the north face: among the highest cliffs in Britain, they harbour some classic scrambles and rock climbs of all difficulties, and are one of the principal locations in the UK for ice climbing.
The summit, at 1,344 metres (4,406 feet) above sea level, features the ruins of an observatory which was permanently staffed between 1883 and 1904. The meteorological data collected during this period is still important for an understanding of Scottish mountain weather. C.T.R. Wilson was inspired to invent the cloud chamber after a period spent working at the observatory.
- Week 35
The Picts were a confederation of tribes in what later was to become central and northern Scotland from Roman times until the 10th century. They lived to the north of the Forth and Clyde. They were the descendants of the Caledonii and other tribes named by Roman historians or found on the world map of Ptolemy. Pictland, also known as Pictavia, became the Kingdom of Alba during the 10th century and the Picts became the Fir Alban, the men of Scotland.
The name by which the Picts called themselves is unknown. The Greek word Πικτοί (Latin Picti) first appears in a panegyric written by Eumenius in AD 297 and is taken to mean "painted or tattooed people" (Latin pingere "paint"). The Gaels of Ireland and Dál Riata called the Picts Cruithne, (Old Irish cru(i)then-túath), presumably from Proto-Celtic *kwriteno-toutā. There were also people referred to as Cruithne in Ulster, in particular the kings of Dál nAraidi. The Britons (later the Welsh and Cornish) in the south knew them, in the P-Celtic form of "Cruithne", as Prydyn; the terms "Britain" and "Briton" come from the same root. Their Old English name gave the modern Lowland Scots form Pechts.
Archaeology gives some impression of the society of the Picts. Although very little in the way of Pictish writing has survived, Pictish history, from the late 6th century onwards, is known from a variety of sources, including saints' lives, such as that of Columba by Adomnán, and various Irish annals. Although the popular impression of the Picts may be one of an obscure, mysterious people, this is far from being the case. When compared with the generality of Northern, Central and Eastern Europe in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Pictish history and society are well attested.
- Week 36
Frank Hadden (born 14 June 1954 in Dundee, Scotland) is coach of the Scotland national rugby union team. He replaced Matt Williams and was appointed on 15 September 2005.
Hadden coached the Merchiston Castle School (MCS) 1st XV after being appointed Head of Physical Education at the school in 1983. He coached several Scottish age-group teams before being appointed assistant coach of the Caledonian Reds in 1997. He was later appointed coach of Edinburgh Gunners (now Edinburgh Rugby) in 2000 prior to becoming the Scotland coach. He has since coached Scotland to notable wins over England and France in the 2006 Six Nations.
In April 2005 Matt Williams was sacked as Scotland coach after losing all but three of his 17 matches in charge. That month Hadden was appointed Scotland interim coach, leading Scotland to victories against the Barbarians and Romania. On September 15, 2005 Hadden was confirmed as Scotland coach until the Rugby World Cup in 2007.
- Week 37
Sir William Bruce of Kinross, 1st Baronet (c.1630 – 1 January 1710) was a Scottish architect, sometimes viewed as Scotland's first significant architect. He was a key figure in introducing the Palladian style into Scotland, and has been compared to the pioneering English architects Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren.
Bruce played a role in the Restoration of Charles II, carrying messages between the exiled king and General Monck, and was rewarded with lucrative official appointments, including that of Surveyor General of the King's Works in Scotland, effectively the "king's architect". His patrons included John Maitland, 1st Duke of Lauderdale, the most powerful man in Scotland at the time, and Bruce rose to become a member of parliament, and briefly sat on the Scottish Privy Council.
Despite his lack of technical expertise, Bruce became the most prominent "gentleman-architect" of his time in Scotland. Beginning in the 1660s he built and remodelled a number of country houses, including Thirlestane Castle for the Duke of Lauderdale, and Hopetoun House. Among his most significant work was his own Palladian mansion at Kinross, built on the Loch Leven estate which he had purchased in 1675. As the king's architect he undertook the rebuilding of the Royal Palace of Holyroodhouse in the 1670s, which gave the palace its present appearance. After the death of Charles II, Bruce lost political favour, and later following the accession of William and Mary, he was imprisoned more than once as a suspected Jacobite. However, he managed to continue his architectural work, often providing his services to others with Jacobite sympathies.
