Scotland

C

Local Government

The Scottish Development Department is responsible for general policy in regard to local government. A reorganization of local government in Scotland was made effective in 1975, when the counties and burghs were abolished and replaced by nine regions and three island areas. The regions (but not the island areas) were divided into districts. Each of the regions was administered on a two-tier basis by regional and, lesser, district councils, whose members were elected to four-year terms. The island areas were administered by single-tier authorities.

Under the provisions of the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Bill 1994, the two-tier system in the regions was abolished on April 1, 1996. The 62 existing regional and district councils on the mainland were replaced by 29 new single-tier authorities whose borders have in some cases affinity with many of the old authorities. The administrative systems of the island areas (the Orkney Islands, Shetland Islands, and Western Isles regional councils) remain unchanged.

Four of the new unitary authorities—Scottish Borders (formerly Borders), Dumfries and Galloway, Fife, and Highland—have retained the names and administrative boundaries of the preceding regions, combining their regional and district councils into a single authority. The other five regions—Central, Lothian, Grampian, Strathclyde, and Tayside—have vanished from the map. They have been replaced by unitary authorities that for the most part are coterminous with the former district councils, including those for the main cities and towns: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Falkirk, and Stirling. The former Central, Grampian, and Tayside regions are now each administered by three unitary authorities, and the former Lothian region by four. The former Strathclyde region, which encompassed the most populous part of Scotland, has been divided into 12 unitary authorities.

D

Political Parties

Two leading British parties, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, shared the majority of Scottish seats in Parliament from the 1920s until the late 1970s. Since then, however, the Conservative Party, although the party of government for the United Kingdom as a whole from 1979 to 1997, increasingly became a minority party in Scotland. By the 1990s it had become less popular than the Scottish National Party (SNP), which was founded in 1934 in order to press for complete self-government. Although the SNP played a minor role in the politics of the country for a long time, since the 1970s it has become an increasingly significant force. In the 21st century the Liberal Democratic Party became the main opponent to the Labour Party in many areas. At the 1997 general election the Conservative Party lost its last remaining parliamentary seats in Scotland but won a single seat at the 2005 general election after boundary changes to the constituencies. The general election saw the Labour Party win 41 seats, the Liberal Democrats 11, the SNP 6, and the Conservative Party 1.

The Scottish Parliamentary elections of 2007 resulted in a parliament comprising the following breakdown of members: SNP (47 seats), Labour Party (46), Conservatives (17), Liberal Democrats (16), Scottish Green Party (2), and Independent (1).

VI

History

There are many Scotlands. Different images of Scotland and of “Scottishness” have been created and recreated over the course of most of the 20 centuries of written historical records.

The conventional map of Scotland is a picture in disguise of successive attempts to invade it from the south. The natural features of topography, with passes running south to north through the Borders, have drawn invaders—from the Romans in the 1st century ad to the Angles in the 7th century and the armies of Henry VIII of England in the 1540s—to the shores of the Firth of Forth. Relatively few of them have penetrated beyond the Forth for very long. The Romans briefly pursued the barbarians as far north as Strathspey but then retreated behind the walls they built. The Angles were decisively beaten off at the battle of Nechtansmere in Angus in 685. The efforts of Edward I of England, the “hammer of the Scots”, were concentrated on the area around Stirling, which is the first bridge over the dangerous, tidal waters of the Forth; for that reason so many of the battles in Scottish history during the Wars of Independence—Stirling Bridge (1297), Falkirk (1298), and Bannockburn (1314)—were concentrated in that area.

The same formidable barrier of the Forth also helps explain why, until the 10th century, Scotland was naturally divided into separate kingdoms on either side. The territorial kingdom of the kings of Scots, bridging the Forth, came into being only slowly, as a makeshift coalition of disparate peoples.

If that map is turned on its side, looking westwards, a different history of the Scots comes into view. Separated from the rest of mainland Scotland by the Highland massif known as Druimalban (the “spine of Scotland”), the western Highlands and Isles look towards Ireland. Only a few miles of water separate Kintyre from Antrim, from whence the Scoti came to settle in southern Argyll in the 5th century. They were followed by the Christian bishop and missionary, Columba, in 563. For the next ten centuries, the histories of western Scotland and Ireland were closely intertwined. In the 16th century, the gallowglasses, mercenaries from the western Highlands, crossed the North Channel every year to fight in the Irish clan wars and, later, to resist the English conquest of Ireland. The union of the crowns of England and Scotland in 1603, ironically, brought attempts by both governments, in London and Edinburgh, to keep the two Gaelic-speaking races apart. And the 17th century would see the first mass migration of Scots, from Scotland to the Ulster plantation. The results of this exodus are with us still, in the sectarian make-up of Northern Ireland.

If the map of Scotland is turned on its head, it gives a view of Scotland seen by a succession of Viking raiders and settlers. The Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland were swamped by Scandinavian settlement, and all traces of their previous occupation by the Picts wiped out. Viking invaders penetrated only a short distance into the mainland, occupying Caithness and some of Ross and Cromarty and stopping short of modern-day Inverness, but their influence can be seen throughout almost the entire length of the western coast, marking the way to the Viking bases in Dublin and the Isle of Man.

