Showing posts with the label Scotland

How Students Stole Britain’s Coronation Stone, The Stone of Scone

Jun 13, 2023

For more than seven hundred years, British monarchs have sat on a large block of rectangular sandstone during their coronations. This block ...

The Tay Whale

Jan 31, 2023

The city of Dundee on the Firth of Tay, on the east coast of Scotland, was a major whaling port in the 19th century. But few locals had actu...

Curfew Bell

Jan 20, 2023

Nearly every medieval house in Europe used to have an open hearth where a fire was kept going at all times to keep the occupants warm, and a...

Helen Duncan: The Last Witch of Britain

Dec 20, 2022

The Witchcraft Act of 1735 was a landmark act for Britain. Unlike the earlier Witchcraft Acts which legalized witch-hunting and the executio...

The Vanishing of Flannan’s Lighthouse Keepers

Jun 27, 2022

During the cold December days of 1900, three men disappeared off a remote island in the Outer Hebrides. They left no trace or trail, save fo...

The Witches of Paisley

Jan 24, 2022

Four years after the events in Salem in Massachusetts, the United States, that saw the execution of nineteen innocent victims charged with w...

Propeller Driven Railways

May 31, 2021

A locomotive can derive power from many different sources. The earliest locomotives were driven by steam. Then came electric trains powered ...

The Ingenuity of The ‘Ha-Ha’

Feb 17, 2021

What’s in a wall but a simple structure to keep intruders out, you might say. But a surprising amount of thought goes behind the constructio...

The Balmoral Pyramid

Sep 7, 2020

Hidden among the trees in the woods surrounding the Balmoral Castle in Royal Deeside, Scotland, are eleven stone cairns erected by Queen Vic...

Joseph Bell, The Real Sherlock Holmes

Mar 28, 2020

An illustration of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson that appeared in a stamp printed in Alderney, circa 2009. Photo: Olga Popova/Shutterstoc...

The Murders Written in Stone

Feb 3, 2020

The Ardwell House East Lodge sits right on the edge of A716 that runs along the east coast of the Rhins of Galloway, in southern Scotland. L...

Scuttling at Scapa Flow: When The German Navy Sank its Own Ships

Jan 27, 2020

The Armistice of 11 November 1918, that ended hostiles between the Allied and the Allies, left little for negotiation. The Germans were give...

The Locomotive That Walked: William Brunton’s Steam Horse

Jan 20, 2020

Railway engineering has come a long way from Richard Trevithick’s first steam locomotive to today’s high speed Maglev trains. Throughout th...

Tron: Scotland’s Public Weighing Scales

Jan 3, 2020

The tron at Stenton, East Lothian, Scotland. Image credit: Studio Karel/Shutterstock.com This is the village of Stenton, in East Lothian...

Why do People Spit on The Heart of Midlothian?

Dec 31, 2019

Spitting on the streets is not quite gentlemanly behavior, but on the Royal Mile in Edinburg, it is almost a ritual. The object of contemp...

Britain’s Hundred Million Pound Banknotes

Dec 20, 2019

Scottish banknotes are weird. Although they are used all over Scotland and the rest of the UK, they are not legal tender, which means a shop...

Why Mediaeval Europeans Slept Inside Boxes

Nov 1, 2019

For much of human history, privacy during bedtime was an alien concept. Many poor families lived in small houses, where there was only one o...

The Editor of Encyclopædia Britannica Once Wrote a Guidebook to Edinburg’s Prostitutes

Sep 13, 2019

In the late 18th century, tourists seeking carnal pleasure in Scotland’s capital city Edinburgh had a handy guidebook to start with. It det...

How Mediaeval Husbands Chastised Wives Who Talked Too Much

Aug 17, 2019

By putting a muzzle on them, of course. Known as Scold's bridle, these devices of torture and public humiliation were used mostly in En...

The Vitrified Forts of Scotland

Aug 6, 2019

Throughout the Bronze and the Iron Ages, Europeans have constructed hilltop forts and enclosures made of stone. About two hundred examples o...