Scotland

Dictionary: Scot·land   (skŏt'lənd)

A constituent country of the United Kingdom comprising the northern part of the island of Great Britain as well as the Hebrides, Shetland Islands, and Orkney Islands. Inhabited by Picts in prehistoric times, the region was invaded but never conquered by the Romans and split into a variety of small kingdoms after the fifth century A.D. In the ninth century most of Scotland was unified into one kingdom, but conflicts with the English to the south soon erupted, leading to a series of bloody wars. When Mary Queen of Scots's son James VI succeeded to the English throne in 1603, the two kingdoms were united. Scotland became a part of the kingdom of Great Britain by a parliamentary act of 1707. Edinburgh is the capital and Glasgow the largest city. Population: 5,120,000.

For more information on Scotland, visit Britannica.com.

For a small nation, Scotland has made a quite disproportionate contribution to the art of photography. Even before David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson began their groundbreaking work in Edinburgh in the summer of 1843, Scotland had a significant role in the development of the medium. In the 18th century, Scotland was a European leader in the study of science, medicine, and philosophy. The Scottish Enlightenment had produced such significant figures as David Hume, Adam Smith, Robert Adam, James Hutton, Raeburn, and Burns, and an English visitor reported of Edinburgh's High Street that he could, ‘in a few minutes, take 50 men of genius and learning by the hand’. One such was the great chemist Joseph Black FRS; and among those who came from all over Europe to study at Edinburgh University with him was Thomas Wedgwood, who was there from 1786 to 1788, and who subsequently worked with Humphrey Davy on an idea of photography. The physicist David Brewster, an expert in light and optics, reported their experiments in the Edinburgh Magazine of December 1802 and subsequently became a close friend of Henry Talbot. By 1839, when Talbot announced his photogenic drawing process, Brewster was principal of the United Colleges of St Leonard and St Salvator at St Andrews University, and it was through his agency that the calotype came to Scotland.

Brewster's circle included Sir Hugh Lyon Playfair and Dr John Adamson. With the assistance of the optical instrument maker Thomas Davidson, both daguerreotypes and calotypes were made and Adamson's younger brother Robert was prompted into his remarkable but brief career. Robert Adamson set up his studio at Rock House on the Calton Hill in Edinburgh in May 1843, the mouth which saw the Disruption of the Church of Scotland, arguably the most significant event in Scotland in the 19th century, and it was this momentous occasion that prompted the Hill—Adamson partnership.

Photography had already taken Edinburgh, a city of numerous learned societies, by storm. James Bryson claimed to have taken a portrait daguerreotype in 1839 and Thomas Davidson was making daguerreotypes and improving cameras. As early as 17 Apri 1839, Dr Andrew Fyfe (1792-1861) delivered a lecture on ‘The New Art’ to the Society of Arts. In May, Mungo Ponton communicated his discovery of a system of photography using bichromate of potash rather than silver. By October, James Howie, ‘Artist’ at 64 Princes Street, was showing daguerreotypes he had made, and an exhibition in December included examples by Daguerre himself. In the west of Scotland, Revd Dr John Smith Memes (1794-1858) made the first English translation of Daguerre's manual and in Glasgow in 1841 Robert Hunt published his ‘Popular Treatise’ Art of Photography, the first comprehensive account of the medium. In 1843, the Edinburgh Calotype Club became probably the world's first photographic society.

The achievement of Hill and Adamson is so dominant that it is easy to overlook the fact that they were surrounded by many other fine contemporary exponents. In 1844, George Skene Keith made daguerreotypes of Palestine; George Smith Cundell (1798-1882) published his own account of the calotype process. James Ross (d. 1878) and John Thomson (d. 1881) set up their own studio on the Calton Hill about 1846 and were among the first to use the albumen process, winning a medal at the Great Exhibition in 1851. John Muir Wood, a musician and publisher, explored metals in photographic printing.

After Robert Adamson's death, his brother John encouraged Thomas Rodger to set up in business in St Andrews and he himself became an important portrait photographer. Jemima (Wedderburn) Blackburn (1823-1909) was one of the first to employ photography to reproduce her own drawings for publication; Charles Piazzi Smyth, the Astronomer Royal in Scotland, used a stereoscopic camera to take photographs at 2, 730 m (9, 000 ft) in Tenerife in 1856, and in 1865 inside the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Distinguished amateur photographers of the time included the physician Dr Thomas Keith and his brother-in-law John Forbes White (1831-1904). Among the professionals were Thomas Annan and others such as Archibald Burns (d. 1880), James Good Tunny (d. 1887), John Kibble (1815-94), Revd Dr Thomas Kerr Drummond (1799-1888), William Donaldson Clark (1816-73), John Moffat (1819-94), James Cox (1849-1901), Ronald Leslie Melville (1835-1906), and Horatio Ross (1801-86). In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell was the first to experiment with colour photography.

Scotland as a land of romance was largely the invention of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). His writings, the coming of the railways and tourism, and Queen Victoria's love affair with the Scottish Highlands helped raise landscape photography to an industry through George Washington Wilson and James Valentine.

From the beginning, Scots photographers were to be found all over the world. Nearest to home, Lady Clementina Hawarden, originally from Cumbernauld, produced her extraordinary evocative images in London and Ireland. John Thomson travelled in Asia and also produced his Street Life of London. Among the many working in foreign fields, frequently the earliest and most successful photographers in their new countries, were William Carrick in Russia, Alexander Gardner in America, Alexander Henderson and William Notman in Canada, Sergeant James McDonald (1822-85) in the Holy Land, Robert Macpherson in Rome, Dr John Murray in India, James Robertson in Turkey, and George Valentine (1852-90) in New Zealand.

George Valentine, the son of James, indicates the professional and aesthetic continuity in the story. The Annan firm, established in 1855, has a special distinction. Thomas Annan's admiration for D. O. Hill, and his son James Craig Annan's enthusiasm for the calotypes, which he introduced to the New York Photo-Secession, ensured the impact of the Scottish tradition in America. It was this influence which brought Alvin Langdon Coburn to Edinburgh at the beginning of the 20th century to illustrate Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes and helped persuade Paul Strand to work in the Hebrides in 1954. Among others making important documentary photographs, often from an ‘outsider’ perspective, were Werner Kissling (1895-1988) on the island of Eriskay; Humphrey Spender, Bert Hardy, Bill Brandt, and Oscar Marzaroli (1933-88) in Glasgow; Joseph McKenzie (b. 1929) and Wolfgang Suschitzky (b. 1912) in Dundee; Roger Mayne in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The tradition has continued in the work of, for example, John Charity (b. 1946) and Chick Chalmers (1948-98).

Documentary photographers working outside Scotland include Leslie Hamilton Wilson (1883-1968) in India, George Rodger, particularly in Africa, and Grace Robertson (born of Scots parents in Manchester). Influential landscape photographers include Raymond Moore, Fay Godwin, and Murray Johnston (1949-90).

Scottish photography in the late 20th century was encouraged by exhibition and education. In 1977 Richard Hough (1945-85) established Stills Gallery in Edinburgh where he was succeeded by Murray Johnston, who became the first head of photography at the Edinburgh College of Art. The appointment of Thomas Joshua Cooper at Glasgow School of Art was also crucial. Simultaneously, there was a growing awareness of the significance of the Scottish heritage in photography, manifested in 1983 by the founding of the Scottish Society for the History of Photography. In 1984 the National Galleries of Scotland set up the Scottish National Photography Collection, starting with the immensely important holdings of Hill-Adamson calotypes. In 1995, the National Galleries' crucial exhibition, Light from the Dark Room, publicly demonstrated Scotland's historical and contemporary wealth in photography. In 2001, the first moves were made to create a Scottish National Photography Centre in Edinburgh, and funding was obtained in 2004.

The key to progress is the current generation of photographers, many of whom work at international levels of excellence. Gunnie Moberg (b. 1941), Stephen Lawson (b. 1942), Patricia Macdonald (See aerial photography (feature)), John Charity (b. 1946), Ron O'Donnell, Robin Gillanders, David Williams (all b. 1952), Pradip Malde, Ruth Stirling (both b. 1957), Andy Wiener (b. 1959), Maud Sulter, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert (both b. 1960), Calum Colvin (b. 1961), Wendy McMurdo (b. 1962), Owen Logan, Mark Johnston (both b. 1963), Catriona Grant (b. 1964), Iain Stewart (b. 1967), and Jane Brettle (b. 1943) are only some of the significant names that future historians will need to take into account in surveying Scottish photography.

Anon. Forth railway bridge under construction, late 1880s. Albumen print

— David Bruce

Bibliography

• Brittain, D., and Stevenson, S., New Scottish Photography (1990).
• Stevenson, S., (ed.) Light from the Dark Room: A Celebration of Scottish Photography (1995)

Constituent country of the United Kingdom, occupying 30,405 square miles in northern Great Britain. Slightly smaller than Ireland, it has the largest population of all Celtic lands, more than 5,200,000; yet not all Scottish persons are of Celtic heritage. Known as Alba in ancient times, still its name in Scottish Gaelic, Scotland was not always distinguished from the rest of Britain until the Romans failed to conquer it and tried to close it off with walls, Hadrian's in AD 122 and the Antonine Wall further north in AD 138. The native populations of what was then Alba/Scotland, the Caledonii or the Picts, spoke P-Celtic languages related to what was to become Welsh. One of the greatest poems from early Welsh tradition, Y Gododdin, is represented as taking place partially in what is now Scotland; Kenneth Jackson (1969), perhaps mischievously, called it ‘the oldest Scottish poem’.

