Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
sessed of vast lands, evicted their crofters in favour of estate-style sheep farming. This
brutal period, the Clearances, left the Highlands an empty wilderness and forced hundreds
of thousands to a precarious coastal life or emigration. Those who sought the cities were
the fuel for the Industrial Revolution, building a spine of heavy industry across southern
Scotland that lasted through to the late 20th century.
However, the 18th century also had a nobler legacy. The Scottish Enlightenment was a
period of rich cultural and intellectual flowering that turned the eyes of all Europe on this
northern outpost. The thinkers David Hume and Adam Smith, the poet Robert Burns and
the architect Robert Adam are just a few of the many Scots who are still considered giants
in their respective fields. They built a tradition of Scottish intellectualism and literature
that has also continued to the present day.
Early Days
Hunters and gatherers have left fragments of evidence of the earliest human habitation in
Scotland. These early people came in waves from northern Europe and Ireland as glaciers
retreated in the wake of the last Ice Age around 10,000 BC.
The Neolithic was similarly launched by arrivals from mainland Europe. Scotland's
Stone Age has left behind an astonishing diary of human development: Caithness, Orkney
and Shetland have some of the world's best-preserved prehistoric villages, burial cairns
and standing stones. Further south, crannogs (round structures built on stilts over a loch)
were a favoured form of defensible dwelling through the Bronze Age.
The Iron Age saw the construction of a remarkable series of defence-minded structures
of a different sort. Brochs (again a northeastern island development) were complex, mus-
cular stone fortresses, some of which still stand well over 10m high.
Romans & Picts
The Roman invasion of Britain began in AD 43, almost a century after Julius Caesar first
invaded. However, the Roman onslaught ground to a halt in the north, not far beyond the
present-day Scottish border. Between AD 78 and 84, the Roman Governor Agricola
marched northwards and spent several years trying to subdue the wild tribes the Romans
called the Picts (from the Latin pictus, meaning 'painted'). By the 2nd century Emperor
Hadrian, tired of fighting the tribes in the north, decided to cut his losses and built the wall
(AD 122-28) that bears his name across northern England. Two decades later Hadrian's
successor, Antoninus Pius, invaded Scotland again and built a turf rampart, the Antonine
Wall, between the Firth of Forth and the River Clyde. In northern Britain, the Romans
found they had met their match.
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