July/August 2021

Scotland Magazine

Celebrating Scotland across the world

Scotland Magazine1 min read
Scotland Magazine
Editor Sally Coffey Production Editor Jenny Rowe Consultant Editor Roddy Martine Art Editor Clare White Contact Stacy Knoud stacy@contactpublicity.co.uk Chairman Paul Dobson Managing Director James Dobson Publisher Simon Temlett Chief Financial Offic
Scotland Magazine1 min read
Editor’s Letter
It’s been a long, hard lockdown. We’ve done what we can to get through it – we’ve reconnected with nature, we’ve exercised outdoors and we’ve learned to appreciate what’s in our own backyard. But now it’s time to spread our wings a little, to travel
Scotland Magazine1 min readFashion
Suits You
Anyone who has visited the Harris Distillery recently can attest that the staff uniform is super stylish, with beautiful jackets made of the distillery’s very own tweed. The tweed was the result of a local competition run with Harris Tweed Hebrides,
Scotland Magazine1 min read
Brora Distillery Reborn
Brora Distillery, whose doors have remained closed for 38 years, has finally reopened after a three-year restoration project under its new owner, whisky giant Diageo. Originally opened in 1819, Brora Distillery (called Clynelish for much of its histo
Scotland Magazine1 min read
Sing For Your Supper
The Royal Celtic Society has said it will offer a bursary of £500 per year to a student in the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s traditional music department. The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland offers the UK’s only Bachelor of Music degree dedicated
Scotland Magazine2 min read
Land In Local Hands
Globally important peatlands and ancient woods in Dumfries and Galloway will be restored, native woodlands established, and nature-based tourism opportunities created thanks to the biggest community land buyout ever in Scotland. The Langholm Initiati
Scotland Magazine1 min read
Highland Hopes
A new hotel group hopes to further develop some of the Highlands’ most loved hotels into sustainable businesses that will both create local careers and provide amazing places for people to stay as they travel the North Coast 500. Hotels that have rec
Scotland Magazine4 min read
Notes From The Isles
These notes are indeed ‘from the Isles’ again. On Easter Monday, having received my second jab in the morning, Mary and I set off for our base in the Outer Hebrides, having been given the all-clear from our neighbours there, so long as we kept our di
Scotland Magazine3 min read
Dates For Your Diary
29 July-29 August What? Edinburgh Art Festival was founded in 2004 to bring together the city’s leading galleries, museums and artist-run spaces thus adding visual art to Edinburgh’s summer festival scene, a previously missing ingredient. edinburghar
Scotland Magazine2 min read
We’ve Got Mail
In Issue 115, the When Life Gives You Salmon story had a photo of the Drawing Room at Kinloch Lodge. I noticed in the photo, two paintings of two young girls in lovely, smocked dresses (bottom left). I was amazed how much they resemble the photo of m
Scotland Magazine5 min read
The Festival City
August in Edinburgh has a character all of its own. It’s a familiar crescendo to the city’s year. The summer starts to fizz with energy after Easter as visitors roll in and the festivals take shape. We scramble for tickets, dodge venue builders and t
Scotland Magazine2 min read
Fiona’s Festival Guide
Eating is always a pleasurable part of being in Edinburgh at festival time. With my festival hat on, among my picks are well-established favourites: Angels with Bagpipes (angelswithbagpipes.co.uk) and Wedgwood (wedgwoodtherestaurant.co.uk), both on t
Scotland Magazine7 min read
ROLL OUT THE Red Carpet
As the world locked down and we were forced to spend weeks or months at a time confined to our own homes, many of us no doubt fantasised about how much better it would be to quarantine in a Bridgerton-scale house, with a scandalously big estate all t
Scotland Magazine5 min read
The Duke Of Edinburgh Remembered
On 16 April 2021, a week after her husband’s death on 9 April, Her Majesty The Queen shared a private photograph of her and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, on holiday in Scotland. The previously unseen image shows the couple smiling together at the