If the map is turned again on its side, to look eastwards across the North Sea, it shows that much of Scotland’s economic development before 1700 took place on the east coast, with ports strung along it from Wick in the north to Berwick-on-Tweed in the south. Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, and Berwick were all at the mouth of tidal estuaries, where the produce of the land was gathered for export. Scotland’s main trading routes, from the 12th century until almost the close of the 17th, lay across the North Sea, in the eastern Baltic, the Low Countries, and northern France. Many of the cultural characteristics of Scotland through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as a result, can be explained from the point of view of its natural links with northern Europe. The monasteries founded in Scotland in the 12th and 13th centuries had their mother houses mostly in France: the Tironensians at Tiron, for example, and the Cistercians at Citeaux. By the 15th century, Scots went to the Low Countries and the Rhineland for trade, first at Bruges and then Middleburg and Veere, and for higher education, to the universities of Louvain and Cologne. By the 17th century, budding lawyers and medical students were going especially to Leiden, whose famous medical school would be replicated in Edinburgh during the century of the Enlightenment. “Scotland in Europe” is a phrase often used by 20th-century politicians, but it has a long history.

A

The Land

The country that comprises present-day Scotland came into existence only gradually. Until the 10th century Scotia or Alba meant the territory to the north of what one chronicler called the “sea of Scotland”, the wide stretch of tidal water known as the Firth of Forth. South of this inland sea was Lothian. By 1100 Scotland embraced both Scotia and Lothian; Celtic law and custom reached almost every part of mainland Scotland. But a borderline with England resembling the modern frontier was not established until 1239. Before that, the Scots periodically controlled large tracts of land in northern England, including present-day Cumbria and Northumberland. Even after 1239 the Borders still included tracts of “debatable land”, belonging to neither country, until the issue was finally settled in 1551, with the drawing of the first straight-line frontier in Europe, the so-called Scots Dyke.

The winning of the west came slowly and with difficulty: the control exercised by kings of Scots over the Western Isles was not ultimately settled until the Battle of Largs in 1263, when King Håkon IV of Norway was forced to accept a boundary fixed between the Northern Isles, which remained in Norwegian hands, and the Western Isles (or Sudreys), which passed to the Scots, along with the Isle of Man. Man itself was lost to England during the Wars of Independence (1296-1328), as was Scotland’s premier port of Berwick, which still remains within England to this day although, oddly, its football team plays in the Scottish League. The Northern Isles, which belonged to Denmark, were annexed by the Scottish Crown as late as 1470. It was only then, in the reign of James III, that the making of the kingdom of Scotland was fully completed.

B

The Early Peoples of Scotland

With such a long history, it is not surprising that Scotland was a conglomerate of different peoples, languages, and cultures. As late as 1138, when David I invaded northern England, he led an army made up of an assembly of “Normans, Germans, English, Northumbrians and Cumbrians, men of Teviotdale and Lothian, Galwegians and Scots”. Yet they all fought under the war cry Albanaich! Albanaich! (Men of Alba). “New” Scots fought alongside the descendants of the Scots of Dál Riata, who had given their name to the kingdom. The making of Scotland, in part, was the process of the consolidation of a territorial kingdom. It was also the interweaving of a series of different peoples, sometimes violent but probably more often a natural process. Historically, Scotland is a collection of immigrants and migrants.

The earliest peoples who appear in some form of record were the inhabitants whom the Romans encountered during their three main periods of conquest and occupation between ad 78 and ad 215. The first map of Scotland, drawn by Ptolemy in the 2nd century ad, depicted 5 groups in the area of Roman occupation and a further 12 to the north of the Forth. Among the northern peoples, the most prominent was the Caledonii, whose influence was shown as extending from the Forth to the “northern sea” of the Moray Firth. The story of the next six centuries or so was one of the gradual amalgamation of these peoples into a unitary kingdom. The first mention of the “Picts” was made by a Roman observer in ad 297. The name in itself, literally meaning “painted people”, was probably a nom de guerre, given by the Romans to the various barbarian peoples who resisted their repeated attempts to extend their influence beyond the Forth-Clyde line.

The first attempt to subdue the Picts came with the three expeditions made by Gnaeus Julius Agricola between ad 79 and 83. Attempts to build forts deep in hostile territory, to act as firebreaks, were abandoned in favour of an ambitious, defensive barrier, built of stone and turf between ad 118 and 122. Hadrian’s Wall extended for 117 km (73 mi), from the Solway Firth to the mouth of the River Tyne. Two decades later, another rampart, called the Antonine Wall, was built across the 58 km (37 mi) from the Firth of Forth to the Firth of Clyde. By ad 161, however, after repeated breaches of it, the Antonine Wall, together with the policy of trying to create a pale across southern Scotland, was finally abandoned in favour of a fortress Britain, with its northern frontier fixed at Hadrian’s Wall. By ad 400, this wall, too, had become obsolete and was abandoned. The legacy of the Roman occupation is debatable, not least because of the huge gap in evidence between the 2nd and 6th centuries ad. The most obvious traces of Roman occupation are still to be seen, including the remains of the two walls, which marked the northern limits of the Roman Empire. Significant sections of Hadrian's Wall still exist and have been designated a World Heritage site under the title Frontiers of the Roman Empire. But also beyond the Antonine Wall have remained clusters of Roman marching camps, such as Ardoch and Bertha, and in the occupied zone between the two walls are forts and supply bases, such as Newstead and Inchtuthill.

One effect of the Roman period of invasion and occupation was to encourage and consolidate a closer confederation of their enemies. Already by about ad 350 the Picts were divided into two main peoples, each with an overking: the Maeatae, who lived immediately north of the Antonine Wall, and the Caledonii, who lived beyond them, deeper in hostile territory. The boundary between the two was probably the Mounth, the great natural obstacle stretching east-west, along the southern boundary of modern-day Aberdeenshire. By 685, when King Bridei mac Bile defeated Northumbrian invaders at the battle of Nechtansmere, or Dunnichen Moss, in Angus, there was one high king of the Picts, whose centre of power lay at Fortriu in Strathearn but whose authority stretched over a group of peoples from the Forth to beyond the Moray Firth.