For the past 13 years, I have lived on the banks of a wild river that forms part of the Anglo-Scottish border. Liddel Water was once the eastern boundary of the Debatable Land, a 50-square-mile enclave of wooded gorges, rough …
Rural Scotland is dying of cold
Lindsay lives in a council house in Kirkwall, the largest town in Orkney, a starkly beautiful archipelago off the north coast of Scotland. Now in her mid-fifties, Lindsay has lived in her one-bedroom house for 17 years. She’s tended the …
Why doesn’t Scotland love King Charles?
When the Queen died at her country estate in Scotland, crowds lined the streets as her hearse crept its way from Balmoral to Edinburgh. There were no indications that her subjects north of the border mourned her any less than …
Beavers are tormenting Britain
The champagne corks must be popping pretty much continually at Beaver Trust HQ. Having been reintroduced to these isles in 2008, there are now about 2,000 Castor fiber out and about in Great Britain, swimming and munching trees from Cornwall …
The crucifixion of Kate Forbes
Lent began this week with a rehearsal for a crucifixion. On Tuesday, SNP leader hopeful and devout Presbyterian Kate Forbes was faced with something she must have known was coming: a challenge from journalists about her views on gay marriage, …
Nicola Sturgeon is rewriting history
So it’s goodbye from Nicola Sturgeon. During a relatively expansive press conference on Wednesday — the prolonged duration of which somewhat undermined her claim that she always knows when it’s time to go — she offered the official version of …
Scottish nationalism will survive Sturgeon
Nicola Sturgeon has exited the stage, but the threat of Scottish independence has not. Whatever the triumphalism in London over the First Minister’s resignation yesterday, the idea that the secession crisis has ended is absurd. For the time being, the …
Scotland turns on gender ideology
The polarising effect of the transgender debate on public opinion in Scotland is revealed today in new research for “UnHerd Britain”. A poll of 5,000 people across Great Britain, conducted this month, put four different statements to voters about the …
The problem with ‘trans women are women’
Once upon a time, pollsters would phone you up and ask how satisfied you were with the railways on a scale of one to ten, or how you intended to vote in the next general election. These days — as …
Sturgeon will lose Scotland’s trans war
In her eight years as Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has revealed herself to be addicted to, and adept at, Manichaean practices: the use, developed by the devotees of the prophet Mani in the later Roman empire, of a cosmology …
JK Rowling works her magic again
The launch of a sexual assault support centre for women is always good news but, when it is the brainchild of J.K. Rowling, it is very big news. Especially given the feminist philanthropist and world famous author has smartly taken …
The forgotten genius of Compton Mackenzie
It was a most fortuitous shipwreck. The S.S. Politician floundered on rocks near the island of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides in February 1941, cutting short its journey from Liverpool to the USA. The hull was breached and the ship …
Can you read in Scottish?
However indifferent we might have been to our school days, most of us will remember at least one moment of significant connection to a teacher, or a lesson, or a book. I recall my high school teachers as a mixed …
Scottish nationalism is fuelled by resentment
Forget the Hogwarts Express. Three times a year, I get on a train at London Kings Cross and make a physics-defying journey towards Montrose in Angus, the Scottish town where I lived for the first 17 years of my life. …
How Britain haunts America
The rhetoric of modern America is dominated by the paradigm of a biracial nation, but history is never black and white. Fissures between national and ethnic traditions have always been at the heart of its political conflict.
Their significance is …