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So alert but so hungry that he or she waited for me to finish taking my shots and then began eating! A treat for me too.
The official state bird of Florida is oddly enough, the northern mockingbird. It has extraordinary vocal abilities and can sing up to 200 songs, including the songs of other birds, insect and amphibian sounds, even an occasional mechanical noise. The northern mockingbird is also the state bird of Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi.
Mockingbirds are a group of New World passerine birds from the Mimidae family. They are best known for the habit of some species mimicking the songs of other birds and the sounds of insects and amphibians, often loudly and in rapid succession. There are about 17 species in three genera. These do not appear to form a monophyletic lineage: Mimus and Nesomimus are quite closely related; their closest living relatives appear to be some thrashers, such as the Sage Thrasher. Melanotis is more distinct and seems to represent a very ancient basal lineage of Mimidae.
When the survey voyage of HMS Beagle visited the Galápagos Islands in September to October 1835, the naturalist Charles Darwin noticed that the mockingbirds Mimus thenca differed from island to island, and were closely allied in appearance to mockingbirds on the South American mainland. Nearly a year later when writing up his notes on the return voyage he speculated that this, together with what he had been told about Galápagos tortoises, could undermine the doctrine of stability of species. This was his first recorded expression of his doubts about species being immutable which led to him being convinced about the transmutation of species and hence evolution.
Beautyberries have ripened to a glorious rich purple. Waiting for birds to feast on them in the days to come. Tart. Delicious albeit to animals or the few humans who cook them into jam. This gorgeous shrub has clusters of glorious magenta berries at regular intervals along the stem. For weeks now, I have been watching the gradual transition from clusters of tiny pink and white flowers to tiny green round dots, to full-sized green berries. And now to a beautiful magenta!
The berries provide important winter food for wildlife. Wild turkeys, bluebirds, robins, yellow bellied sapsuckers, myrtle warblers, cardinals, catbirds, mockingbirds, brown thrashers, quail, towhees and other birds rely on the berries as an energy source. Mockingbirds may establish, and protect, a territory around specific plants. The berries also nourish raccoons and gray squirrels during lean winter months.
The roots and leaves were used medicinally by American Indians to make a tea for use in sweat baths to treat fever, rheumatism, and malaria. Root tea was also used for treating dysentery and colic.
Beautyberry, Callicarpa, Lamiaceae
For more see my set, Luscious Leaves, Fruits and Seeds and Exotic fruits and spices.
Biscayne Park FL
Ayurveda, the oldest extant definer of the principles of health for entire forms of life, had a brilliant, almost divine beginniing. Even the very particles of the universe have been teachers for the one critically inspired to know. The portals of truth have been thrown open before the sincere and accomplished votary of knowledge possessed of the intellects 'pregnant with truth'. The seers had direct realization of biomedical sciences by meditating on the immutable aspects of creation. It is as though at the feet of the actinic brilliance of Savita-the generator of life (sun); of the bases of creation demostrably realized in the forms of the creator (Brahma), the preserver (Visnu) and the annihilator (Siva) of the meaningful imagery of the new Babe (Kartikeya) mothered by six fires and the virtuous power of the whole and undivided divinity of the Word (Saraswati) could the Esis, the seers of truth, about the imperishable foundation of Ayerveda.
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Moses, from whose loins I sprung,
Lit by a lamp in his blood
Ten immutable rules, a moon
For mutable lampless men.
The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy,
With the same heaving blood,
Keep tide to the moon of Moses.
Then why do they sneer at me?
from www.thethinkingtraveller.com/
Puglia is famous for many things: trulli, orecchiette pasta, glorious sandy beaches and the pizzica to name a few, but nothing is quite as Puglia-defining as the >60 million olive trees that carpet the region, from the north to the south.
The sheer number of trees is amazing, but so, in many cases, are their size and age. Called ulivi secolari (literally centuries-old olive trees), you will come across large numbers of ancient trees with knotted, gnarled, robust trunks that have been twisted into grotesque shapes by a mix of time, wind, sun and man’s hand. They give an impression of wizened sagacity, seen-it-all tiredness and a patient acceptance of the immutability of time.
" At the very end of all things, like in the first beginning, No one knows
Everything is about to be written.
So, slowly, the vail of illusion fades out.
Thoughts and memories mix up, an immutable dance of time, space, shadow and light, and in the core of vacuity, the invisible world rebirth.