Scotland takes its name from Irish [Latin Scotti] invaders who migrated in large numbers to Argyll [Scottish Gaelic Oirer Ghaidheal, coast of the Gael], establishing the small kingdom of Dál Riada. After many a century of armed struggle with the Picts and the Brythonic kingdom of Strathclyde, the leader of the Q-Celtic, Goidelic Scotti, Cináed mac Ailpín [Kenneth MacAlpin] (d. 858), merged the three forces into one nation, called Scotland after its most powerful component. In the following centuries the Gaelic language [Scottish Gaelic Gaidhlig] spread across much of Scotland, except for parts of Norse-dominated Caithness and the islands of Orkney and Shetland to the north and the English-dominated regions like Roxburgh and Berwick to the south-east. But pressure against Gaelic began at the top of the power pyramid, as English became the language at court during the reign of Malcolm III, 1058–93, under the influence of his Wessex-born wife, (St) Margaret. Over the next nine centuries English and the English-related Scots dialect (the language of Robert Burns) superseded Gaelic gradually in all but the Hebrides and those parts of the Highlands beyond the Grampian mountains, i.e. the former counties (until 1974) of Argyll, Inverness, Ross and Cromarty, Sutherland, and portions of Perthshire. Called the Gaidhealtachd [Gaelic-speaking area], this region occupies portions of the post-1974 counties of Strathclyde and Highland. The Act of Union (1707) with England somewhat diminished the Scottish sense of nationhood. Far more damaging to Highland culture was the failure of the Jacobite Rebellion (1745–6) and the subsequent suppression of the Gaelic language and culture of those who had supported it. Much of the 19th century saw mass migration from the Gaelic Highlands, some of it forced through clearances, in which crofters (tenant farmers) were driven from small farms to be replaced by herds of sheep. At the end of the twentieth century, Scottish Gaelic is spoken by about 65,000 people in Scotland and fewer than 5,000 in Nova Scotia.

Although Scottish Gaelic passages, linguistically distinguishable from their Old Irish parent, appear in the 12th-century Gaelic notes to the 9th-century Book of Deer, the first extensive record of Scottish Gaelic tradition is found in the Book of the Dean of Lismore (1512–26), in which the spellings are rendered as they would sound phonetically in English, much as Manx is. The Scottish Gaelic bardic tradition continued into the 19th century under clan patronage, producing such distinguished poets as Iain Lóm (c.1625–c.1710), Alastair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (c.1695–c.1770), Rob Donn (1714–78), and Donnachadh Bàn Mac-an-t-Saoir [Duncan Bàn Macintyre] (1724–1812). Despite the differences in geography and political history, not to mention the Norse invasions and the Reformation, much of Scottish Gaelic tradition remained linked to Ireland. Many Scottish Gaelic stories are parallels of Irish stories and have Irish settings. Characters in Irish stories, such as Deirdre or Cúchulainn, travel to Scotland and appear familiar with its geography, although often Scotland is seen as a place of magic and adventure, like other foreign countries. From medieval through to early modern times, commerce and social intercourse continued between Gaelic Scotland and Ireland: large numbers of Highland mercenaries, the galloglasses [Irish gall, stranger; óglach, soldier] migrated to Ireland, and Irish Franciscan missionaries resisted the tide of Calvinism in the Highlands. The now archaic English word for Scottish Gaelic, Erse [Irish], signals a historical perception of this unity. But in the mid-18th century the enormously popular ‘translator’ James Macpherson (1736–96) promoted the still-persistent canard that Scottish Gaelic tradition was separate from and older than its Irish roots. Macpherson's Poems of Ossian (1760–3), drawing on unacknowledged Scottish Gaelic ballads, purported to be a lost epic, contemporary with the ancient classics. The widespread acceptance of this imposture promoted an international interest in Irish and other Celtic traditions. By the mid to late 19th century, informed collectors had assembled large collections of Scottish Gaelic tradition: John Francis Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands (4 vols., Paisley, 1861); Archibald Campbell, Waifs and Strays in Celtic Tradition (4 vols., London, 1889–91); Alexander Cameron, Reliquiae Celticae (2 vols., Inverness, 1894). Old Irish Albu, Alba; Modern Irish Alba(in); Manx Nalbin; Welsh Alban; Cornish Alban; Breton Bro-Skos.

Bibliography

• also Charles W. J. Withers, Gaelic in Scotland, 1698–1981: A Geographical History of a Language (Edinburgh, 1984)
• Derick S. Thomson (ed.), The Companion to Gaelic Scotland (Oxford, 1983; Glasgow, 1994).
• Bibliography under ‘Scottish Gaelic’ for collections of Scottish Gaelic traditions

In 1500 Scotland was a small, poor, and peripheral country on the northern fringe of Europe. Its economy was largely agricultural, its religion unremarkably Catholic, its political leanings toward France, its military and commercial significance minor, its people largely illiterate. By 1800 Scotland was a European leader in the fields of agriculture and commerce; it had long been self-consciously, perhaps aggressively, Protestant; its philosophers had changed the face of European thought; its inhabitants, by now among the best educated in Europe, saw themselves as Scots, but also as Britons; its people, practices, and ideas had left a stamp on the whole British, European, and Atlantic world.

Religion and Politics

The first step in this progression was the Reformation. Politically it was made by Scotland's separate Parliament, at grass roots principally by urban middle classes, and in popular memory by John Knox (1513–1572). Where the Scandinavian and German lands espoused the Word according to Martin Luther, Scotland followed the Swiss model of John Calvin, which also appealed to the northern Netherlands and certain parts of what is now France. To make a political statement against Mary Queen of Scots (1542–1587) and her French connections, Scotland's Parliament introduced in 1560 an assertive Calvinist Confession of Faith. Within a generation or two, Protestantism's institutions were firmly established in the Lowlands, and within three or four generations it had become the faith of most of the country.

Pockets of Catholicism survived into the eighteenth century, but the principal religious battles in the generations after the Reformation were fought over church organization: should it be presbyterian or episcopalian? Bishops and presbyteries coexisted unhappily from 1560 until 1689. The Scottish Revolution of 1638, which eventually led to an invasion of England and the overthrow of Charles I, and the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688–1689 were sparked by Presbyterians; powerful ties existed between Scottish Presbyterians and radical English Puritans in the period up to 1646. Late-sixteenthand early-seventeenth-century Scotland was a hotbed of revolutionary religious and political ideas.

The political origins and standing of the Church of Scotland gave it power almost unique in Europe, for example allowing it to control the moral and religious behavior of all Scots through parish "kirk sessions." Yet this was fatally weakened by a Toleration Act in 1712 and by further splits between Protestant denominations (for example, in 1733), which continued to fragment the faith into the mid-nineteenth century. Vocal and sometimes violent anti-Catholicism also persisted throughout the early modern period.

Calvinist reformers placed education at the top of their agenda. A national system of parish schools was established by Parliament during the seventeenth century, giving Lowland Scots among the highest literacy levels in Europe by the mid-eighteenth century. Scots came to value education highly. Around 1790 Scotland had the highest ratio of universities per million inhabitants in Europe (3.3 per million; the figure was 0.2 for England, Wales, and Ireland, 0.9 for France). Early growth in university numbers was fueled by demand for training in Protestant theology, while its eighteenth-century expansion was principally associated with legal and medical education—Scotland's universities produced nine out of ten British medical graduates between 1750 and 1800. Student numbers rose from just over 1,000 to 4,400 between 1700 and 1820. Young men were attracted to Scotland's institutions of higher learning by important changes in teaching methods and curricula, and by the fact that Scotland was almost the only country in Europe where it became cheaper in real terms to attend university over the course of the eighteenth century. Thus Scotland's universities were much less elitist than Oxford or Cambridge and were becoming more socially inclusive during the eighteenth century.

Scotland's eighteenth-century universities represented the country to the world. Yet from the 1707 Union of Parliaments until 2000, Scotland had no representative assembly. At one level the Union of 1707 was part of a process of growing integration with and dependence on England. Links with England, regarded since the Middle Ages as the "auld [old] enemy," had been enhanced by the Union of the Crowns in 1603. James VI of Scotland (ruled 1567–1625) became James I of England (ruled 1603–1625) after the extinction of the Tudor dynasty with the death of Elizabeth I. James left the old royal palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh for the decidedly more lavish setting of London. From 1603 to 1714 the house of Stuart reigned over Scotland (as it had since 1371), England, Wales, and Ireland, albeit with a shift in the line of succession in 1689 when James VII of Scotland (James II of England) fled to France. The Union of the Crowns brought about important changes in the status of the border counties of England and Scotland, pacifying and integrating them into unified government structures, but in all other regards the nations remained distinct. The most important event integrating them was the Union of Parliaments in 1707.

Earlier attempts at integration, for example by the crown with its disastrous attempt to impose an Anglican prayer book on Scotland in 1637–1638 and by the Republican Oliver Cromwell with his forced union in the 1650s, had met with failure. In the early 1700s the mood of Scots remained decidedly Anglophobic, and the Union was constructed by elements of the ruling elite. "We are convinced that an Union will be of great advantage to both. The Protestant religion will be more firmly secured, the designs of our enemies effectually disappointed, and the riches and trade of the whole island advanced." So argued supporters of the Union. In exchange for giving up their own Parliament, they got 45 members in the 513-strong House of Commons and 16 representative peers in the House of Lords, both in London. Scotland was thereafter part of the "United Kingdom of Great Britain" and was managed by a succession of aristocratic patrons, notably the dukes of Argyll. For all that Scots prized an egalitarian ethos, theirs was not a politically democratic society. Scotland had only 3,000 county electors in 1788, and the burgh franchise was confined to town councils; Edinburgh's member of Parliament was elected by just thirty-three men.

While Queen Mary (wife of William of Orange and co-ruler with him 1689–1702) was a Stuart, the change of monarch in 1689 left many Scots (and some English) uneasy, feelings accentuated by the arrival of a Hanoverian monarch (George I) in 1714. This discontent provided support for the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Glorious failures as they may have been, the rebellions bound Scotland ever more closely into the political, military, and imperial destiny of her nearest neighbor.

