May-June 2022

History Scotland

The world's premier Scottish history magazine

History Scotland1 min read
From The Editor
Welcome to our May/June issue and as you’ll have seen from the magazine cover, we have an enticing mix of subjects and time periods for you this month. As a major new edition of Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd is published, we take a look at how t
History Scotland1 min read
Meet The Contributors
Professor Murray Pittock is pro-vice principal and Bradley chair of English literature at the University of Glasgow, and principal investigator on the ‘Collected Works of Allan Ramsay’ project. Dr Brianna Robertson-Kirkland is an expert on historical
History Scotland2 min read
History Scotland
David Breeze Christopher Smout Historiographer Royal Elizabeth Ewan University of Guelph Richard Oram University of Stirling Murray Pittock University of Glasgow FIND OUT MORE AT: HTTP://SCOT.SH/HIS-BOARD Mr Derek Alexander Archaeologist, NationalTru
History Scotland1 min read
Aberdeen Children Of The 1950s
The Aberdeen Children of the 1950s are a group of more than 12,000 people who took part in a test when they were in primary school and have since gone on to contribute to dozens of important studies. Researchers continue to use the data collected fro
History Scotland1 min read
World’s Largest Jurassic Pterosaur Found On The Isle Of Skye
The giant winged creature, more popularly known as pterodactyls, lived around 170 million years ago and had an estimated wingspan of more than 2.5 metres. Experts say the fossil is the best-preserved skeleton of a pterosaur found in Scotland. The spe
History Scotland1 min read
See A Handwritten Stuart Treasure
Written in Latin on vellum, the Book of Hours contains 40 illuminations by a 16th-century master artist. Used for private worship, it belonged to Mary’s great-aunt Louise de Bourbon, abbess of Fontevraud, who is believed to have gifted the volume to
History Scotland3 min read
Plockton’s Sporting Dilemma
On 8 August 1879 the Ross-shire Journal carried a short item of sporting interest: The want of games carried on in a more systematic manner than is general in country places has long been felt in Plockton. Last week, a few of our young men met to con
History Scotland7 min read
Urban Standing Stones
At the time of writing, according to the National Record of the Historic Environment, there are 1,251 single standing stones recorded in Scotland. Almost all are prehistoric in origin, probably dating back to the 3rd or 4th millennium BCE, but some a
History Scotland8 min read
The Discovery Of A Unique World War II Domestic Air Raid Shelter
In February 2021, after moving to Falkirk, I noticed a brick building at the bottom of my new garden. Covered in decades of household rubbish, green waste and unchecked growth, I was unsure if this building was a forsaken garden shed or, perhaps, som
History Scotland1 min read
Theories From A Brief History
Having gathered significant supporting evidence and unable to find any refuting evidence leads me to deduce the following: 1. The house appears to have been built between 1936 and 1937.2. The domestic air raid shelter construction may have begun as e
History Scotland2 min read
Additional Supporting Evidence: Maps, Photography, And Site Bricks
Archival maps held at Falkirk Library corroborate the theory that the house was a pre-war construction. A map revision of 1943 includes the entire housing scheme known as David’s Loan as complete, except for the last dozen remaining houses on Cobbleb
History Scotland13 min read
Plague Returns To Glasgow
On Friday 24 August 1900, Dr Thomas Colvin attended a sick family named Malloy in Hutchesontown, Glasgow and, being uncertain of the cause of their illness, reported it to the authorities as an infectious disease. Within 24 hours it was confirmed tha
History Scotland4 min read
The Annals Of The Goodsir-taylor Brooch
As Dr. Russell Potter wrote ‘It may be one of the most extraordinary relics of the Franklin expedition that’s never before been seen: a brooch, containing in its inmost oval a weave of human hair, including that of Henry Duncan Spens Goodsir’, the as
History Scotland13 min read
Three Centuries Of Performance: Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd
In 1725, Scottish bard Allan Ramsay (1684-1758), published the first edition of The Gentle Shepherd, a fiveact play that would quickly become one of the most successful works ever published. Just three years shy of its 300th anniversary, 2022 marks t
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Diary Dates
Fair Game, ongoing A major online exhibition from Shetland Museum and Archives, part of their Between Islands project. Each museum in the group has approached the project theme creatively and used it to produce their own online exhibition which is in
History Scotland14 min read
The Police And The Royal Air Force In Wartime Berwickshire
I saw a parachutist come from the west, and pass over the village… towards the sea… I cannot understand how he disappeared so quickly if he had been wearing a ‘Mae West’ life jacket. These are the words of Constable Andrew Wood of Cockburnspath polic
