The Scottish Highlands & Island of Skye

History

Prehistoric Settlers

The earliest evidence of human settlement in Scotland dates from the Mesolithic period (8000-4000 BC), a time of hunter-fisher-gatherers that lasted from the end of the last Ice Age until the rise of farming.

During the Neolithic period (4000-2000 BC), the first farming communities were established. With the development of permanent settlements, people built communal tombs and monuments such as cairns and stone circles; examples of these are Knap of Howar in Papa Westray (Orkney), Skara Brae and Ring of Brodgar in Orkney, and the Callanish Standing Stones in Lewis.

The Bronze Age (2000-700 BC) began with the introduction of metalworking skills; during this era there was a shift from communal to single burials, marking the increased status of the individual over the collective.

During the Iron Age (700 BC-400 AD), in addition to the development of iron-working technology, was increased building of defensive settlements and enclosures such as brochs - circular, fortified dwelling towers - like Dun Carloway in Lewis and Mousa Broch in Shetland, and hill forts, such as Eildon Hill (Borders).

The Early Tribes

Scotland's population is a conglomeration of several immigrant and migrant peoples, languages and cultures.

Several barbarian tribes lived in northeast Scotland during the Iron Age, approximately 2,000 years ago. By the third century AD, these tribes had amalgamated to become the Picti (the Picts, or painted people), as they were named by the Romans in 297 AD. In their three periods of conquest and occupation, beginning in 79 AD, the Romans never conquered the north of Scotland and their hold on the south was precarious and brief. The Romans were initially driven back to their ambitious Antonine Wall (built 142-145 from the Firth of Forth to the Firth of Clyde), which they had abandoned by 161. They retreated farther south to their original barrier of Hadrian's Wall (built 118-122 from the Solway Firth to the mouth of the River Tyne) but abandoned this, too, by 400, and finally withdrew from Britain in 409.

The Scotti - Scots - were invaders who arrived in Kintyre from northern Ireland in the 6th century, and established the Gaelic-speaking Dalriada kingdom in what is now southern Argyll. In 563, Columba, an Irish missionary, came to Dalriada from northern Ireland and established a monastery on Iona. The Vikings launched a series of raids on Skye and Iona in the late eighth century, culminating in the slaughter of 68 Iona monks in 806. The Norsemen eventually settled in Caithness, Sutherland, Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles.

The Unification of Scotland

The Picts and Dalriada tribes united against their common Norse enemy but suffered a setback in 839 when many Pictish nobles were killed in battles against the Vikings. Kenneth mac Alpin (MacAlpin) stepped in and claimed Pictavia. In 843, as king of both the Scots and Picts, MacAlpin founded a new kingdom - Alba or, as it came to be known, Scotland. Alba remains the Gaelic name for Scotland.

Stability didn't come easily to the new kingdom despite the efforts of the Christian church to introduce a civilizing and unifying influence. Three 10th-century kings were killed putting down revolts, and a fourth - Duncan I - was murdered by Macbeth (reigned 1040-57). Duncan's son Malcolm Canmore (Malcolm III) won back the throne in 1057 and ruled with his pious queen, Margaret (who in 1250 became Scotland's only royal saint).

English influence increased during the reign of Malcolm's youngest son David I (reigned 1124-53), who had spent time at the court of his brotherin-law, Henry I of England. David introduced coinage, established 15 Royal Burghs, including Dunfermline, Edinburgh, Perth and Stirling, and founded several famous abbeys in what is now the Borders region.

Relations with England

The Scottish kings made continuous attempts to extend their border southwards, aided by the political instability following the Norman invasion of England in 1066. David won Newcastle and Northumberland but his son Malcolm IV (reigned 1153-1165) was forced to relinquish them. His successor William the Lion (reigned 1165-1214) was captured attempting to regain Northumbria and was forced to accept the Treaty of Falaise in 1174, ceding Scotland to England as a feudal dependency.

The last of the Canmore kings - Alexander III (reigned 1249-1286) - defeated the Norwegian king Haakon in 1263 at Largs in Ayrshire and won the Western Isles for Scotland. His death in 1286 left as his successor a three-year-old grandchild, Margaret (the Maid of Norway), who died in Orkney on her way to Scotland in 1290. This left 13 claimants to the throne, known as the Competitors (chief of whom were John Balliol and Robert Bruce), and the threat of civil war. Edward I of England seized the chance to adjudicate, choosing Balliol (a grandson of David I) but extorting recognition as overlord of Scotland.

