The Voyage of the Hector

The Voyage of the Hector

It was only 28 years after the infamous Battle of Culloden, in 1773, when the Hector was moored within Loch Broom taking onboard a group of people from the Highlands. 189 passengers joined the Hector that day, 25 single men, 33 families, a piper and their agent, all of which had one thing in common. They […]

Read More

A Victorian View Into Scottish North America: Part Two Of Lady Isabella Bird’s Encounters With Scots In Canada And America

A Victorian View Into Scottish North America: Part Two Of Lady Isabella Bird’s Encounters With Scots In Canada And America

A few weeks ago, we took a peek into the late nineteenth-century world of frontier Colorado with a most remarkable little Victorian era explorer named Lady Isabella Bird.  On one of her many adventurous journeys around the globe, Englishwoman Lady Isabella introduced us to the Chalmers family in the foothills of the front range in […]

Read More

Murdo Mackenzie: The most influential cattleman in America was from Scotland

Murdo Mackenzie: The most influential cattleman in America was from Scotland

Any cattleman worth his salt will tell you that he’s in the grass business. He either grows it himself or takes his cows where it grows up naturally. That means that it is not so much the cow that deserves attention. The important thing is the land and the water – when water is available, […]

Read More

Getting comfortable with Gaelic’s indigenous side – a few things to consider

Getting comfortable with Gaelic’s indigenous side – a few things to consider

Some of the advantages that accompany engagement with one’s Gaelic heritage are the wonderful and useful bits of relevance that a Gaelic past brings to modern life. That’s right. Lessons learned from a Gaelic perspective can be productively relevant to difficult problems we face today. Consider the following: Gaelic tradition introduces community oriented and inclusive perspective in an increasingly exclusive and inward looking […]

Read More

“Our children are bred for emigration”

“Our children are bred for emigration”

Yesterday was the birthday of a great Gael. One of the greatest in fact. Poet, story teller and Gaelic cultural warrior Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorely MacLean) was born on Raasay on October 26th in 1911. Somhairle died in 1996. Had the Gaelic people, culture and kingdom not been overtaken and marginalized (i.e. stolen) by Anglo aggression, ethnic cleansing and forced […]

Read More

Martin Fowler’s Graphic History of Scotland

Martin Fowler’s Graphic History of Scotland

Compiling 500 years of Scottish history is by no means an easy feat. Countless pages of history books burst at the seams with tales of battles, inventions, kings and queens, acts of law, migration, song – it’s hard enough to even pick where to begin. However, Scottish artist Martin Fowler has done just that, compiling […]

Read More

Highland Clearances Influence Composer

Highland Clearances Influence Composer

A new soundtrack by a Scottish composer has been influenced by the infamous Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th Centuries. Kildonan, the latest work by Sutherland based composer Robert Aitken, draws on traditional, contemporary and classical styles to create an album that evokes the forced eviction of people from their lands. During the industrial […]

Read More