- Week 38
Mingulay (Scottish Gaelic: Miùghlaigh) is the second largest of the Bishop's Isles in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Located 12 miles south of Barra, it is known for its important seabird populations, including puffins, Black-legged Kittiwakes, and razorbills which nest in the sea-cliffs, which are amongst the highest in the British Isles.
There are Iron Age remains, and the culture of the island was influenced by early Christianity and the Vikings. From the 15th to the 19th century Mingulay formed a part of the lands of Clan MacNeil of Barra, but then suffered at the hands of absentee landlords.
After two thousand years or more of continuous habitation, the island was abandoned by its residents in 1912 and has remained uninhabited since. It is currently used for grazing sheep. Also associated with the island is the Mingulay Boat Song, although it was composed in 1938 after the abandonment of the island. The National Trust for Scotland has owned Mingulay since 2000
- Week 39
Andrew Carnegie (November 25, 1835 – August 11, 1919) was a Scottish-American industrialist, businessman, a major philanthropist, and the founder of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Steel Company which later became U.S. Steel.
Carnegie is known for having built one of the most powerful and influential corporations in United States history, and, later in his life, giving away most of his riches to fund the establishment of many libraries, schools, and universities in America, Scotland and other countries throughout the world. Carnegie, a poor boy with fierce ambition, a pleasant personality, and a devotion to both hard work and self-improvement, started as a telegrapher. By the 1860s, he had investments in railroads, railroad sleeping cars, as well as bridges and oil derricks, and he built wealth as a bond salesman raising money in Europe for American enterprises.
Steel was where he found his fortune. In the 1870s, he founded the Carnegie Steel Company, a step which cemented his name as one of the “Captains of Industry”. By the 1890s, the company was the largest and most profitable industrial enterprise in the world. He sold it to J.P. Morgan's US Steel in 1901 and devoted the remainder of his life to large-scale philanthropy, with special emphasis on local libraries, world peace, and scientific research.
- Week 40
Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, narrating a tale of "buccaneers and buried gold". First published as a book in 1883, it was originally serialised in the children's magazine Young Folks between 1881-82 under the title The Sea Cook, or Treasure Island.
Traditionally considered a coming of age story, it is an adventure tale known for its superb atmosphere, character and action, and also a wry commentary on the ambiguity of morality—as seen in Long John Silver—unusual for children's literature then and now. It is one of the most frequently dramatised of all novels. The influence of Treasure Island on popular perception of pirates is vast, including treasure maps with an 'X', schooners, the Black Spot, tropical islands, and one-legged seamen with parrots on their shoulders.
- Week 41
Staffa (Old Norse for stave or pillar island) is an island of the Inner Hebrides in Argyll and Bute, Scotland. The Vikings gave it this name as its columnar basalt reminded them of their houses, which were built from vertically placed tree-logs.
Staffa lies about 10 kilometres (6 mi) west of the Isle of Mull. The area is 33 hectares and the highest point is 42 metres (135 ft) above sea level.
The island came to prominence in the late eighteenth century after a visit by Sir Joseph Banks. He and his fellow travellers extolled the natural beauty of the basalt columns in general and of the island's main sea cavern which Banks re-named 'Fingal's Cave'. Their visit was followed by that of many other prominent personalities throughout the next two centuries, including Queen Victoria and Felix Mendelssohn. The latter's Hebrides Overture brought further fame to the island, which was by then uninhabited. It is now in the care of the National Trust for Scotland.
- Week 42
John Thomson (14 June 1837 – 7 October 1921) was a pioneering Scottish Victorian photographer, geographer and traveller. He was one of the first photographers to travel to the Far East, documenting the people, landscapes and artifacts of eastern cultures. On returning home, his work among the street people of London cemented his reputation, and is regarded as a classic work of social documentary which laid the foundations for photo journalism. He went on to become a fashionable Mayfair portrait photographer of High Society, gaining the Royal Warrant in 1881.