The Wars of Independence

Edward's harsh and arrogant treatment of the Scots roused bitter resentment. Balliol finally turned on Edward and led a short-lived uprising that resulted in crushing defeat, Balliol's exile and military occupation by the English. Adding insult to injury, in 1296 Edward removed the Stone of Destiny, the ancient coronation stone of Scottish kings, from Scone and carted it off to London.

Wallace & Bruce

Acting in the name of the exiled king, Scottish patriot William Wallace led a guerrilla movement against the English and in 1297 won a major victory at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. A huge English army won a decisive victory at Falkirk the following year and recaptured Stirling Castle in 1304. In 1305, Wallace was betrayed to the English, convicted and executed.

After Wallace's death, Robert Bruce (grandson of the 1290 Competitor) assumed leadership of the resistance movement. He murdered his rival, the Earl of Comyn and, defying Edward I, was crowned Robert I in Scone in 1306. After suffering several reverses, he took advantage of the death of Edward I in 1307 to launch a devastating campaign into northern England. Edward II finally led his army north but the Bruce's much smaller force inflicted a shattering defeat on the English at Bannockburn in June 1314. In 1320, the Scots drew up a Declaration of Independence at Arbroath Abbey. The war finally ended in 1328 when the regents of the young Edward III approved the Treaty of Northampton, recognizing Scotland's independence.

The Bruce's son, David II, staged a series of raids into England, which was by that time involved in the Hundred Years' War with France and had abandoned most of its strongholds in Scotland. David was captured at Neville's Cross, near Durham, in 1346 and was not released until 1357 in return for a crushing ransom.

The Stewarts

On David II's death without heirs in 1371, his nephew, the son of Robert I's daughter Marjorie, became the first Stewart (later Stuart) king as Robert II. So began a 343-year dynasty of 14 monarchs, five of whom ruled on both sides of the border, beginning with James VI of Scotland (crowned James I of England in 1603 after the death of Queen Elizabeth) and ending with Queen Anne, who reigned from 1702 until her death in 1714. The Stewarts inherited a land struggling with its emerging nationhood and torn by powerful nobles. Over the next four centuries, they unified Scotland, brought it under central control, and guided it through the Renaissance, Reformation and finally union with England.

Robert II and his son Robert III were ineffective rulers. James I (reigned 1406-37) was captured by the English in 1406 and imprisoned in London until 1424. On his return from captivity, James tried to recover crown land and authority lost to the nobles in his absence but was assassinated by members of his household in 1437. James II (reigned 1437-60) and James III (reigned 1460-88) came to the throne as minors, which encouraged further strife between the nobles. Orkney and Shetland passed to Scotland in 1471 following the marriage of James III to Margaret of Denmark.

James IV (reigned 1488-1513) successfully reasserted royal authority over the nobles, improved justice and encouraged the arts. He married Margaret, daughter of Henry VII of England, in 1503. In support of the auld alliance with France, James invaded England, but his army was routed and he was killed at Flodden Field in 1513. But it was from his marriage to Margaret that, a century later, would spring the union of Scotland and England under James VI (I of England).

After a long minority, James V (reigned 1513-42) continued the French alliance and refused to break with the Pope as Henry VIII of England wanted. James sent an army to invade England but its defeat at Solway Moss in November 1542 contributed to his death shortly afterwards and left a six-day-old girl, Mary, as his successor, under the protection of her mother, Mary of Guise.

Mary, Queen of Scots & The Reformation

Henry VIII wished to marry the young Queen Mary (reigned 1542-67) to his son Edward. When his wish was rebuffed, he devastated southern Scotland in the rough wooing. After another English force defeated the Scots at Pinkie, the six-year-old Mary was sent to France for safety, where she remained for 13 years. She married the young Dauphin François (who a year later became François II) in 1558 and only returned to Scotland on his death in 1561.

