Scotland has inspired millions of words through the ages.
Who said what?

These days, visitors to Scotland tend to spin 'round and 'round the same tourist circuits, embedded in Mother Earth like grooves in an old Victrola record. They follow the scratchy needle to the same old tunes-- The Edinburgh Festival Stomp, The Loch Ness Monster Mash and Over the Sea To Skye. This gives even more air play to the already well-known Scottish "tourist products" that steal most of Scotland's travel media coverage.

Why not cut some new grooves? Let the observations - fair and unfair - and the bletherings, ponderings and exclamations of the many who have passed through here amuse, bemuse, outrage and inspire you.

S C O T L A N D

So this is your Scotland. It is rather nice, but dampish and Northern and one shrinks a trifle inside one's skin. For these countries one should be amphibian.

.......D.H. Lawrence, Letter to Hon. Dorothy Brett, 14 August 1926

In one very important respect Scotland is physically inferior to most similar countries, and that is in climate. Most of the great Greek ideas came naturally from her sunshine and mild sea breezes. The philosophers...sat in the open air under trees, drinking wine...Scotland's climate has never been temperate enough to produce that ease of mind which suddenly erupts in the world-shattering ideas, nor has it been hard enough, such as that of Scandinavia and Russia, to transform men into ravening wild beasts, like the Viking and other hoards.

.....SCOTLAND: THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE, by Donald Cowie, 1973 by A.S. Barnes and Company, Cranbury, NJ and London: Thomas Yoseloff Ltd., London ISBN 0-498-01169-0

I went to Scotland and found nothing there that looks like Scotland.

.......Arthur Freed, defending studio production of the film Brigadoon 1950's

...consider the geography of Scotland. One needs only to look at a relief map of the country to realize how divided up the nation is by mountains and lochs. The Grampians cut north Scotland off from the Lowlands, and everywhere lines of ridges bar one district from its neighbor. Long inlets of the sea, firths and lochs that are often dangerous to cross, segment the country.

...... Wallace Notestein, The Scott in History, New Haven Yale University Press, 1947

Scotland, the dour granitic wedge atop the British Isles...Scotland has this extraordinarily compact, portable culture, compressed into a handful of potent images and concepts and flogged the world over: the skirling music, the whisky, the tartan, the heritage of oppression and inventiveness, the lowering beauty of the landscape, the adamantine handsomeness of the cities, the wonderfully simple and memorable Saltire waving untainted over all. At the same time Scotland seems to be able to exist anywhere...provided that whisky, tartan and a man called Ewan are present.

...FAINTHEART: An Englishman Ventures North of the Border by Charles Jennings, Abacus, Time Warner Books U.K., www.TimeWarnerBooks.co.uk; Copyright 2001 by Charles Jennings ISBN 0349114404.

I've trudged the world; I have learned many bravados, so that my heart never stirred much to the mere trick of an instrument but one, and the piob mhor conquers me. What is it, Colin, that's in us, rich and poor, yon rude cane-reeds speak so human and friendly to?
"'Tis the Gaelic," I said, cheered myself by the air. "Never a road of the drone or a sob of the chanter but it's in the Gaelic tongue."

.....Neil Munroe in John Splendid

Scotland does not have to be located on a specific block of land north of the 55th parallel. You can do Scotland wherever Scottish expats are.

......Charles Jennings, Faintheart: An Englishman Ventures North of the Border, 2001, Abacus, an imprint of Time Warner Books, UK

Samuel Johnson said to James Boswell:
“Your country consists of two things: stone and water. There is indeed a little earth above the stone in some places, but a very little; and the stone is always appearing. It is like a man in rags; the naked skin is always peeping out.'

.......James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, 1773 (1785)

Outside observers fool themselves into believing that they can decipher the peculiar recipe of Scottish history. Certainly it contains elements of courage, daftness, greed, madness, genius, saintliness and sordidness, but in what proportions? Ah, there the experts are left guessing and arguing among themselves.

.......Jimmy Black, author of History's Mysteries, Saint Andrews Press, Edinburgh. 1993

O Caledonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! What mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band
That knits me to thy rugged strand!

.......Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1801

Shall I see Scotland again? Never shall I forget the happy days I passed there amidst odious smells barbarous sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts, and most enlightened and cultivated understandings.

.......Sydney Smith, Letter to Francis Jeffrey, 27 March 1814

Scotland is renowned as the home of the most ambitious race in the world.

.......Frederic Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead, Rectorial Address, Aberdeen, 16 November 1928

How can one ever explain to the go-ahead West the charm of the shabby grey haphazard old land? It is partly the feeling that things just grow and are not made.

.......Freya Stark, Note of 17 February 1929, in Beyond Euphrates, 1951

Most . . . small towns I have seen in Scotland are contentedly or morosely lethargic, sunk in a fantastic dullness broken only by scandal-mongering and such alarums as drinking produces; a dead silence punctu­ated by malicious whispers and hiccups.

.......Edwin Muir, Journey into Scotland, 1935

In Scotland there is a rapid loss of all grandeur of mien and manners; a provincial eagerness and acuteness appear; the poverty of the country makes itself re­marked, and a coarseness of manners; and, among the intellectual, is the insanity of dialectics.

.......Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits, 1856

If there's a sword-like sang
That can cut Scotland clear
O' a' the warld beside
Rax me the hilt o't here,
For there's nae jewel till
Frae the rest o' earth its's free,
Wi' the starry separateness
I'd fain to Scotland gie.

.......Hugh MacDiarmid (C.M. Grieve),
'Separatism', from To Circumjack Cencrastus, 1930

Let nae man think he can serve you, Scotland,
Withoot muckle trial and trouble to himsel'.
The slightest service -to you compares
Wi' fetchin' a bit o' Heaven doon into Hell...
Nay, fegs, it's wi' you as wi' a lion-cub
A man may fetch hame and can play wi' at first,
But if he has it lang, it grows up and syne -
Suddenly his fool's paradise is burst!

.......Hugh MacDiarmid (C.M. Grieve), 'Towards a New Scotland, VII', from Stony Limits and Other Poems, 1934

SEE WHO SAID WHAT ABOUT...

The Scots
Glasgow
Edinburgh
Inverness, Capital of the Scottish Highlands
The Scottish Mountains
The Scottish Islands