His photography from the Far East enlightened the Victorian audience of Britain about the land, people and cultures of China and South-East Asia. His pioneering work documenting the social conditions of the street people of London established him as one of the fathers of photo journalism, and his publishing activities mark him out as an innovator in combining photography with the printed word. In recognition of his work, one of the peaks of Mount Kilimanjaro was named "Point Thomson" on his death in 1921.
- Week 43
The Forth Bridge is a cantilever, railway bridge over the Firth of Forth in the east of Scotland, to the east of the Forth Road Bridge, and 14 km (9 miles) west of central Edinburgh. It is often called the "Forth Rail Bridge" to distinguish it from the Forth Road Bridge. The bridge connects Scotland's capital Edinburgh with Fife, and acts as a major artery connecting the north-east and south-east of the country. Described as "the one internationally recognised Scottish landmark", it may be nominated by the British government as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The bridge and its associated railway infrastructure is owned by Network Rail Infrastructure Limited.
Construction of an earlier bridge, designed by Sir Thomas Bouch, got as far as the laying of the foundation stone, but was stopped after the failure of another of his works, the Tay Bridge. On Bouch's death the project was handed over to Sir John Fowler and Sir Benjamin Baker, who designed a structure that was built by Sir William Arrol's company between 1883 and 1890.
- Week 44
Curling is a team sport with similarities to bowls and bocce, played on a rectangular sheet of carefully prepared ice by two teams of four players each. Teams alternate turns at sliding heavy, polished granite stones down the ice towards the target area called the house. Two sweepers with brooms accompany each rock and use timing equipment and their best judgement along with direction from their other teammates to help direct the stones to their resting place. The complex nature of stone placement and shot selection has led some to refer to curling as "chess on ice".
The game of curling is thought to have been invented in late medieval Scotland, with the first written reference to a contest using stones on ice coming from the records of Paisley Abbey, Renfrew, in February 1541. Two paintings (both dated 1565) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder depict Dutch peasants curling—Scotland and the Low Countries had strong trading and cultural links during this period, which is also evident in the history of golf.
- Week 45
Catherine Cranston (27 May 1849 – 18 April 1934), widely known as Kate Cranston or Miss Cranston, was a leading figure in the development of the social phenomenon of tea rooms. She is nowadays chiefly remembered as a major patron of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret MacDonald in Glasgow, Scotland, but the name of Miss Cranston's Tea Rooms lives on in reminiscences of Glasgow in its heyday.
Like other cities in the United Kingdom in the 19th century Glasgow was then a centre of the temperance movement which sought an alternative to male-centred pubs. Tea had previously been a luxury for the rich, but from the 1830s it was promoted as an alternative to alcoholic drinks, and many new cafés and coffee houses were opened, catering more for ordinary people. However it was not until the 1880s that tea rooms and tea shops became popular and fashionable.
- Week 46
Single Malt Scotch is a type of whisky, distilled by a single distillery in a pot still, using malted barley as the only grain ingredient in Scotland. As with any Scotch whisky, a Single Malt Scotch must be distilled in Scotland and matured in oak casks in Scotland for at least three years (most single malts are matured for longer).
- "Single" indicates that all the malts in the bottle comes from a single distillery. Multi-distillery malts are usually called "blended malt", "vatted malt" or (deliberately confusing, perhaps) "pure malt".
All single malt Scotch goes through a similar batch production process. At bottling time various batches are mixed together or vatted to achieve consistent flavours from one bottling run to the next. Even so, some variation does occur.
- Week 47
The Cutty Sark is a clipper ship. Built in 1869, she served as a merchant vessel (the last clipper to be built for that purpose), and then as a training ship until being put on public display in 1954. She is preserved in dry dock at Greenwich in London, but was damaged in a fire on 21 May 2007 while undergoing extensive restoration.