The world that never was. "
Teaser for a short movie I'm working on for months now on my personal free time.
Still a lot of work to do...
Hope to release a Final cut on the fall 2011
After so many hours working on it, just sharing some of the shots ! Hope you will like the mood of the "invisible"
Adobe After Effects CS5
Particular 2.1
RG Colorista II
5D Mark II
The priceless support from Somepling
Ten thousand cups of Coffee
EDIT __11/27/2011__:
The LandEscape Project should have been online via vimeo on 11/11/2011... But unfortunately I'm unable to keep this date as a release for the final cut.
I'm really sorry and disapointed too but the last three months have been very very complicated to manage with big changes in my life.
I'm still working on the project (and on other stuff) & three new screenshots have been added to my flickr gallery.
Once again I'm really sorry to be unable to keep my schedule. Life is tricky sometimes...
Thanks to all of you for your positives comments and supports. I'm going back to work now...
Bests
J.H.K 11/2011
Watch this video on Vimeo. Video created by John H. King.
5/1/11 cblog "I BELIEVE !" (SO DO I) MESSAGE BY SHEILA SCHULLER,CRYSTAL CATHEDRAL, 11a...[if this message gets cut off, go to cblogs.posterous.com/5111-i-believe-message-by-sheila-sch... ]
[sheila schuller, after chilean miner interview] .
m: " ..best life possible ..series..believe in the god who believes in u..ten commandment message..dusting off...haven't been taught in a while..I was a teenager when dad preached on these..did it sound exciting ? Actually, it became a positive, "Thou shall, thou can..." rather than the negative, so I heard..& thought maybe if I follow..maybe god gave..maybe to spare me from heartache, from pain from hurting self or others, that's how I heard the 10 comm as a teen. And have lived my life accordingly to the best of my ability..has my life been perfect..no, anybody can google my name and see not perfect , but. ..as close as what I remember as a teen being taught by my father, first, developing positive rship..as dad says vertical with God..l,,first four commandments..then the rest are horizontal..rshp with others..forms a cross..the ten comms were very imp to god.. ..one recurring theme of god..obey my comms ..obey & be blessed, ignore & problems [not always, sometimes persecution comes from obeying god, that's a jewish fallacy] ..have no other gods before me..don't compete, no other gods, ...if u do that, no matter what happens, can live best life pssble, god wants to be #1 in your life, ...who is ths god ? So many books, theol tomes, ..not all agree, well let's look at the word, God wants to be in a loving intim rshp with u, he loves u, here is god with moses,,..bush that is burning but not burning,,that's right..fire in middle of bush, but not being consumed, that got moses attention, wouldn't it get yours ? I'm here. Wow..god will do things to get your attention, it was obviously god's nly god, moses knew it was god, god spoke thru the bush, this is what he said "I am the god of abraham isaac jacob,..hav heard the cry of my people..." god acknwldges..god wants to lead moses out, lead us out of bondage, moses says "who me ?" Do I stutter ? Not qualifed,,u got the wrong guy, many feel inadeq unworthy, but god blvd in moses, & god created u for divine purposes as well, moses said believe in me,,will lead..who will I say u r, moses asks, here's what god says, "I am, who I am" that's who god is, that is..I am, god is I am, that simple, look at those words "I am" what they mean, God is self-existing, nobody created god, he created everything else, beware of distinction btw creator & created, u & me the created, we r not the creator, anythng we create is created from something god created..god, the great "I am" tempting to worship created v creator.."I am" ..immutable, no permutations, same... was is will be...never ceased being loving being all powerful , ..he is always the same, never changes, always existed, will always exist, god is real, exists, alive, he loves u, loves his creation, has a plan for u , just as he did for moses, like to say "have no other gods bf me"..re-phrase "believe in the god who believes in u"..this god did rescue..there back on mt sinai, why did god do ten plagues, not one ? I learned they were necc to demonstrate god's power, all these plagues, sppsdly protected by their frog god, fly god, etc, but here come the plagues, they discover god is real true and only powerful god, god delivers from plagues, from red sea, yet even when they see all this, when moses goes up to top of mt sinai, comes back down they had built a golden calf, false gods kept creeping back in, god said don't have any other gods but me, god knew those gods couldn't help them..god knew they were being misled, today, constantly self-examining,..golden calf in your life..one calf I have is "success"..important, but don't let it become a god in your life,,another calf I have to tip is "pleasing others"..I love to please others but did I please god, ..maybe for u it is intelligence, beauty, acquisitions,, tip it over, how..if false god, how can this mislead me,, if I want to be successful, make choices,..maybe have fulfilled god's plan for my life..if haven't pleased god, haven't fulflled god's plan for my life..god wants your life to be full, but starts w making him first & foremost, god believes in u even when u don't believe in him...he loves u, he created u....sometimes circumstances...but but..how can he love me..is god there, does god care, close with story from my dad re daniel foley (?) .belief not just a feeling, ..its a choice..to believe even when there's no reason to believe..have had to do it from time to time..daniel foley ? Poley ? His son became chaplain in ww2..navy, ship lost,,son died,, when poley received news his son was lost he cried to god.."why god, how could u let this happen?" This christian leader's faith was rocked...he made a choice..with no feeling, but he said it..."I believe, I believe, I believe...in god"...still didn't feel anything, but made the declaration,...next day again..day after day..didn't feel it..but finally after many times the spark returned..believe that god loves me..can u make that declaration today ? Maybe u don't feel it ? Just say..I believe ! I believe in god I believe god loves me!