Society

The defeat of the '45 also signaled important social changes. Lowland society had long been a "modern" one. Landowners were the elite. Land-ownership was concentrated in a few hands, and the "lairds" dominated the hierarchies of wealth, status, and political power. The men who attended Scotland's Parliament until 1707 were members of the landed nobility. Beneath them in the social hierarchy came the tenant farmers, along with their subtenants or "cottars" and servants, who worked the land that provided the bulk of wealth and wellbeing. In the Lowlands approximately a fifth of late-seventeenth-century rural dwellers were craftsmen and tradesmen. Until the eighteenth century the "middle class" was made up of prosperous tenants and small landowners in the countryside and the merchants of the larger towns. Then professionals came into their own—lawyers, doctors, and educators—along with the increasingly confident merchants and manufacturers spawned by the industrial and commercial revolutions.

Highland society was distinctive until the eighteenth century. The structure of landholding was superficially similar, but Highland society was based on very different premises, which were increasingly alien to Lowlanders and to the English. Highland nobles were not just landlords, but also chiefs, in charge of clans built on the bonds created by feuding and feasting. The crown used clan rivalries to extend its hold on the Highlands, most notably in the notorious massacre of Mac Donalds by Campbells at Glencoe in 1692. Weakened by political and economic change since the sixteenth century, the cultural framework of clans was not finally dismantled until after the failure of the 1745 Jacobite rising. In its aftermath the wearing of Highland dress and the carrying of bagpipes were banned, except for Highland regiments abroad.

The early modern Highlands were densely peopled, and indeed the distribution of Scotland's population was very different from that of the present day. As late as the mid-eighteenth century more than half of Scotland's people lived north of an imaginary Highland Line drawn from just south of Aberdeen to just north of Glasgow. In common with most northern Europeans except the Dutch, Scots were country dwellers. Just 3 percent lived in towns of 10,000 or more in 1500. However, the rate of urbanization was the fastest in Europe in the eighteenth century. Just one Scot in twenty lived in a large town in 1700, compared with one in six by 1800. The most rapid eighteenth-century growth occurred in Glasgow and neighboring towns in the west-central Lowlands, the former on the back of the colonial tobacco trade, the latter mostly thanks to textile manufacturing.

Until the eighteenth century population figures are largely guesswork. Scotland may have had 700,000 people around 1500 and perhaps one million by about 1700, though most of the growth probably took place between about 1540 and 1640; the first accurate census in 1801 showed there were 1.6 million people. Scotland's population growth rate was slower than elsewhere in the British Isles—strikingly so in the eighteenth century because Scottish women married later than did their English and Irish counterparts, and a larger proportion never married during their childbearing years. Slow growth occurred despite the fact that adults began to live much longer in the eighteenth century. Life expectancy at the age of twenty-five years rose from twenty-eight years in the early seventeenth century to thirty-eight years by the end of the eighteenth century. Apart from low fertility and high mortality, the other reason was substantial emigration, this usually of young men for military or mercantile service. The North Sea and Baltic countries had always been important destinations for Scots (as had England), but the main goal in the seventeenth century was Ireland and in the eighteenth the Atlantic and Caribbean colonies.

The redistribution of population to the west central Lowlands in general and the rise of Glasgow in particular marked a profound shift in the economic focus of Scotland's wealth and overseas trade. In the Middle Ages both had centered on the east coast, Scots looking to the North Sea and the Baltic; then the emphasis changed to the west, focusing on the Atlantic economies. Scotland's agriculture had always been less developed than that of England, but the second half of the eighteenth century saw dramatic improvements in arable farming, which brought rural productivity onto a par with the best in Europe. Industry, until then located mainly in the countryside, became more identifiably urban and began to diversify from textiles and other "organic" economies (using, for example, leather and wood) into mineral-based production of coal and metals. Scotland had already become more dependent on her southern neighbor for trade by the end of the seventeenth century, and experienced agricultural and industrial revolutions at the same time as England a century later.

Yet for all the convergences of experience, Scotland was in many ways a very different country from England even in 1800. There was fiscal integration with England from 1707, but Scotland's legal systems, educational framework, religious establishment, and even currency—the pound (£) Scots was worth about one twelfth of the pound (£) sterling and the Bank of Scotland was a separate foundation in 1695.The trading privileges of her royal burghs were preserved distinct from England's at the Union of Parliaments. Key social institutions also differed. For example, poor relief was discretionary and recipients had less clearly defined rights than in England; it was usually supplementary and therefore meager; there were fewer institutions like work-houses, which existed mainly in some of the larger towns.

Culture

Within Scotland's borders considerable social and cultural diversity also persisted. Highland literacy was much lower than Lowland because most people there spoke Gaelic, not Scots (a West Germanic tongue similar to English). Gaelic was the first language of half of Scotland in the fifteenth century, a third in 1689, but just a fifth in 1806. Linguistic variety did not end there, for all of Scotland was becoming more Anglicized. Scots itself had flourished as a literary medium in the late Middle Ages (c. 1480–1520) but was in retreat thereafter as standard court Scots fragmented into regional dialects after the departure of James VI in 1603. Anglicization of language and culture proceeded in the eighteenth century. The literati of Enlightenment Edinburgh aspired to pronunciation and orthography that conformed to the best London practice, and it was English rather than Scots that became the tongue of Scotland's landed, professional, and aspirant mercantile classes.

Edinburgh was the crucible of the Scottish Enlightenment, which also flourished in the universities, drawing rooms, and clubs of Glasgow and Aberdeen. Scotland's enlightened thinkers and writers—Adam Smith and David Hume, to name but two—were of worldwide significance, bound together by a shared faith in the improvability of individual and society through education, reason, and discussion. They celebrated and promoted commercial change, including an early consumer revolution, by arguing that economic cooperation and exchange would promote sociability, refinement, and "taste." Scotland's Enlightenment was far more vigorous, socially diverse, and influential than England's.

While Scotland ended the early modern period closely integrated with England and tied up in its industrial, commercial, and imperial future, its independent evolution and effects on England (and Ireland) in the early modern period illustrate that different parts of the United Kingdom influenced each other's development. Through contacts with Europe and the Atlantic world, Scotland also exerted a wider influence over space and time. Aspects of the educational system developed in the seventeenth century, political theories expounded at the Reformation and after, the ideas aired in the Scottish Enlightenment, and Scotland's interpretation of Calvinist theology and some of the practices of church organization and discipline are all examples of an enduring international impact of her early modern development.

Bibliography

Houston, R. A., and W. W. J. Knox, eds. The New Penguin History of Scotland: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day. London, 2001. A comprehensive, up-to-date and readable overview.

—R. A. HOUSTON

This entry is a subtopic of British Isles.

In Scotland food and food traditions have, as elsewhere, changed over time while regional influences have had a major effect. In addition, both Europe and Scandinavia have introduced changes in the food of the country. Geography has played a central role in determining the basic foodstuffs and their place in the diet. The country is divided into two areas, the Highlands in the north and west, and the Lowlands in the south and east. Each has its own distinct language and culture. The Highlands are generally a mountainous region, with an emphasis on pastoral activities, livestock husbandry, crofting (small acreage farming), general agriculture, and maritime activities. The Lowlands are the chief agricultural area.

Beginning with the Agricultural Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the area developed specialized agricultural districts. The east is predominantly an area of arable and crop production; the climate of the west makes it suitable for the raising of livestock. The major towns and cities are located in this region, between the Firths of Forth and Clyde. These two areas are divided into smaller ones. The South-West, including the Inner Hebrides, is a dairying area; the East and South-East are advanced grain-cropping areas with a European reputation for farming; the North-East is a stock rearing area, especially for beef; the Highlands and Islands are another stock area.

A number of foods and foodstuffs have been important in the Scottish diet. Cereals have played a central role, especially in rural areas. Bere, a barley, was the traditional grain. By the end of the seventeenth century, it was being rapidly supplanted by oats. Beginning in the eighteenth century oats came to be recognized as a mark of Scottish nationality. As its consumption grew, bere fell down the social scale, though it continued to be eaten in Caithness and Orkney in the early twentieth century. Bere and oats were eaten in a number of ways. Oatmeal was milled into a number of "cuts" or grades, used for specific dishes. It was the basis of brose (mixed with water to make an instant food), porridge (cooked with water or milk), and such foods as sowens and skirley (mixed with fat and onion). Oatmeal was an ingredient in dishes such as haggis (mixed with liver and suet, traditionally cooked in a sheep's stomach). It was baked into bannocks and oatcakes, often toasted over an open fire.

Wheat was a grain grown in only the most favored areas and sold as a cash crop. Wheat bread was at first a prestigious food, eaten by the higher classes; for the lower classes it was eaten on special occasions such as harvesting. In the late eighteenth century, it spread from the towns and cities, where it was accompanied by the rise in baker's shops. Peas and beans were bread crops. Especially in the Lowlands, they were made into meal, but also put into dishes such as broths. These grains also indicated social class, and by the seventeenth century they were confined to the poorer people.

Baking

These grains, especially oats and wheat, were used in the tradition of baking, for which Scotland has become renowned. From oats, bannocks, scones, and oatcakes were baked. These did not use raising agents. From wheat, cakes, pastry, and shortbread were oven-baked. This was a later development, owing to the late introduction of the oven and the initial high cost of sugar.

Potatoes

The potato was introduced as a novelty in the late seventeenth century. In the 1740s there was resistance against eating it. By the 1790s when the "Statistical Account of Scotland" was compiled, it had become an important element of the diet, especially in Highland areas and among the poorer classes of the Lowlands. It was a principal food in the diet and was a cheap and healthy food and a substitute for bread. The potato continued to be an important element and only declined in status in the 1990s in the face of increased use of pasta and rice. Traditionally potatoes were boiled, with or without their skins. In the urban diet of the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century and beyond, they were sliced and deep-fat fried as chips. They were eaten as a meal, as a side dish in a main meal, or as an ingredient in a wide range of dishes such as soups and stews; they were also used in baking, as in potato scones.