Meanwhile, war with England came to an end in 1551 and Mary's mother, Mary of Guise, assumed the regency in 1554. Her government was thrown into turmoil as the Reformation reached Scotland in an extreme Calvinist form. John Knox, an uncompromising Protestant preacher, returned from exile to Scotland in May 1559 to head the reformers. However, it took open support from Queen Elizabeth of England, an English army, and the death of Mary of Guise to win ultimate victory for the Protestants. In August 1560, the Reformation Parliament adopted the Protestant Confession of Faith, repudiated the supremacy of the Pope and abolished the Catholic mass.The return to Scotland of the Catholic Mary threatened the success of the Reformation. Mary initially demonstrated adept statecraft, skilfully playing off the different factions against each other, but soon became embroiled in personal affairs. In 1565 she married Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, and gave birth to the future James VI in 1566. In the same year, a Protestant conspiracy resulted in the murder of Mary's Italian secretary Rizzio. Worse still, Mary and the Earl of Bothwell were implicated in the mysterious murder of Darnley in 1567. Mary's hurried marriage to Bothwell lost her the favor of both Protestants and Catholics. She was imprisoned at Lochleven and forced to abdicate in favor of her infant son. Mary escaped the following year but after being defeated at Langside fled to England. Elizabeth, fearful both of aiding rebels against the sovereign and of Catholic conspiracies, imprisoned Mary for 19 years. In 1587 Mary was implicated in another Catholic plot, this time engineered by her page Anthony Babington. She was tried and executed.

Union of the Crowns

On the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, James VI, her nearest heir, inherited the Crown of England as James I. The religious struggle developed into one between episcopacy (defined as a heirarchical government of the church) and presbyterianism (government of the church by elders of equal standing). The Covenanters were devoted to maintaining Presbyterianism as Scotland's sole religion and helped establish the supremacy of Parliament over the monarch in both Scotland and England. James restored the bishops to the church and parliament, and Charles I went further, trying to change church doctrine and ritual. This provoked the signing of the National Covenant in 1638, resisting religious change, and later (in 1643) an alliance with English puritans.

Following Cromwell's victory over the royalists, the Scots refused to accept a republic and instead crowned Charles II in 1651, which resulted in another English invasion and occupation. After the restoration of Charles II in England in 1660, Covenanters were hunted down and shot. Charles II reigned until 1685, and was succeeded by his brother, James VII (II of England). James was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in favor of his daughter Mary. She became Mary II and reigned with her husband William III (William of Orange), until her death in 1694. William died in 1702, and was succeeded by Mary's sister Anne.

In 1707, under the reign of Anne, the Scottish Parliament approved the Act of Union, which joined England and Scotland. Though cheered in London, the Union was far from popular in Scotland where unrest simmered and Jacobitism - support for the exiled James VII/II - refused to disappear.

The Jacobites

The first major Jacobite Rising in 1715 was not a rising of the Highlands but rather a protest by disillusioned Scots. Poorly led, the rising fizzled out long before the Old Pretender (James Edward, son of James VII), returned from France. The London government remained nervous, and General Wade, commander of the king's forces in Scotland, built a series of roads and fortresses across the Highlands in the 1730s for the use of British troops. This did little to deter the last and most spectacular Jacobite Rising in 1745. This time, Bonnie Prince Charlie, known as the Young Pretender, raised a largely Highland army. He reached Derby and could probably have taken London but, gaining little support from southern Jacobites, returned north. The Prince's army was crushed by the Duke of Cumberland's Government forces at Culloden in April 1746, so ending all hopes for a restoration of the Stewart monarchy.

The Clearances

In the savage backlash that followed Culloden, the Government sought to end the Jacobite threat once and for all. A raft of draconian legislation dismantled the Highland way of life, even banning tartan and bagpipes, and paved the way for the Highland Clearances.

The eviction of thousands of tenants from vast tracts of the Highlands remains a highly emotive issue even today. Landlords forced tenants from their crofts to free up land for sheep farming. Most notoriously, the Countess of Sutherland evicted some 700 families in 1819-21. Later clearances in the mid-19th century were mainly the result of famine caused by the failure of the potato crop. Although accurate numbers aren't known, hundreds of thousands of people left the Highlands (from Perthshire to Sutherland as well as Skye, the Western Isles and Shetland) between 1730 and 1880.

Industrialization & Urbanization

The first stage of industrialization took place between the 1770s and 1830s, mainly dominated by textiles. From the 1830s, a more skilled industrialization emerged with the rise of heavy industry - shipbuilding, marine engineering and steel - in Glasgow, whose population exploded from 147,000 in 1820 to over 760,000 by 1900. One in two Scots now lived in towns, whereas only a century and a half earlier it had been only one in five.

The 20th Century & Home Rule

Unlike the sister movements in Ireland and Wales, Scottish nationalism didn't emerge until the 1960s. Having its own press, banks and legal system, and the experience of the two World Wars, cemented the sense of being both Scottish and British. The discovery of oil in the North Sea in the early 1970s offered recovery from the post-war slump. It also provided Scottish nationalists with a new campaigning slogan, claiming that the oil revenue rightfully belonged to Scotland and not Britain.