Supreme Power
Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
April 14, 2010, 12:00pm – 1:00pm
To watch the event, click here: www.americanprogress.org//events/2010/04/supreme.html
Scholars are asking the same questions about the role of the Supreme Court today as they were back in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s time when he tried to expand the Supreme Court and stack it with his supporters: “Was it the judge’s role to essentially pass on the wisdom of economic legislation? Or was it the judges’ role to essentially … let Congress do what it felt needed to be done to advance the general welfare?” Author Jeff Shesol posed these questions at a CAP event last Wednesday about his new book Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court. Shesol was joined by Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate, on a panel moderated by John Halpin, Senior Fellow at CAP.
Halpin summarized the book as a three-act drama of the stability of democracy itself. “One is a decades-long ideological battle between competing world views about government, the economy, and the Constitution,” he said, “the second is how this ideological battle plays out politically in relation to the Court in the 1930s. And then there’s the third act that’s a little more implied, which is what’s the long-term legacy of this battle, both ideologically and politically for the New Deal and for…debates about the Court and jurisprudence throughout the 20th century,” Halpin explained.
The Supreme Court shot down each item on President Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda beginning in 1935. The impoverished social and economic situation meant that violent revolution was a real threat in the United States by late 1936 and early 1937. President Roosevelt was looking for a solution that was “constitutional, and that was quick and that would be effective,” Shesol said. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mandate the number of seats on the Supreme Court, so President Roosevelt decided to expand the Court to 15 judges and pack it with liberals. His plan failed, split the Democratic Party, and transformed the American constitutional landscape.
“When we think about the Court-packing plan we have an idea that the Court was way out of line. That it was striking down good, good laws,” Lithwick said. “No, these were well-intentioned laws, but…it’s not the case…they were horrified by the really very quick…one after another churning out legislation,” she explained.
But by 1936, “the Court has covered the constitutional landscape and has knocked down not only laws that were sloppily drafted, but laws that were exceedingly carefully drafted,” Shesol said. The Court decided with sweeping opinions to “pre-emptively overrule any such legislation in the future” so President Roosevelt came to believe that no matter how legislation was drafted, it was the justices themselves who would prevent the advance of anything he tried to do, Shesol added.
President Roosevelt thought the Constitution “was a very flexible instrument” and that the doctrines used to strike down the New Deal were obsolete, Shesol explained. Yet it’s evident in the conservative justices’ letters that they “believe [President] Roosevelt is centralizing power in his own hands” and both the Court and [President] Roosevelt viewed this constitutional argument as one about the survival of democracy and believed that a dictatorship would rise out of the ashes of failure, Shesol said.
The competing ideologies of constitutional formalism versus the notion of an elastic, living constitution have as much of an effect on legislative decisions today as they did in President Roosevelt’s day. Lithwick described the book as “manna from heaven” because of its timeliness in the current discussion of “jurisprudential theories and originalism” evolving around President Barack Obama’s decision to criticize the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in his State of the Union address. “Eighty percent of the public hated the Citizens United decision,” she said. Clearly, the Court is “way out of whack” with public opinion.