History Scotland3 min read
Call The Midwife: A Brief History Of The Establishment Of The Midwifery Profession In Scotland
Throughout the course of time, women have had help and support when giving birth, usually in the form of another woman. In Scotland this role was known by various terms including ‘neighbour-woman’, ‘helping woman’ and most commonly a ‘howdie’. Early
History Scotland6 min read
How To Take A Town
Depending upon which contemporary account one reads, descriptions of the Jacobite army’s behaviour during the 1745 rising can paint a number of strikingly different pictures. Embellished narratives and biased propaganda on both sides of the conflict
History Scotland13 min read
The First Scottish enlightenment Part 2
In the first of two articles spotlighting my recent book, The First Scottish Enlightenment, I outlined a period which I have defined as ‘the first Scottish Enlightenment’, a period which stretched from the 1680s to the 1740s and saw Scotland, especia
History Scotland4 min read
Audubon’s Birds Of America at The National Museum Of Scotland
Published as a series between 1827 and 1838, Birds of America was a landmark work that achieved international renown due to the epic scale of the project and the book’s spectacular, life-sized ornithological illustrations. Complete sets were bound in
History Scotland1 min read
Prestonfield House
Located at the foot of Arthur’s Seat, Prestonfield House is one of Edinburgh’s finest historic buildings, with centuries of history and an impressive roll call of former owners, visitors and – since the 1950s – hotel guests. This five-star hotel stan
History Scotland1 min read
The Witchery
The Witchery by the Castle stands literally at the gates of Edinburgh Castle in 16th-century Boswell’s Court, named after its one-time resident James Boswell, the uncle of Samuel Johnson’s biographer. The Witchery was built in 1595 for merchant Thoma
History Scotland3 min read
A Lifelong Passion
James Thomson OBE is best known as a renowned restauranter and hotelier, through his work as owner of Edinburgh hotels Prestonfield House and The Witchery. What is perhaps less well known is his work to restore these two historic buildings at the hea
History Scotland8 min readCrime & Violence
The Lawyer, The Witch, And The Way Forward: Sir George Mackenzie And The End Of Scottish Witch-hunting
From our vantage point in the 3rd millennium, the early modern witch-hunts seem difficult to understand. Over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, some 50,000 people were executed for a crime we no longer believe to exist. The end of the trials
History Scotland3 min read
Climate Change Heritage Action
In this issue, we take a closer look at Historic Environment Scotland’s recent announcement of a new inspection regime to repair and maintain the historic properties they care for. We explore how we, as individuals, can get involved in the conversati
History Scotland2 min read
No Mere Materialism
Explore a selection of digital history guides in the History Scotland store https://scot.sh/hsdownload Edited by Dr Martha McGill reviews@historyscotland.com Anna of Denmark: The Material and Visual Culture of the Stuart Courts, 1589-1619 Jemma Field
History Scotland4 min read
The Case For Scottish Independence
The Case for Scottish Independence: A History of Nationalist Political Thought in Modern Scotland Ben Jackson Cambridge University Press, 2020 210 pages Hardback, £59.99 / paperback, £18.99 ISBN: 9781108835350 / 9781108793186 The title of Ben Jackson
History Scotland3 min read
300 Years Of Scottish Women
Women and Scottish Society, 1700-2000 W. W. J. Knox Routledge, 2021 268 pages Hardback, £120.00 / ebook, £31.44 ISBN: 9780367700096 / 9781003144212 In the introduction to Women and Scottish Society, 1700–2000, W. W. J. Knox explains that source mater
History Scotland2 min read
Legacies Of The Slave Trade In Jamaica: Scottish Connections
One of the recent acquisitions to my library has been David Alston’s 2021 publication Slaves and Highlander: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean. This thought-provoking book details how heavily those of Scottish highland extraction were
History Scotland3 min read
…the Albany Stewarts
Towards the end of the 14th century, Scotland was afflicted by an acute crisis of leadership. The first two Stewart monarchs, Robert II (r.1371-90) and Robert III (r.1390-1406), proved weak rulers, and both had around them large numbers of male relat
History Scotland2 min read
Scottish Schools And Schoolmasters Of The 16th And 17th Centuries
A biographical dictionary of long-dead schoolmasters might initially seem like a very dull book indeed, but allow me to make the case that this volume is actually quite exciting for a number of reasons. It is the result of decades of painstaking arch
History Scotland3 min read
Final Word
How important is it to your work to focus on local, rather than national or global, weather patterns and their consequences? Of course, we need all these approaches, which is why it’s such a research challenge across several scientific disciplines. I

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