Scotland Quotes

“Our nation is the sum of Scandinavian Scotland, Pictish Scotland, Irish Scotland, English Scotland and British Scotland.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“Therefore, it is possible to say with considerable certainty that more than 40 per cent of all Scots, men and women, carry the DNA of the people of the painted caves.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“Our history is written in our rocks just as surely as it is in monastic chronicles, census returns or the stones and bones of archaeological”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“UBIQUITOUS SCOTS As the British Empire grew, Scots found themselves scattered to the corners of the Earth – an experience which often profoundly changed them. Few changed as much as Thomas Keith. Born in Edinburgh, he enlisted in the 78th (Highlanders) Regiment of Foot and was sent to Egypt as part of the Alexandria expedition of 1807. Captured near Rosetta, he was bought as a slave by Ahmad Aga, and he and his compatriot, William Thompson, decided to convert to Islam. Thomas became Ibrahim Aga and William, Osman. After fighting a duel with an Egyptian soldier, Thomas sought the protection of the wife of a powerful figure, Muhammad Ali Pasha, and she sent him into the service of her son, Tusun Pasha. In 1811 he joined an expedition to fight the Wahhabis of what is now Saudi Arabia, and four years later he was appointed Acting Governor of the holy city of Medina, the burial place of the Prophet Mohammed.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“Aberdeenshire.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“Ancestral DNA research suggests that when the last real Viking died in an attack on Dublin in 1171, his marker carried on – with great vigour. A relatively new sub-type of M17 – S375 – is now prominent in the North Isles of Orkney, on the five major islands north of Gairsay. It is also carried by 30 per cent of men with the surname of Gunn who have taken DNA tests. Tradition, genealogy and history all begin to come together to form a narrative. It may be that the prevalence of S375 on the islands of Rousay, Westray, Eday, Sanday and Stronsay is linked to the well-attested phenomenon of social selection, where powerful men in the past sired many children with different women. In that way their Y chromosome markers were spread widely and quickly, much faster than if they had remained monogamous. And few men were more powerful in 12th-century Orkney than Svein Asleifsson.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“Gaelic ritual also moved eastwards and Gaelic bards remembered its atmosphere. The place name of Scone is itself a memory of ancient ceremony. Bards sang of Scoine Sciath-Airde, ‘Scone of the High Shields’, probably a reference to the habit of warriors raising up a new king on their shields. As this precarious rite proceeded, another bardic name added a soundtrack. Scoine Sciath-Bhinne means ‘Scone of the Singing Shields’, the shouts and chants of acclamation as lords and warriors roared approval and support for the king raised on the high shields. Here is what John of Hexham wrote about the coronation of Malcolm IV in 1153: ‘and so all the people of the land, raising up Malcolm, son of Earl Henry, King David’s son (a boy still only 12 years old), established him as king at Scone (as is the custom of the Scottish nation).”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“And it also seems likely that many Scots are directly descended from the hunter-gatherer communities of the western refuges. Very recent ancestral DNA research shows that more than 40 per cent carry markers from the mitochondrial DNA haplogroups identified as H, H1 and HVO, all of which originated amongst the people of the painted caves. Each of us carries a great deal of information in our DNA but two small parts of our genomes are especially informative about ancestry. Men carry a Y-chromosome marker inherited from their fathers and their fathers before them, away back in time, and they also inherit mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, from their mothers and their mothers, again away back in deep time. Women carry only mtDNA but they pass it on to their children of both genders. So, men carry mtDNA too but can only pass on their Y-chromosome marker, their fatherline, to their sons. In the act of reproduction, when the 6 billion letters of DNA we carry are passed on, tiny errors of copying are made. These are known as DNA markers and both their origin and the date when they arose can be calculated. Therefore, it is possible to say with considerable certainty that more than 40 per cent of all Scots, men and women, carry the”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“No such suspension of disbelief was needed on the morning of 13 September 1645. If I had been looking south from my house, I would have seen an awesome sight. During the civil war fought all over Britain and Ireland, the Scottish army led by General David Leslie surprised the Royalists and the Marquis of Montrose at Philiphaugh, west of Selkirk. In the early morning mist, he sent about 2,000 cavalry troopers through our little valley, perhaps keeping to the metalled surface of the old road leading to Oakwood Fort. They moved quietly around Howden Hill and, while Leslie led the rest of his army in a frontal assault, the cavalry attacked the rear of the Royalists and scattered them. Philiphaugh was a savage, sadistic rout with much unnecessary slaughter excused by fundamentalist piety. The greater part of the landscape of the valley was much altered after 1645. The fields, the thorn hedges, the shelterbelts of hardwoods, the steadings, the big houses and their policies are not old. After the middle of the 18th century, the pace of agricultural improvement quickened and shaped much of the countryside we see now and believe to be traditional. One of the most important catalysts was drainage and below where I sit in the evening stretches the 35-acre Tile Field. It is billiard-table flat because it was scraped for clay and at the western end stood a tile works. Its kilns were fired by the trees of the Hartwood and the clay puddled in a pond formed by the Common Burn and the Hartwoodburn.