Fruits and Vegetables

Fruit and vegetables had a relatively small role in the diet. The traditional staple vegetable was kale, a member of the Brassica varieties. Vegetable gardening around the houses of noblemen and lairds, and the rise of market gardening in the vicinity of the large towns, especially from the eighteenth century onwards, meant the development of a wide range of vegetables. Like other foodstuffs, they were at first eaten by the wealthy classes, then spread to the social classes below. Traditionally they were consumed as broth. Fruit was not extensively grown, and a limited number of varieties were raised. Orchard fruit was little cultivated, though soft fruit, especially strawberries and raspberries, has been commercially grown from the late eighteenth century; fruit was supplied from kitchen gardens. Especially where domestic production was limited or not undertaken, fruit growing wild in nature provided an important source. It could be a fruit substitute, as were rosehips during World War II. Fruit was eaten raw, or made into dishes, puddings, sauces, and drinks, including alcoholic ones. When sugar became available, it was made into conserves, jams, and jellies, or was bottled.

Dairy Products

Milk and dairy products have had a number of roles. Much of the supply has been from cows; that from ewes and goats has been minor. Milk has always been an important element in the rural diet. In urban areas and near towns, the supply was traditionally inadequate, though small town dairies filled a gap. Supplies had a seasonal fluctuation. Milk could be processed into dishes such as Corstorphine cream, made from frothed whey. Cheese-making enabled surplus quantities of milk to be utilized, especially in districts located away from centers of population. A large number of regional recipes and varieties exist, some developed during the expansion of the dairy industry in the nineteenth century. The Highlands are associated with soft cheeses for rapid consumption such as crowdie; the Lowlands have longer-keeping hard cheeses. Butter was the only source of fat in the rural diet, though beef or mutton fat could be obtained.

Meat, Fowl, and Fish

Meat was a foodstuff associated with social status. Among the rural population in the 1790s, it was rarely eaten. Even by the 1840s, it was still not an everyday foodstuff, especially among the poor. Before the Agricultural Revolution, livestock were slaughtered at Martinmas (November 11) as not all animals could be overwintered. Meat from domesticated livestock was supplemented by wild game and animals such as rabbits and hares. Sea fowl was caught in coastal areas. The nobility consumed large quantities of meat, especially on days when rents were paid: payment was made in-kind, of which livestock formed a major element.

There were regional variations in the types of meat consumed. The keeping of pigs became prevalent with the spread of potato growing in the eighteenth century. At that time, mutton became a meat of social distinction, being confined to the higher classes in the Lowlands, and the lower classes in the Highlands and Islands.

All parts of animals were utilized, as food, or as non-food items, such as tallow for lighting or hides and leather goods. Mealy puddings were made from entrails; blood was mixed with oatmeal to form blood puddings (black pudding); heads and trotters from sheep were made into pie and soup stock (powsoddie). Meat was rarely eaten fresh. It was salted, dried, or pickled in brine.

Fish was primarily eaten in coastal regions. With the improvement of transport networks in the nineteenth century, consumption spread to inland regions. Fish was a central element of the diet: it was a subsistence food, it filled the hungry gap before harvest when food was in short supply, and it was a delicacy. The Western Isles and Islands had large quantities of herring, haddock, whiting, and mackerel. Other fish included salmon, cod, ling, and shellfish such as cockles and oysters; around the Orkney Islands, whale was plentiful. Coalfish was widely eaten among the working classes. Inland fish such as trout were caught. Fish were eaten fresh, dried, or smoked. A number of fish dishes, many local in nature, are food identity markers: kippers, salted and smoke-cured fish, usually herring, first developed in Newcastle in the 1840s; salt-pickled herring or Finnan haddock, a lightly salted and smoked haddock; Arbroath smokies, salt-dried and smoked haddock.

Birds and poultry include domestic poultry, especially hens and geese. Their eggs were eaten, as were those of wild fowl. In some districts such as Ness, in the Outer Hebrides, wild bird flesh was eaten from gannets.

Some foods have become associated with geographical areas (see Table 1).

Beverages

The traditional drink crop was bere or barley. Ale was drunk, especially in Lowland areas; in the Highlands, whiskey was distilled, both legally and illicitly. Hot drinks spread from the upper classes. Tea drinking started to become increasingly widespread by the 1790s, though for some time afterwards it remained a drink for special occasions among lower social classes. Cocoa was drunk, as were coffee substitutes such as chicory. Coffee was not a drink of the working class, and even among industrial workers in Edinburgh in the 1950s it was consumed rarely, if at all. In recent decades coffee has increasingly taken the place of tea, among all social classes.

Special Foods for Special Occasions

Special foods were eaten during festivals. They were specially prepared; they often had ingredients with a certain significance (such as flour from the last sheaf) or were made with ingredients that were expensive, difficult to obtain, or not eaten at other times of the year. Some dishes were served only at a festive occasion, or during part of it, others were not.

Table 1

Festivals took place around the Celtic Calendar. They were held at the quarters that marked the passing of one season to another (Beltane, Lammas, Whitsun, and Martinmas). Foods included bannocks and oatcakes. Others were associated with the Gregorian Calendar. Hogmany, New Year's Eve, on December 31, was and probably still is the most widely celebrated of all the calendar festivals. Many of its foods were sweet in nature. Shortbread was a rich textured biscuit of flour, sugar, and butter. This could be decorated with a sugar iced or embossed pattern. Pitcaithly bannock was decorated with crystallized lemon and orange peel, caraway comfits, and almonds. Black bun is a rich and spiced dried fruit cake enclosed within a thin casing of bread dough or pastry. During harvest, harvesters were given wheat bread and ale; harvest meals also celebrated the end of harvest.

Rites of passage had foods associated with them. These included many common foods, with special attributes, such as bread, cheese, bannocks, and whiskey.

Meal Times and Menus

Meals had distinct patterns. Eating times were shaped by class, occupation, work hours, and days of the week. In rural areas meals were arranged around the feeding of livestock.

Three main meals were eaten: breakfast in the morning, dinner in the middle of the day, and tea or supper at five or six in the evening. The main meal was dinner; supper was fairly light but could also be substantial. Although traditionally no food was eaten between meals, changing mealtimes led to the evolution of the high tea, taken in the late afternoon, around four o'clock. It filled the gap between dinner and the evening meal. It developed as tea drinking became popular, especially among the upper classes. By the 1890s sweet and chocolate biscuits were becoming popular additions to the high tea. Meals had a number of courses. Dinner was three courses: a soup, a main course, and what was called a pudding. This varied: if there was soup, there might be no pudding; if there was no soup, the pudding was more substantial.

The eating of dishes, especially the main meal, had a weekly cycle. Sunday, the Sabbath, was reserved for churchgoing for Protestants and Catholics. (Other faiths had their Sabbaths on different days.) On this day meat was eaten. It was roasted, served with dumplings, and accompanied by potatoes and cooked vegetables. The byproducts and leftovers of the Sunday dinner were eaten throughout the working week.

Menus of daily meals are recorded in household accounts, personal and travel diaries, letters, and cookery books. According to Alexander Fenton, house-servants in the 1790s had "breakfast of oatmeal porridge or sowens with milk; dinner of broth and boiled meat warm twice a week, or of re-heated broth, or milk, with cold meat, or of eggs, cheese, butter, and bread of mixed barley and pease-meal; supper was for breakfast, or in winter there might be boiled potatoes mashed with a little butter and milk" (Scottish Country Life, p. 170). Ian Carter notes that in North-East Scotland during the 1840s, "the usual food of the farm servants [farm workers] is porridge and milk for breakfast: for dinner, potatoes, bread and milk with perhaps oatmeal brose made with greens, for supper. They do not have beer, except when there is a deficiency of milk. In harvest time an allowance of beer is given then" (Farm Life in Northeast Scotland, 1979, pp. 132–133).

Food and the diet have been influenced by a number of factors. Agriculture and changes within it led to changes in agricultural practices and the introduction and spread of new crops and markets. These affected the crops and livestock raised, their quantities, and seasonal availability. Trade and contact with other countries introduced foods, dishes, food habits, names of dishes, and methods of cooking. These were especially noted from the Netherlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Political and cultural links have been important, like those from the Auld Alliance with France, which started in the eleventh century and had its greatest impact in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It introduced dishes cooked "in the French way," such as "beef alamonde," dishes such as "omlit of eggs," terminology such as "gigot," a leg of mutton or lamb, and cooking utensils such as the "ashet," a dish for serving meat.

Union with England

Scotland was politically influenced by its larger neighbor, England. The two countries were joined in 1603 by a union of Crowns, then a Union of Parliaments in 1707. These brought the countries closer and shifted the power structure. The English Court influenced the food and eating habits of the nobility. Cultural influences came from the English diet and the introduction of such dishes as roast beef, mutton, and lamb.

Immigrants influenced the native food culture. From those of the sixth to the twelfth centuries, the Scandinavians influenced the use of resources from the sea and introduced dishes such as fish and mustard. Large-scale immigration took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from Ireland, Italy, and India. Italians were noted for fish and chips and ice cream, with all their traditions of these foods. Italian specialty shops such as Valvona and Corolla are a noted feature of some cities such as Edinburgh, where there is a large Italian population.

Social changes created a demand for new foods. Food substitutes, such as margarine, developed around 1870, allowed for greater variation in the diet. So too did new methods of food preservation, such as canning, from the 1860s; refrigeration was first applied to meat imported from the United States in the 1880s; pasteurization was first used in the dairy industry around 1890. These also reduced the influence of season and locality.

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—Heather Holmes

One of the four countries that make up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; contains the northern portion of the island of Great Britain and many surrounding islands. Its capital is Edinburgh, and its largest city is Glasgow.

• Bagpipes and kilts are well-known symbols of Scotland.

[For early historical material on Scotland, see the entry on the Celts].