Concessions by successive British governments culminated in a referendum in September 1997, in which Scots voted by nearly three to one for the creation of their own devolved parliament. On 6th May 1999, elections took place for the new Scottish Parliament, thus settling the issue of Home Rule and deferring any prospects for independence. The new Scottish Parliament, the first convened since 1707, sat for the first time on 12th May 1999.

Geography

Scotland covers an area of over 30,000 square miles, including over 600 square miles of inland water. It is deeply indented by the Moray Firth and Firth of Forth in the east and by the firths of Lorn and Clyde in the west. Scotland's only land border - with England - runs 60 miles (96 km) along the line of the Cheviot Hills.

The terrain is predominantly mountainous and is divided into three main regions: the Southern Uplands, Central Lowlands, and Highlands and Islands. The Southern Uplands extend from the border and the Solway Firth to the firths of Clyde and Forth. Most of this area is covered by fertile plains, moorland plateaux and rounded hills rarely over 2,000 feet, with occasional mountainous outcrops.

The narrow Central Lowlands include the lower valleys of the Clyde, Forth and Tay rivers, traversed by several long but broken chains of hills, including the Ochil and Sidlaw Hills. Although only comprising a tenth of Scotland's land area, the Central Lowlands hold three-quarters of the country's population.

The rugged Highlands consist of parallel chains of sandstone and granite mountains, trending generally southwest to northeast, broken by deep ravines and valleys. Common in this area are moorland plateaux, mountain and sea lochs, fast-flowing streams and dense thickets. The Great Glen bisects the Highlands from the southwest to northeast. To the northwest of the Great Glen rise heavily eroded peaks ranging around 2,000-3,000 feet. The topography southeast of the Great Glen is more diversified and is traversed by the Grampian Mountains, Scotland's principal mountain range. The northeast (Caithness and Aberdeenshire) is flatter and dominated by broad coastal plains. At 4,406 feet, Ben Nevis near Fort William is the highest point in Britain.

The Highland Boundary Fault traverses Scotland from the Isle of Arran in the west to Stonehaven in the east. In most places, the fault is only identifiable by a change in topography - from Highlands in the northwest to Lowlands in the southeast. Loch Lomond is one of the sites where the fault can be distinguished more clearly, in particular at Conic Hill and on several islands in the loch.

Of Scotland's 790 islands, 130 or so are inhabited. The major island groups are the Inner and Outer Hebrides off the west coast, and Orkney and Shetland to the northeast.

The Tay is Scotland's longest river (120 miles), although the Clyde (106 miles) is the principal commercial river. The other major rivers are the Spey (107 miles), Tweed (97 miles), Dee (85 miles) and Don (82 miles).

Loch Lomond (27.5 square miles) is Scotland's largest lake in surface area, but Loch Ness (21.8 square miles) is deeper.

Climate

Being surrounded by sea on three sides and enjoying the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream protects Scotland from the worst seasonal extremes of weather. Summers aren't too hot and winters relatively temperate, although overall the climate is very changeable and it can rain at any time. The weather can also vary significantly over small distances - even across neighboring glens.

May and June are usually drier than July and August. July and August are the warmest months, averaging 60-68°F (15-19°C). The east coast tends to be cool and dry; the west coast is milder and wetter (the western Highlands record the highest rainfall in Britain). Edinburgh receives only slightly more rainfall than London and some east coast towns are drier than Rome. Low winter temperatures and heavy snowfalls can occur, particularly in interior mountain regions.

AURORA BOREALIS

The Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) is a gigantic natural light show that occurs when solar winds drive plasma (electrically charged solar particles) against the Earth. When the charged particles enter the Earth's upper atmosphere, they are drawn by magnetic fields down into the ionosphere at the polar regions. At the poles, they react with atmospheric gases and glow in colorful bands of red, green, blue and violet to create a beautiful aerial blaze. The Aurora is most visible at latitudes above 65 degrees north - the north mainland, Orkney and Shetland - on crisp, clear late autumn and winter evenings, although displays can be seen from all over the country, even in warmer months.

Wildlife

Birds

Scotland provides a home to over 300 species of birds, of which 200 are either residents or regular visitors. It lies at the junction of two major migration flyways: one from the high Arctic Canadian islands, across Greenland and Iceland; the other from the east, from north Russia across Scandinavia. This creates a great diversity of species during passage periods, with many Scottish habitats, especially wetlands, providing essential