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SCOTS HERITAGE ARCHIVES

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Mary Katherine Burke

Mary Kathleen Burke

02/12/2008

Mary Kathleen Burke is a distinguished graduate from the school of hard knocks. Having endured the kind of life shattering experiences from which most of us might never recover, she has had the intelligence and the maturity to harness her pain and channel it into music of outstanding quality. It’s given her voice, her musicianship and her songwriting layer upon layer of subtlety and nuance that commands both attention and admiration and ranks her, I think, among the great exponents of the art.

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Eilean Iarmain Hotel on Skye. The Oban Times
 
Tullibardine

Tullibardine

02/12/2008

The village of Blackford is famous for its water. It was from here that King James IV ordered a barrel of beer for his coronation in 1488. He granted the brewery a Royal Charter in 1503. Alfred Barnard, the tireless distillery and brewery visitor, came here in 1889 and found brewery buildings that had been in use since the 17th century. Then, in 1947, along came William Delmé Evans, a Welsh land surveyor with a keen interest in distilling and brewing. “When I saw the results of the water tests,” he said, “I knew it was perfect for distilling. By the end of the week I had purchased the [brewery] building”. Delmé Evans had contracted tuberculosis during the war, and, while recuperating, designed what he called “an up-to-date gravity-flow distillery”.

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Old Postcards from Fort William. Scottish Field Magazine
 
The HUnt of the Unicorn

The Hunt of the Unicorn

01/12/2008

In November 2002, SCOTS reported on the beginning of one of the biggest and most ambitious conservation projects in Britain, the restoration of the Royal Palace within Stirling Castle. Six years on we revisited Stirling to discover that a vast amount of truly exceptional work has been carried out, much of it under the more or less constant gaze of the visiting public.

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Craigellachie Hotel on Speyside National Trust for Scotland
 
Celebrating the Written Word

Celebrating the Written Word

01/12/2008

Every now and then, by a freak of nature or circumstance, Scotland yields up some unsuspected treasure: a fossil, a tomb, a relic of a bygone age now almost completely forgotten. Robert Smail’s Printing Works in the sleepy little Border town of Innerleithen is one of those, an industrial time capsule where everything was perfectly preserved and in excellent working order, exactly as it was in the 1800s.

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The Arran Banner The Town House Company
 
Glenfinnan

Glorious Glenfinnan

01/12/2008

At Glenfinnan, Highland grandeur and Highland history come together. Great mountains guard the narrow length of Loch Sheil; their wooded slopes rise steeply from its edge; the scene changes with every change of light. At the head of the loch a narrow strip of land makes a natural stage in the amphitheatre of the hills.

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Sillycat Media The Argyllshire Advertiser
 
Out of India

Out of India

01/12/2008

If Henry Noltie ever quits his job as taxonomist at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh I should think Scotland Yard would be more than happy to employ him as a detective. In five years of meticulous investigation Dr Noltie has drawn together the many strands of Robert Wight’s life in Scotland and in India, weaving them all into a seamless, eloquent and beautifully illustrated three-volume tribute to the great botanist.

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The Campbeltown Courier
 
Barnacle Geece

Barnacle Geece

01/12/2008

The trouble with a scarce species that likes to congregate in a small area is that it fails to convey a proper impression of its rarity. The barnacle goose, for example, has only three breeding centres; in north-east Greenland, Svalbard and in Novaya Zemlya/Vaigach Island. Each population has a traditional wintering ground: the Svalbard birds come to the Solway Firth, the Russian ones go to the Netherlands and those from Greenland head, as their first port of call, to Islay

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Harry Bensons Glasgow

Harry Bensons Glasgow

01/12/2008

Even after 44 years in the United States, Harry Benson has lost none of the unmistakeable burr that stamps him as a man born and bred in Glasgow. As one of America’s bestknown photographers he has homes in New York and in Florida and yet he still regards the city on the Clyde as his real home.

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Museum of Scotland

The National Museum of Scotland

01/12/2008

The Royal Museum is a masterpiece of High Victorian architecture. A crystal cathedral of soaring white enamelled cast iron pillars and translucent glass, it was designed by Captain Francis Fowke, who created London’s Royal Albert Hall and the National Gallery in Dublin.

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Still Life in bronze

Still LIfe in Bronze

01/12/2008

Morag Farquharson (oh, how she hates the name Morag!) was born and bred in the rolling green hills of Aberdeenshire, a farm factor’s daughter with a keen eye for all the quirky details that shape an animal’s character and individuality: a hare sitting bolt upright, listening intently, ready for flight; ducks marching in step like feathered guardsmen; a scrappy terrier grinning as he bounds after a ball.

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