Witchcraft

Witchcraft and, more commonly, sorcery, malevolent magic, appear to have been practiced in the earliest historical and traditional times in Scotland. It is related that during the reign of Natholocus in the second century there lived in Iona a witch of great renown, so celebrated for her marvelous power that the king sent one of his captains to consult her regarding the issue of a rebellion then troubling his kingdom. The witch declared that within a short period the king would be murdered, not by his open enemies but by one of his most favored friends, in whom he had most special trust. The messenger inquired the assassin's name. "Even by thine own hands as shall be well known within these few days," replied the witch.

So troubled was the captain on hearing these words that he abused her bitterly, vowing that he would see her burned before he would commit such a crime. But after reviewing the matter carefully in his mind, the captain arrived at the conclusion that if he informed the king of the witch's prophecy, the king might, for the sake of his personal safety, have him put to death, so thereupon he decoyed Natholocus into his private chamber and killed him with a dagger.

In about the year 388, the devil was said to be so enraged at the piety of St. Patrick that he assailed the saint with a whole band of witches in Scotland. The story goes that St. Patrick fled to the river Clyde, embarking in a small boat for Ireland. As witches cannot pursue their victims over running water, they flung a huge rock after the escaping saint, which fell harmlessly to the ground, and which tradition says now forms Dumbarton Rock.

Catholic and Protestant church leaders alike pursued the crusade against witchcraft with equal vigor, drawing their support from biblical passages such as Exodus 22:18, which commands, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Witches were believed to have sold themselves, body and soul, to the devil. Their ceremony was said to consist of kneeling before the devil, who placed one hand on the individual's head and the other under her feet, while she dedicated all between to the service of the devil and renounced baptism. The witch (usually thought of as a female) was thereafter deemed to be incapable of reformation. No minister of any denomination whatever would intercede or pray for her. On sealing the compact, the devil then proceeded to put his mark upon her.

Writing on the "Witches' Mark," the Reverend Bell, minister of Gladsmuir, in 1705 states, "The witches' mark is sometimes like a blew spot, or a little tale, or reid spots, like fleabiting, sometimes the flesh is sunk in and hollow and this is put in secret places, as among the hair of the head, or eyebrows, within the lips, under the armpits, and even in the most secret parts of the body."

The Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle in his Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (written in 1691) notes, "A spot that I have seen, as a small mole, horny, and brown colored, throw which mark when a large brass pin was thrust (both in buttock, nose, and roof of the mouth) till it bowed [bent] and became crooked, the witches, both men and women, nather felt a pain nor did bleed, nor knew the precise time when this was doing to them (their eyes only being covered)."

In many cases the mark was invisible, and according to popular lore, no pain accompanied the pricking of it. Thus, there arose a group of experts who pretended great wisdom and skill concerning the marks. They referred to themselves as "witch prickers" and it became their business to discover and label witches.

The method employed was barbarous. First, having stripped and bound his victim, the witch pricker proceeded to thrust his needles into every part of the body. When at last the victim, worn out with exhaustion and agony, remained silent, the witch pricker declared that he had discovered the mark.

The witch pricker could also resort to trial by water. The suspects were tied, wrapped in a sheet, and flung into a deep pool. In cases where the body floated, the water of baptism was supposed to be giving the accused, while those who sank to the bottom were absolved, but no attempt was made at rescue.

If a confession was demanded, tortures was resorted to, burning with irons being generally the last torture applied. In some cases a diabolic contrivance called the "witches' bridle" was used. The "bridle" encircled the victim's head while a pronged iron bit was thrust into the mouth, piercing the tongue, palate, and cheeks. In cases of execution, the victim was usually strangled and her body later burned at the stake.

Witches were accused of a great variety of sorceries. Common offenses were bewitching milk cattle by turning their milk sour or curtailing the supply, raising storms, stealing children from their graves, and promoting various illnesses. A popular device was to make a waxen image of the victim, thrust pins into it, and sear it with hot irons, all of which the victim was supposed to feel. Upon domestic animals witches cast an evil eye, causing emaciation and refusal to take food until at length death ensued. On the other hand, to those who believed in them and acknowledged their power, witches were supposed to use their powers for good by curing disease and causing prosperity.

Witches were believed to meet weekly, at which time the devil presided. Saturday was commonly called "the witches' sabbat," as their meetings were generally believed to be held on that day in a desolate place or possibly a ruined church building (a number of which had been left by the invading Vikings). They rode to the gatherings through the air on broomsticks (see transvection). If the devil was not present on their arrival, they evoked him by beating the earth with a fir stick and saying "Rise up foul thief."

The witches appeared to see the devil in different guises; to some he appeared as a boy clothed in green, others saw him dressed in white, while to others he appeared mounted on a black horse. After delivering a mock sermon, he held a court at which the witches had to make a full statement of their doings during the week. Those who had not accomplished sufficient "evil" were beaten with their own broomsticks, while those who had been more successful were rewarded with enchanted bones. The proceedings finished with a dance, the music to which the fiend played on his bagpipes.

The poet Robert Burns in his Tale of Tam o'Shanter gave a graphic description of a witches' gathering. There were great annual gatherings at Candlemas (February 2), Beltane (April 30), and Hallow-eve (October 31). These were of an international character and the witch sisterhood of all nations assembled, those who had to cross the sea performing the journey in barges of eggshell, while their aerial journeys were on goblin horses with enchanted bridles.

Laws Against Witchcraft

Through the confessions extracted from accused witches, guided by the fantasies about witchcraft in the several manuals that circulated through Europe beginning late in the fifteenth century, a picture of witchcraft was constructed and then promulgated into a society that still strongly believed in the powers of supernatural magic. In response to the fear of sorcerers and witches, the government passed laws outlawing their reported activities. In Scotland, less than a century after the redefinition of witchcraft as apostasy by the Roman Catholic Church in the 1480s, the first witchcraft law was enacted in the form of statute passed in 1563 in the Parliament of Queen Mary. It read (in the now archaic English of the time), "That na maner of person nor persons of quhatsumever estaite, degree or condition they be of, take upon hand in onie times hereafter to use onie maner of witchcraft, sorcerie, or necromancie, under the paine of death, alsweil to be execute against the user, abuser, as the seeker of the response of consultation."

Scottish Catholics then accused Protestant reformer John Knox of being a renowned wizard and having by sorcery raised up saints in the churchyard of St. Andrews, when Satan himself was said to have appeared and so terrified Knox's secretary that he became insane and died. Knox was also charged with using his magical arts in his old age to persuade the beautiful young daughter of Lord Ochiltree to marry him.

There were numerous trials for witchcraft in the Justiciary Court in Edinburgh and at the circuit courts, while session records preserved from churches all over Scotland also show that numerous cases were dealt with by local authorities and church officials.

C. Rodgers, in his book Social Life in Scotland, (3 vols., 1884-86) states: "From the year 1479 when the first capital sentence was carried out thirty thousand persons had on the charge of using enchantment been in Great Britain cruelly immolated; of these one fourth belonged to Scotland. No inconsiderable number of those who suffered on the charge of sorcery laid claim to necromantic acts with intents felonious or unworthy."

When James VI of Scotland in the year 1603 was called upon to ascend the throne of Great Britain and Ireland (as James I), his own native kingdom was in a rather curious condition. James himself was a man of considerable learning, intimate with Latin and theology, while his book, Daemonologie marks him as a person completely absorbed in the supernatural. Moreover while education and even scholarship were comparatively common at this date in Scotland (more common in fact than they were in contemporary England), the great mass of Scottish people shared abundantly their sovereign's dread of witches and sorcery. The efforts of Knox and his associates had brought about momentous changes in Scottish life, but if the Reformation rejected certain popular beliefs, Presbyterianism (the particular form of Protestant Christianity that came to power in Scotland) undoubtedly tended to introduce others. For that stern Calvinistic faith that now began to take root in Scotland nourished the idea that sickness and accident were a mark of divine anger. This theory did not cease to be common in the north till long after King James' day.

King James mentioned few precise facts concerning the practitioners of magic who were said to flourish in Scotland during his reign. But other sources of information claimed that these people were very numerous, and whereas in Elizabethan England it was customary to put a witch to death by hanging, in Jacobean Scotland magistrates employed harsher measures. In fact, the victim was burned at the stake, and it is interesting to note that on North Berwick Law, in the county of East Lothian, there is a tall stone that, according to local tradition, was formerly used as a site for such burnings.

Yet it would be wrong to suppose that witches and sorcerers, although handled roughly, were regarded with universal hatred, for in seventeenth-century Scotland medicine and magic went hand in hand, and the man suffering from a physical malady (particularly one whose cause he could not understand) very seldom entrusted himself to a professional leech (a physician whose medical technique was the placement of bloodsucking leeches on the patient's body) and much preferred to consult one who claimed healing capacities derived from intercourse with the unseen world.

Sorcerers, however, were generally also experts in the art of poisoning, and while a good many cures are credited to them, their triumphs in the opposite direction would seem to have been much more numerous. Thus we find that in July 1702, a certain James Reid of Musselburgh was brought to trial, being charged not merely with achieving miraculous cures, but with contriving the murder of one David Libbertoun, a baker in Edinburgh. This Libbertoun and his family, it transpired, were sworn enemies of a neighboring household, by the name of Christie, and eventually their feud grew as fierce as that between the Montagues and Capulets. The Christies swore they would bring things to a conclusion, and going to Reid they petitioned his nefarious aid.

His first act was to bewitch nine stones, these to be cast on the fields of the offending baker with a view to destroying his crops. Reid then proceeded to enchant a piece of raw flesh and also to make a statuette of wax. The nature of the design is not recorded, but presumably Libbertoun himself was represented. Mrs. Christie was instructed to thrust the meat under her enemy's door, and then to go home and melt the waxwork before her own fire. These instructions she duly obeyed, and a little later the victim breathed his last. Reid did not escape justice and after his trial suffered the usual fate of being burned alive.