The ship is named after the cutty sark (Scots: a short chemise or undergarment). This was the nickname of the fictional character Nannie (also the name of the ship's figurehead) in Robert Burns' 1791 comic poem Tam o' Shanter. The ship was designed by Hercules Linton and built in 1869 at Dumbarton, Scotland, by the firm of Scott & Linton, for Captain John "Jock" "White Hat" Willis, and launched November 22 of that year.
- Week 48
Carved Stone Balls are Petrospheres, usually round and rarely oval. They have protruding knobs on the surface, from 3 to 160 in number. Their size is fairly uniform, they date from the late Neolithic to possibly the Iron Age and are mainly found in Scotland. They range from no ornamentation (apart from the knobs) to extensive and highly varied engravings.
They are around 4000 years old, coming from the late Neolithic and bronze age, with a possibility that they were still used in the Iron Age. All but five have been found in Scotland, the majority between the River Tay and the Moray Firth, these lands being the highly fertile lands lying to the east of the Grampian Mountains. A similar distribution to that of Pictish symbols has led to the suggestion that Carved Stone Balls are Pictish artefacts.
- Week 49
Robert Burns - known as Rabbie Burns, Scotland's favourite son, the Ploughman Poet, the Bard of Ayrshire and (in Scotland) simply as The Bard (January 25, 1759 – July 21, 1796) was a poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best-known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is also in English and a 'light' Scots dialect which would have been accessible to a wider audience than simply Scottish people. At various times in his career, he wrote in English, and in these pieces, his political or civil commentary is often at its most blunt.
Burns is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement and after his death, he became an important source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism. A cultural icon in Scotland and among Scots who have relocated to other parts of the world (the Scottish Diaspora), his celebration became almost a national charismatic cult during periods of the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature.
- Week 50
The fishing industry in Scotland comprises a significant proportion of the United Kingdom fishing industry. A recent inquiry by the Royal Society of Edinburgh found fishing to be of much greater social, economic and cultural importance to Scotland than to the rest of the UK. Scotland has just under 8.6% of the UK population but lands at its ports over 60% of the total UK catch of fish.
Many of these are ports in relatively remote communities such as Fraserburgh, Kinlochbervie or Lerwick, which are scattered along an extensive coastline and which, for centuries, have looked to fishing as the main source of employment. Restrictions imposed under the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) affect all European fishing fleets, but they have proved particularly severe in recent years for the demersal or whitefish sector (boats mainly fishing for cod, haddock and whiting) of the Scottish fishing industry.
- Week 51
The Glasgow Subway is a metro system in Glasgow, Scotland. Opened in 1896, it is the third oldest subway system in the world after the London Underground and the Budapest Metro. Originally a cable railway, the Subway was later electrified, but its one circular line has never been expanded. Officially called the Glasgow Underground between 1936 and 2003, it has reverted to its colloquial name of Subway. It remains one of only two underground metro-type systems in the UK outside London, the other being the Tyne and Wear Metro. A £40,000 study examining the feasibility of an expansion into the city’s south side is in progress.
The circular route is almost 6.5 miles (10.4 km) long and extends both north and south of the River Clyde. The tracks have the unusual narrow gauge of four feet (1219 mm), and a nominal tunnel diameter of 11 feet (3.35m), comparable to that of the deep-level lines of the London Underground (11 feet 8.25 inches or 3.56m), though the rolling stock is significantly smaller.
- Week 52
Adam Smith FRSE (baptised June 5, 1723 O.S. / June 16 N.S. – July 17, 1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneering political economist. He is a major contributor to the modern perception of free market economics. One of the key figures of the intellectual movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment, he is known primarily as the author of two treatises: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter was one of the earliest attempts to systematically study the historical development of industry and commerce in Europe, as well as a sustained attack on the doctrines of mercantilism. Smith's work helped to build the foundation of the modern academic discipline of free market economics and provided one of the best-known intellectual rationales for free trade, capitalism, and libertarianism.