Scotland Magazine3 min read
The Greatest Honour
Being from Braemar, it was my early ambition to play in the massed pipes and drums at the Braemar Gathering. At roughly seven or eight years old I joined the Ballater and District Pipe Band as a junior member. I played with them throughout my teenage
Scotland Magazine4 min read
Pick Up The Pipes
Even just 25 years ago, the conventional route to learning the bagpipes was to do so through your local pipe band, or – if you could – your local Boys’ Brigade pipe band. “If you go right back in history, to the turn of the 20th century, the Boys’ Br
Scotland Magazine5 min read
Man On A Mission
“Dr Livingstone, I presume’. These are the immortal words Henry Morton Stanley is said to have greeted David Livingstone with, one of the world’s most famous explorers, when he eventually located him in 1871 in Ujiji, a village on the shores of Lake
Scotland Magazine5 min read
The Real-Life HORSE WHISPERER
James Clarke is a farrier working in the Scottish Borders. With its traditional common ridings and other equestrian events, the Borders is definitely horse country. But James Clarke is more than just a man nailing shoes on horses’ hooves. He possesse
Scotland Magazine4 min read
ODE to BURNS
Two hundred years ago this year, the poet, John Keats, died in Rome, where he had gone to convalesce after contracting tuberculosis. Aged just 25, Keats left behind an impressive collection of work, made even more remarkable by the fact that he only
Scotland Magazine1 min readCooking, Food & Wine
Tasting Notes
■ Springbank 10 is big-bodied, medium-dry, and fresh with quite a solid and gently earthy peat note and a slight tarry ropes character – water brings out some heather honey and a light melon fruity touch on the nose. The flavour is again big-bodied,
Scotland Magazine1 min read
Forgotten Piers
As part of our survey – which is not exhaustive – it is worth remembering two piers that are lost to us, as they have legacies still moored in the places they were built. Both were along the coastal suburbs of Edinburgh, at Leith (Trinity Chain Pier,
Scotland Magazine1 min read
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Scotland Magazine3 min read
Pictures In Time
It’s an image not often associated with royal couples – a doting pair spending their evenings happily hunched over their collection of watercolours as they organise them into albums, and reminisce. But this was indeed a favourite pastime of Queen Vic
Scotland Magazine3 min read
A Right Royal Red Herring
Jane Lane (c.1626-1689) was the daughter of Thomas Lane of Bentley Hall, Staffordshire. When Charles II was defeated by Cromwell’s forces at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, he escaped and took refuge at Bentley. Jane happened to have a pass for her
Scotland Magazine3 min read
Decline And Rise
Campbeltown is, geographically, the smallest of Scotland’s whisky regions. In the Scotch Whisky Regulations 2009, it is constituted as “comprising the South Kintyre ward of the Argyll and Bute Council as that ward is constituted in the Argyll and But
Scotland Magazine2 min read
The Library
Wild Winter: In Search of Nature in Scotland’s Mountain Landscape BY JOHN D. BURNS Author of The Last Hillwalker and Bothy Tales, John Burns is a bestselling and award-winning mountain writer who has spent over 40 years exploring Britain’s mountains.
Scotland Magazine3 min read
Clan Reunited
Many clans in Scotland are ancient and have centuries of history and tangled tales to draw upon, of rivalries and septs, of bloody battles and homelands that still call them back. But few Scottish clans that have disbanded, have reformed again and fe
Scotland Magazine5 min read
A Scattered People
We ended part one of this deep dive into the Highland Clearances in Sutherland with Patrick Sellar’s brutal evictions of the tenants from the inland straths and hills of the Highland Estate of the Countess of Sutherland. Forced evictions and relocati
Scotland Magazine4 min read
Take Pleasure In Scotland’s Piers
The ‘pleasure pier’ – as a uniquely British construction – was, strictly speaking, a mostly English and Welsh tradition. Though Scots have always derived ‘pleasure’ from their piers, the traditions that were born from these structures were generally

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