Isobel Griersone, a Prestonpans woman who was burned to death on the Castle Rock, Edinburgh, in March 1607, had a record of poisonings rivalling that of Cellini himself, and it is even recorded that she contrived to put an end to several people simply by cursing them.

Equally sinister were the exploits of another sorceress, Belgis Todd of Longniddry, who was reported to have brought about the death of a man she hated just by enchanting his cat. This picturesque method was scorned by notorious Perthshire witch Janet Irwing, who in about the year 1610 poisoned various members of the family of Erskine of Dun, in the county of Angus. The criminal was eventually detected and suffered the usual fate.

The wife of John Dein, a burgess of Irvine, conceived a violent aversion for her brother-in-law, Archibald, and on one occasion, when the latter was setting out for France, Margaret hurled imprecations at his ship, vowing none of its crew or passengers would ever return to their native Scotland. Months went by, and no word of Archibald's arrival reached Irvine, until one day a peddler named Stewart came to John Dein's house and declared that the baneful prophecy had been duly fulfilled.

Learning of the affair, municipal authorities arrested Stewart, whom they had long suspected of practicing magic. At first he confessed innocence, but under torture he confessed how, along with Margaret Dein, he had made a clay model of the illstarred ship, and thrown this into the sea on a particularly stormy night. His audience was horrified at the news, but they hastened to lay hands on the sorceress, whereupon they dealt with her as noted above.

No doubt the witches of Jacobean Scotland were credited with triumphs far greater than what they really achieved. At the same time, a number of the accused sorcerers firmly maintained, when confronted by a terrible death, that they had been initiated in their craft by the devil himself, or perhaps by a band of fairies. It is not surprising that they were dreaded by the simple, illiterate folk of their day, and, musing on these facts, we may feel less amazed at the credulity displayed by King James, who declared that all sorcerers "ought to be put to death according to the law of God, the civill and imperiale Law, and municipall Law of all Christian nations."

The last execution of a witch in Scotland took place in Sutherland in 1722. An old woman residing at Loth was charged, among other crimes, with having transformed her daughter into a pony, shod by the devil, which caused the girl to turn lame both in hands and feet. Sentence of death was pronounced by Captain David Ross, the Sheriff-substitute. C. Rodgers relates: "The poor creature when led to the stake was unconscious of the stir made on her account, and warming her wrinkled hands at the fire kindled to consume her, said she was thankful for so good a blaze. For his rashness in pronouncing the sentence of death, the Sheriff was emphatically reproved."

In more recent centuries witchcraft has been dealt with under laws pertaining to rogues, vagabonds, gamesters, and practitioners of fortune-telling.

Magic and Demonology

Magic appears to have been common in Scotland until a late period. In the pages of Adamnan, Abbot of Iona (ca. 625-704C.E.), St. Columba and his priest regarded the Druids as magicians, and he countered their sorcery with what was believed to be a superior celestial magic of his own. Thus does the religion of one race become magic in the eyes of another.

Notices of sorcery in Scotland before the thirteenth century are scanty, if we except the tradition that Macbeth encountered three witches who prophesied his fate to him. There is no reason to believe that Thomas the Rhymer (who was endowed by later superstition with adventures similar to those of Tannhauser) was really other than a minstrel and maker of epigrams, or that Sir Michael Scott was other than a scholar and man of letters.

The rhymed fragment known as "The Cursing of Sir John Rowil," by a priest of Corstorphine, near Edinburgh, which dates perhaps from the last quarter of the fifteenth century, provides a glimpse of medieval Scottish demonology. The poem is an invective against certain persons who rifled his poultry-yard, upon whom the priest called down divine vengeance. The demons who were to torment the evildoers were Garog, Harog, Sym Skynar, Devetinus "the devill that maid the dyce," Firemouth, Cokadame, Tutivillus, Browny, and Syr Garnega, who may be the same as Girnigo, to whom cross children are often likened by angry mothers of the Scottish working classes. The Scottish verb, "to girn" (to pull grotesque faces or grin), may find its origin in the name of a medieval fiend, the last shadow of some Teutonic or Celtic deity of unlovable attributes.

In Sym Skynar, we may have Skyrnir, a Norse giant in whose glove Thor found shelter from an earthquake, and who sadly fooled him and his companions. Skyrnir was one of the Jotunn or Norse Titans, and probably one of the powers of winter, and he may have received the popular surname of "Sym" in the same manner as we speak of "Jack" Frost.

A great deal has still to be done in unearthing the minor figures of Scottish mythology and demonology, and even the greater ones have not received the attention due to them. For example, in Newhaven, a fishing district near Edinburgh, we find the belief in a fiend called Brounger, who is described as an old man who levies a toll of fish and oysters upon the local fishermen. If he is not placated with these, he wreaks vengeance on the persons who fail to supply him. He is also described as "a Flint and the son of a Flint," which strongly suggests that, like Thor and many other gods of Asia and America, he was a thunder or weather deity. In fact his name is probably a mere corruption of an ancient Scandinavian word meaning "to strike," which still survives in the Scottish expression "make a breenge."

With regard to practical magic, a terrifying and picturesque legend tells how Sir Lewis Bellenden, a lord of session and superior of the Barony of Broughton, near Edinburgh, succeeded by the aid of a sorcerer in raising the devil in the backyard of his own house in the Canongate, somewhere around the end of the sixteenth century. Bellenden was a notorious trafficker with witches, with whom his barony of Broughton was reportedly overrun. Wanting to see the devil in person, he secured the services of one Richard Graham. The results of the evocation were disastrous to the inquisitive judge, whose nerves were so shattered at the devil's appearance that he fell ill and soon expired.

The case of Major Thomas Weir in 1670 is one of the most interesting in the annals of Scottish sorcery. Master storyteller Sir Walter Scott recounts the major aspects of the curious occurrence: "It is certain that no story of witchcraft or necromancy, so many of which occurred near and in Edinburgh, made such a lasting impression on the public mind as that of Major Weir. The remains of the house in which he and his sister lived are still shown at the head of the West Bow, which has a gloomy aspect, well suited for a necromancer. It was, at different times, a brazier's shop and a magazine for lint, and in my younger days was employed for the latter use; but no family would inhabit the haunted walls as a residence; and bold was the urchin from the High School who dared approach the gloomy ruin at the risk of seeing the Major's enchanted staff parading through the old apartments, or hearing the hum of the necromantic wheel, which procured for his sister such a character as a spinner.

"The case of this notorious wizard was remarkable chiefly from his being a man of some condition (the son of a gentleman, and his mother a lady of family in Clydesdale), which was seldom the case with those that fell under similar accusations. It was also remarkable in his case that he had been a Covenanter, and peculiarly attached to that cause. In the years of the Commonwealth this man was trusted and employed by those who were then at the head of affairs, and was in 1649 commander of the City-Guard of Edinburgh, which procured him his title of Major. In this capacity he was understood, as was indeed implied in the duties of that officer at the period, to be very strict in executing severity upon such Royalists as fell under his military charge. It appears that the Major, with a maiden sister who had kept his house, was subject to fits of melancholic lunacy, an infirmity easily reconcilable with the formal pretences which he made to a high show of religious zeal. He was peculiar in his gift of prayer, and, as was the custom of the period, was often called to exercise his talent by the bedside of sick persons, until it came to be observed that, by some association, which it is more easy to conceive than to explain, he could not pray with the same warmth and fluency of expression unless when he had in his hand a stick of peculiar shape and appearance, which he generally walked with. It was noticed, in short, that when this stick was taken from him, his wit and talent appeared to forsake him.

"This Major Weir was seized by the magistrates on a strange whisper that became current respecting vile practices, which he seems to have admitted without either shame or contrition. The disgusting profligacies which he confessed were of such a character that it may be charitably hoped most of them were the fruits of a depraved imagination, though he appears to have been in many respects a wicked and criminal hypocrite. When he had completed his confession, he avowed solemnly that he had not confessed the hundredth part of the crimes which he had committed.

"From this time he would answer no interrogatory, nor would he have recourse to prayer, arguing that, as he had no hope whatever of escaping Satan, there was no need of incensing him by vain efforts at repentance. His witchcraft seems to have been taken for granted on his own confession, as his indictment was chiefly founded on the same document, in which he alleged he had never seen the devil, but any feeling he had of him was in the dark.

"He received sentence of death, which he suffered 12th April, 1670, at the Gallow-hill, between Leith and Edinburgh. He died so stupidly sullen and impenitent as to justify the opinion that he was oppressed with a kind of melancholy frenzy, the consequence perhaps of remorse, but such as urged him not to repent, but to despair. It seems probable that he was burnt alive.

"His sister, with whom he was supposed to have had an incestuous connection, was condemned also to death, leaving a stronger and more explicit testimony of their mutual sins than could be extracted from the Major. She gave, as usual, some account of her connection with the queen of the fairies, and acknowledged the assistance she received from that sovereign in spinning an unusual quantity of yarn. Of her brother she said that one day a friend called upon them at noonday with a fiery chariot, and invited them to visit a friend at Dalkeith, and that while there her brother received information of the event of the battle of Worcester. No one saw the style of their equipage except themselves.

"On the scaffold this woman, determining, as she said, to die with the greatest shame possible was with difficulty prevented from throwing off her clothing before the people, and with scarce less trouble was she flung from the ladder by the executioner. Her last words were in the tone of the sect to which her brother had so long affected to belong: 'Many,' she said, 'weep and lament for a poor old wretch like me; but alas, few are weeping for a broken covenant.' "

Alchemy

While fearful of sorcery and witchcraft, James IV was attracted to the science of alchemy. The poet William Dunbar described the patronage the king bestowed upon certain adventurers who had studied the mysteries of alchemy and were ingenious in making "quintiscence," which should convert other metals into pure gold. In the Treasurer's Accounts there are numerous payments for the "quinta essentia," including wages to the persons employed, utensils of various kinds, coals and wood for the furnaces, and for a variety of other materials such as quicksilver, aqua vitae, litharge, auri, fine tin, burnt silver, alum, salt and eggs, and saltpeter.