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“Now, two centuries after George IV appeared resembling a tartan dumpling, few formal occasions are kilt-free. Lowland bridegrooms and their male guests routinely put on the dress of men who were believed by their ancestors to be sub-human savages.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“Hunter-gatherer communities were very small and grew extremely slowly. One persuasive reason for this is diet. The wild harvest of roots, fruits, berries, meat and other items that needed mastication to be digestible were not suitable for infants and their soft baby teeth. It is persuasively conjectured that this depressed the birth rate because infants were breastfed for much longer by hunter-gatherer mothers whose milk was a prime source of protein. When women are nursing, they are generally unable to conceive and that meant a long birth interval, perhaps four or five years between new babies. Given that women died young in prehistory, usually before they reached the age of 30, and had a fertile life of only 15 or so years, they will have had only three children at most, not all of them surviving to adulthood.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“In the excavation season of 2010, the diggers made a discovery that changed perceptions of prehistoric buildings. They found a stone slab with traces of red, yellow and orange pigment still discernible. It appears that individual stones in the walls of the temple buildings had been painted, creating a checkered effect. Like the creators of Greek and Roman temples and sculpture, but many millennia before, the Orcadian builders had painted their sacred structures – a striking contrast with the sober grey, lichen-covered megaliths of the stone circles.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“For several millennia our species, Homo sapiens, was not alone in Europe. Neanderthals competed with our ancestors but about 30,000 years ago, our ancestors appear to have triumphed and Neanderthals gradually died out. Recent research suggests that the reason for this was grandparents. Until c. 28,000 BC, most people died before they were 30. However, a survey of ancient remains showed that for every 10 young Neanderthals who died between the ages of 10 and 30, only four older adults lived beyond the age of 30. By contrast, for every 10 of our species who died young, between 10 and 30, there were 20 who lived beyond the age of 30. This appears to have been a critical development. Grandparents could pass on important knowledge such as where water could be found or where the best hunting and gathering was. This became a virtuous cycle and, the more seniors who survived, the better their family bands did and, since Neanderthals – for whatever reason – did not see the same numbers live longer, they died out.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“Archaeologists made a haunting discovery that lends a little weight to this conjecture. Amongst the shells and fish bones of one midden, human fingers had been deliberately placed on seal flippers. This powerful note of identification with the natural world, the association of the fingers and flippers, may point to a sense of an afterlife, one where the souls of the dead swam with the seals in the deeps of the world.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“In high contrast to modern land-based perceptions, the earliest Scots understood Scotland from the sea, its lochs and rivers. It was probably seen less as a landmass with a scatter of islands offshore and more as a series of related shorelines.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“The western seaboard was, in part, settled by migrants from Iberia and south-western France and they often came by sea. There is a clear set of staging posts marked by a shared lexicon. Celtic languages were once spoken in Spain and are still whispered in Galicia, Breton clings on in Brittany, Cornish is being revived, Welsh thrives, Manx survives, Irish is constitutionally enshrined and Scots Gaelic hangs on, just.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“On the west coast of the Isle of Man, near the hamlet of Niarbyl, the cliffs of a small cove have running diagonally across them a thin, greyish-white seam of rock. It is visible for only a hundred metres or so before it disappears into the waters of the Irish Sea but it is a memorial to the making of Scotland. Known as the Iapetus Suture, it marks the precise place where the vast continents of Laurentia and Avalonia collided, having welded the four terranes together.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

“The word clann is Gaelic for ‘children’ and the term clan began to be applied to all those with links, geographical as well as genealogical, with a common name father.”
― Alistair Moffat, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times