The Scottish monarch appears to have collected around him a multitude of quacks of all sorts for mention is made of "the leech with the curland hair," of "the lang Dutch doctor," of one Fullertone, who was believed to possess the secret of making precious stones, of a Dr. Ogilvy who labored hard at the transmutation of metals, and many other empirics, whom James not only supported in their experiments, but himself assisted in their laboratory. The most noted of these adventurers was Master John Damian, the French Leich. He probably held an appointment as a physician in the royal household.

John soon ingratiated himself with the king, who had a strong passion for alchemy. He remained in James's favor throughout the rest of his life, the last notice given to him being on March 27, 1513, when the sum of £20 was paid to him to travel to the mine in Crawford Moor, where the king had artisans at work searching for gold.

From the reign of James IV to that of Mary Stuart, no magician or alchemical practitioner of note appears to have existed in Scotland, and in the reign of James VI, too great a severity was exhibited against such to permit them to avow themselves publicly. In the reign of James VI, however, lived the celebrated Alexander Seton of Port Seton near Edinburgh, known abroad as "The Cosmopolite," who is said to have succeeded in achieving the transmutation of metals.

Magic and Religion in the Scottish Highlands

Pagan Scotland appears to have been lacking in benevolent deities. Those representatives of the spirit world who were on friendly terms with mankind were either held captive by magic spells or had some sinister object in view which caused them to act with the most plausible duplicity. The chief demon or deity (one hesitates which to call her) was a one-eyed hag who had tusks like a wild boar. She was referred to in folk tales as "the old wife" (Cailleach), "Grey Eyebrows," or "the Yellow Muitearteach," and reputed to be a great worker of spells. Apparently she figured in a lost creation myth, for fragmentary accounts survive of how she fashioned the hills, brought lochs into existence, and caused whirlpools. Echoes of this boar-like hag survive in folk ballads of "Old Bangum" and "Sir Lionel" (Child No. 18), prefigured in ancient Hindu legends of the god Vishnu as the giant boar Vahara.

The hag was a lover of darkness, desolations, and winter. With her hammer she alternately splintered mountains, prevented the growth of grass, and raised storms. Numerous wild animals followed her, including deer, goats, and wild boars. When one of her sons was thwarted in his love affairs by her, he transformed her into a mountain boulder "looking over the sea," a form she retained during the summer. She was liberated again on the approach of winter. During the spring months, the hag drowned fishermen and preyed on the food supply; she also stole children and roasted them in her cave.

Her progeny included a brood of monstrous giants, each with several heads and arms. These were continually operating against mankind, throwing down houses, abducting women, and destroying growing crops. Heroes who fought against them required the assistance of a witch who was called the "Wise Woman," from whom they obtained magic wands.

The witch of Scottish folk tales is the "friend of man" and her profession was evidently regarded in ancient times as a highly honorable one. Wizards also enjoyed high repute; they were the witch-doctors, priests, and magicians of the Scottish Pagans, and it was not until the sixteenth century that legal steps were taken to suppress them in the Highland districts.

There seems to have been no sun-worship or moon-worship in Scotland, for neither sun nor moon was individualized in the Gaelic language; these bodies, however, were reputed to exercise a magical influence. The moon especially was a "Magic Tank," from which supplies of power were drawn by those capable of performing requisite ceremonies. This practice has been revived by modern neo-pagan witches in the ritual referred to as "drawing down the moon."

But although there appear to have been no lunar or solar spirits, there were numerous earth and water spirits. The "water wife," like the English "mer wife," (see mermaids), was a greatly dreaded being who greedily devoured victims. She must not be confused with the banshee, that Fate whose chief business it was to foretell disasters, either by washing bloodstained garments or knocking on a certain boulder beside the river.

The water wife usually confronted a late traveler at a ford. She claimed him as her own, and if he disputed her claim she asked what weapons he had to use against her. The unwary one named each in turn, and when he did so, the power to harm her passed away. One story of this character is as follows: "The wife rose up against the smith who rode his horse, and she said, 'I have you: what have you against me?' 'My sword,' the man answered. 'I have that,' she said, 'what else?' 'My shield,' the man said. 'I have that and you are mine.' 'But,' protested the man, 'I have something else.' 'What is that?' the water wife demanded. To this question the cautious smith answered, 'I have the long, grey, sharp thing at my thigh.' This was his dirk, and not having named it, he was able to make use of it. As he spoke he flung his plaid round the water wife and lifted her up on his horse behind him. Enclosed in the magic circle she was powerless to harm him, and he rode home with her, deaf to her entreaties and promises.

"He took her to his smithy and tied her to the anvil. That night, her brood came to release her. They raised a tempest and tore the roof off the smithy, but the smith defied them. When day dawned they had to retreat. Then he bargained with the water wife, and she consented that if he would release her, neither he nor any of his descendants should ever be drowned in any three rivers he might name. He named three and received her promise, but as she made her escape she reminded him of a fourth river. 'It is mine still,' she added. In that particular river the smith himself ultimately perished."

Ever since, fishermen have not liked to name either the fish they desire to procure or those that prey on their catches. Haddocks are "white bellies," salmon "red ones," and the dog-fish "the big black fellow." It is also regarded as unlucky to name a minister, or refer to Sunday, in a fishing boat—a fact that suggests that in early Christian times fishermen might be pious churchmen on land but continued to practice paganism when they went to sea, like the Icelandic Norsemen who believed that Christ ruled their island, and Thor the ocean. Fairies must not be named on Fridays, at Halloween, or on Beltane (May Day) when charm fires were lit.

Earth worship, or rather the propitiation of earth spirits, was a prominent feature of Scottish paganism. There too magic played a leading role. Compacts were confirmed by swearing over a piece of turf, certain moors or mounds were set apart for ceremonial practices, and these were visited for the performance of child-procuring and other ceremonies, which were performed at a standing stone.

In cases of sickness, a divination cake was baked and left at a sacred place: If it disappeared during the night, the patient was supposed to recover, if it remained untouched until the following morning it was believed that the patient would die.

Offerings were constantly made to the earth spirits. In a witch trial recorded in Humbie Kirk Session Register (September 23, 1649) one Agnes Gourlay was accused of having made offerings of milk, saying, "God preserve us too; they are under the earth that have as much need of it as they that are above the earth."

The milk poured out upon the earth at magical ceremonies was supposed to go to the fairies. "Gruagach" stones survived into relatively modern times in the Highlands. These were flat stones with deep "cup" marks. After a cow was milked, the milker poured into a hole the portion of milk required by the Gruagach, a long-haired spirit who is usually "dressed like a gentleman." If no offering was given to him, the cream would not rise on the milk, or even if it did, the churning would be a failure. There are interesting records in the Presbytery records of Dingwall, Ross-shire, regarding the prevalence of milk pouring and other ceremonies during the seventeenth century.

The seer was usually wrapped in the skin of a sacrificed bull and left lying all night beside the river. He was visited by supernatural beings in the darkness and obtained answers regarding future events. Another and horrifying way to perform this divination ceremony was to roast a live cat. The cat was turned on a spit until the "Big Cat" (the devil) appeared and either granted the wish of the performer of the ceremony, or foretold what was to take place in answer to a query. In the twentieth century, there are still memories of traditional beliefs regarding witchcraft, fairies, the evil eye, second sight, and magical charms to cure or injure.

Individuals, domesticated animals, and dwellings were charmed against witchcraft by iron and certain herbs or berries. The evil eye influence was dispelled by drinking "water of silver" from a wooden bowl or ladle. The water was taken from a river or well of high repute, silver placed in it, then a charm repeated. When it had been passed over a fire, the victim was given it to drink and what remained was sprinkled around the hearth-stone with a ceremony that varied according to district.

Curative charms were handed down in families from a male to a female and a female to a male. Blood-stopping charms were regarded with great sanctity and the most persistent folklore collectors were unable to obtain them from those who were reported to be able to use these with effect.

Accounts were given of "blood-stopping" from a distance. Although the possessor of the power usually had a traditional charm, he or she rarely used it without also praying. Some Highland doctors testified in private to the wonderful effects of "blood-stopping" operations. In relatively recent times, a medical officer of Inverness-shire stated in his official report to the county council that he was watching with interest the operations of "King's Evil Curers," who still enjoyed great repute in the Western Isles. These were usually seventh sons.

Second sight, like the power to cure and stop blood, runs in families. There is scarcely a parish in the Scottish Highlands without a family in which one or more individuals are reputed to have occult powers. Some had visions, either while awake or asleep. Others heard ominous sounds on occasions and were able to understand what they signified. Certain individuals confessed, but with no appreciation of the faculty, that they were sometimes able to foretell that a person was likely to die soon.

Two instances of this kind may be cited. A younger brother caught a chill. When an elder brother visited him, he knew at once that the young man would die soon, and communicated a statement to that effect to a mutual friend. According to medical opinion, the patient, who was not confined to bed, was in no danger, but three months afterward, he developed serious symptoms and died suddenly. When news of the death was communicated to the elder brother, he had a temporary illness.

The same individual met a gentleman in a friend's house and had a similar experience; he "felt," he could not explain how, that this man was near death. On two occasions within the following week he questioned the gentleman's daughter regarding her father's health and was informed that he was "as usual." The daughter was surprised at the inquiries. Two days after this meeting, the gentleman in question expired suddenly while sitting in his chair.

Again the individual, on hearing of the death, had a brief but distressing illness, with symptoms usually associated with shock. The mother of this man had a similar faculty. On several occasions she saw lights. One day during the Boer War, an officer passing her door bade her goodbye, since he had been ordered to South Africa. She said, "He will either be slain or come back deformed," and turned ill immediately. A few months later the officer was wounded in the lower jaw with a bullet and returned home with his face much deformed.

The faculty of second sight manifests itself in various ways, as these instances show, and evidence that it is possessed by individuals may occur only once or twice in a lifetime. There are cases, however, in which it is constantly active. Those reputed to have the faculty are most reticent regarding it and appear to dread it.

At the close of the nineteenth century, "tow-charms" to cure sprains and bruises were sold in a well-known Highland town by a woman who muttered a metrical spell over each magic knot she tied as the afflicted part was treated by her. She had numerous patients among all classes. Bone-setters (the precursors of modern chiropractors) enjoyed high repute in some localities. In modern memory a public presentation was made to a Ross-shire bone-setter in recognition of his life-long services to the community. His faculty was inherited from his forbears.

Numerous instances may be gleaned in the Highlands of the appearance of the spirits of the living and the dead. The appearance of the spirit of a living person is said to be a sure indication of the approaching death of that individual. It is never seen by a member of the family, but appears to intimate friends. Sometimes it speaks and gives indication of the fate of some other mutual acquaintance.

The Supernatural in Scottish Fiction

While Sir Walter Scott frequently introduced supernatural traditions into his novels and poems, and writers like Robert Louis Stevenson published powerful stories on occult subjects (see fiction, English occult), the magical and supernatural stories of the land go back to the ancient balladry of Scotland. Many of the 305 ballads collected and classified by Francis James Child (regarded as definitive in its time) echo ancient stories and beliefs from a magical past. Some of these themes seem to have descended from Scandinavian balladry.

From Folklore to Psychical Research

The study of Scottish occultism was begun by the collectors of folklore. Among the earliest was the Reverend Robert Kirk, whose The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, (written in 1691, but not published until 1815) reads like an anthropologist's report on a foreign country. The work is precise in its descriptions of fairy life and customs, and some believed that Kirk himself became a prisoner of the fairies.

Among Scottish folklorists whose research preserved ancient legends and magical traditions, the most prominent was John Francis Campbell of Islay (1822-1885). His great collection, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, Orally Collected (4 vols., 1860-62), achieved for Scotland what Jacob Grimm had done for the Household Tales of Europe. Alexander Carmichael (1832-1912) collaborated with Campbell and preserved the ancient Gaelic culture in his collection Carmina Gadelica, Hymns and Incantations, With Illustrated Notes in Words, Rites, and Customs, Dying and Obsolete, Orally Collected in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (2 vols., 1900).

The versatile genius Andrew Lang (1844-1912) published over fifty major works concerned with poetry, book collecting, classical studies, Scottish history, English literature, anthropology, folklore, and fairy tales. Lang was a founder-member and later president of both the Society for Psychical Research, and the Folk-Lore Society. Lang was one of the earliest writers on psychical research to collate modern phenomena with the traditions and beliefs of ancient peoples, and his knowledge in this wide field was encyclopedic. He noted, for example, in regard to reports of crystal gazing that he found it difficult to understand why as long as such things rested only on tradition, they were a matter of respectable folklore, but whenever contemporary evidence was produced, folklorists dropped the subject hastily.

In 1897, he published The Book of Dreams and Ghosts, in which he collated stories from all ages dealing with the whole field of the supernatural, including uncanny dreams, hauntings, bilocation, crystal gazing, animal ghosts, and poltergeists. His classic study, Cock Lane and Common-Sense (1894), reviewed ancient spirit contact, haunted houses, the famous Cock Lane poltergeist of London in 1762, apparitions, ghosts, hallucinations, second sight, table-turning, and comparative psychical research.

Modern-day Scotland

In Scotland, the study of parapsychology has become a degree-bestowing science. Noted writer and critic Arthur Koestler provided in his will the establishment of an endowed Chair of Parapsychology at a British University. His intention was to further objective scientific research into "…the capacity attributed to some individuals to interact with their environment by means other than the recognised sensory and motor channels." Following Koestler's death in 1982, his trustees advertised the post and in 1984 awarded the Chair to the University of Edinburgh. Today, The University of Edinburgh's Koestler Parapsychology Unit, a part of the Department of Psychology, offers a doctorate program in parapsychology and publishes the European Journal of Parapsychology. Similarly, St. Andrews University has also offered courses in parapsychology.

Scotland remains famous for its ghost tales and haunted dwellings, with the natives proud to quip that "ghostly spirits are second only to the drinkable kind in the hearts of Highlanders." Cities such as Edinburgh offer organized ghost walks and haunted tours through selected castles and ancient hotels. Ghostly notoriety is shared among spectors of famous as well as common folk, male and female, young and old. It is the spirit of Mary Queen of Scots that seems to be the most prevalent among Highland haunters. The queen's spiritual presence has reportedly appeared in nearly every castle she visited during her life. In addition to ghost tours for mortal visitors to Scotland, interested parties can learn more about Scottish hauntings at web sites devoted to the subject, as well as the bimonthly magazine, Haunted Scotland.

Sources:

Black, George F. A Calendar of Cases of Witchcraft in Scotland 1510-1727. New York: New York Public Library, 1938.

Bliss, Douglas Percy, ed. The Devil in Scotland. London: Alexander MacLehose, 1937.

Bronson, Bertrand Harris. The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. 4 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959-72.

Campbell, John F. Popular Tales of the West Highlands, Orally Collected. 4 vols. Edinburgh, 1860-62. Rev. ed. London and Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1890-93. Reprint, Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1969.

Campbell, John L., and Trevor H. Hall. Strange Things: The Story of Fr. Allan McDonald, Ada Goodrich Freer, and the Society for Psychical Research's Enquiry into Highland Second Sight. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968.

Carmichael, Alexander. Carmina Gadelica, Hymns and Incantations. 2 vols. 1900. 2nd ed. 5 vols. Edinburgh & London, 1928-54.

Chambers, Robert. Traditions of Edinburgh. N.p., 1825.

Child, Francis J. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vols. Boston, 1882-98. Reprint, Folklore Press; Pageant Book, 1957.

Davidson, Thomas. Rowan Tree and Red Thread. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1949.

Ferguson, John. Witchcraft Literature of Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Papers, 1899.

Ghosts of Scotland. http://www.tartans.com/articles/ghostwomen.html. June 19, 2000.

James I. Daemonologie. Edinburgh, 1597. Reprint, London, 1603. Reprint, London: John Lane/New York: E. P. Dutton, 1924.

Kirk, Robert. The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. Edinburgh, 1815. Reprint, Stirling, Scotland: Eaneas Mackay, 1933.

Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K. http://moebius.psy.ed.ac.uk/. June 19, 2000.

Lang, Andrew. The Book of Dreams and Ghosts. London, 1897. Reprint, New York: Causeway Books, 1974. Lowry, Betty. "Scotland's Lady Ghost Scream in Shades of Gray and Green." The Denver Post. October 31, 1999. Pp. T03.

——. Cock Lane and Common-Sense. London: Longmans, Green, 1894. Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1970.

Macgregor, Alexander. Highland Superstitions Connected with the Druids, Fairies, Witchcraft, Second-Sight, Hallowe'en, Sacred Wells and Lochs. Stirling, Scotland: Eaneas Mackay, 1922.

——. The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer. Stirling, Scotland: Eaneas Mackay, 1935.

Maclagan, Robert Craig. The Evil Eye in the Western Highlands. London: David Nutt, 1902. Reprint, U.K.: E. P. Publishing, 1972. Reprint, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1973.

MacLeod, Nicholas A. Scottish Witchcraft. St. Ives, England: James Pike, 1975.

Macrae, Norman, ed. Highland Second-Sight: With Prophecies of Conneach Odhar of Petty. Dingwall, Scotland: G. Souter, 1908. Reprint, Norwood, Pa., 1972.

McNeill. F. Marian. Scottish Folklore and Folk-Belief. Glasgow: William Maclellan, 1957.

Scott, Sir Walter. Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. London, 1830. Reprint, New York, 1831.

Sharpe, Charles Kirkpatrick. Historical Account of the Belief in Witchcraft in Scotland. N.p., 1819.

Sinclair, George. Satan's Invisible World Discovered. Edinburgh, 1685. Reprint, Edinburgh: Thomas G. Stevenson, 1865.

Sutherland, Elizabeth. Ravens and Black Rain: The Story of Highland Second Sight. London: Constable, 1986.

Thompson, Francis. The Supernatural Highlands. London: Robert Hale, 1976.

I.  Flower of Scotland

(written by Roy Williamson of "The Corries")

O Flower of Scotland,
When will we see
Your like again,
That fought and died for,
Your wee bit Hill and Glen,
And stood against him,
Proud Edward's Army,
And sent him homeward,
Tae think again.

The Hills are bare now,
And Autumn leaves
lie thick and still,
O'er land that is lost now,
Which those so dearly held,
That stood against him,
Proud Edward's Army,
And sent him homeward,
Tae think again.

Those days are past now,
And in the past
they must remain,
But we can still rise now,
And be the nation again,
That stood against him,
Proud Edward's Army,
And sent him homeward,
Tae think again.

0 Flower of Scotland,
When will we see
your like again,
That fought and died for,
Your wee bit Hill and Glen,
And stood against him,
Proud Edward's Army,
And sent him homeward,
Tae think again.

II. Scotland the Brave

Hark where the night is falling
hark hear the pipes a calling
Loudly and proudly calling down thru the glen
There where the hills are sleeping
Now feel the blood a leaping
High as the spirits of the old highland men

Towering in gallant fame
Scotland my mountain hame
High may your proud standards gloriously wave
Land of my high endeavor
Land of the shining river
Land of my heart forever, Scotland the Brave

High in the misty mountains
Out by the purple highlands
Brave are the hearts that beat beneath Scottish skies
Wild are the winds to meet you
Staunch are the friends that greet you
Kind as the love that shines from fair maidens eyes

• Scottish Natterings, Edinburgh Happenings 2 Scottish Ladies chatting about their country