Even today’s linguistic framework for conversations about the Supreme Court and presidential powers have not evolved much from the 1930s. Organic law and theories of evolution are still used to defend the living Constitution argument, versus constitutional formalism’s “language about how the constitution is set in stone, how it’s sort of oracular, and how it’s divine and this notion that the constitution is the secular Ten Commandments, it’s immutable, it doesn’t change,” Lithwick said.
There is a “perfect alignment between one’s economic views and one’s constitutional views in this way,” Shesol added. “If you believed that reform was essential…you tended to see the necessity to have the constitution … evolve with our understanding of contemporary realities. If you were pretty comfortable with the established order…you tended to be drawn to a kind of jurisprudence…that really had no room for these wild social experiments,” he said.
The prevailing Court model right now is to be an umpire with “the language of constraint” and do as little as possible so that you don’t appear to support more presidential power, Lithwick lamented. “We happen to be in a sort of trough right now in history where to talk about the idea that the Constitution seeks to protect minorities or seeks to protect the underprivileged is to look reckless,” she said. It has also become somewhat taboo to challenge the finite nature of the Constitution and insist that it’s a living document that should fit the times.
Conservatives have dominated the conversation on the Constitution for the last couple of decades, and we need to hear progressives assert their points of view, Shesol said. “What [President] Roosevelt understood and what he constantly reiterated is that this argument between these two notions of the Constitution goes back to the nation’s founding…and so [President] Roosevelt made this argument with a sense of supreme self-confidence that he was true to the intentions of the founders,” Shesol continued, “And we have somehow—on the progressive side—allowed the conservatives…to get away with the argument that the founders were universally in favor of smaller, weaker government, and state’s rights and so forth…and [President] Roosevelt didn’t believe that. I don’t imagine President Obama believes it either but it would be useful thing to hear him say forcefully.”
The two moments in time are very similar, but the key difference is that now we don’t have “a full-fledged coherent” progressive view of the Constitution, Lithwick said. This is a much more “one-sided view of the Constitution…but this is a moment where the president has decided to take on the Court” with Citizens United, she explained. Yet his argument against the decision has been a pragmatic one—that this decision can open up our elections to foreign interests—rather than a constitutional argument, despite the fact that he’s a constitutional professor.
“[President] Roosevelt was defending a whole set of policies that saved the country, that saved capitalism, created a modern social welfare system and renewed the concept of equal opportunity,” Halpin said. “Perhaps part of the problem today is that the issues outside of, say, the health bill, don’t seem as pressing.”
Featured Speakers:
Jeff Shesol, author, Supreme Power
Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor, Slate
Moderated by:
John Halpin, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
PHOTO CREDIT:
Ralph Alswang
Photographer
202-487-5025
ralph@ralphphoto.com
Loch Assynt is a freshwater loch in Sutherland, Scotland, 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) north-east of Lochinver.
Situated in a spectacular setting between the heights of Canisp, Quinag, and Beinn Uidhe [cy], it receives the outflow from Lochs Awe, Loch Maol a' Choire [gd], and Loch Leitir Easaidh. It discharges into the sea at Loch Inver, via the river Inver. The general trend of the loch is west-northwest and east-southeast, while the western end bends sharply at Loch Assynt lodge to the southwest.
The loch is 9.65 kilometres (6 mi) long, and about 1.5 kilometres (1 mi) in maximum breadth. The total area is approximately 800 hectares (1,980 acres) and its drainage basin is over 111 square kilometres (43 sq mi). The total volume of the loch is approximately 250 million cubic metres (9 billion cubic feet) and the maximum depth is 86 metres (282 feet).
There is excellent fishing for trout, sea-trout, and salmon. Ardvreck Castle, once held by the MacLeods and Mackenzies, occupies a promontory on the north shore, west of Inchnadamph.
The elevation of the loch's surface above sea level varies with the levels of rainfall but has been measured as 65.55 metres (215.1 ft).
Whispered amongst the locals of Inchnadamph, the area surrounding the castle, legend tells of MacLeod's lost daughter, Eimhir, and her continued presence at Loch Assynt. Instead of jumping to her death, they believe Eimhir plunged into the caverns of the loch and, hiding from the devil to whom she was promised, made a new home beneath the water's surface, becoming the elusive 'mermaid of Assynt'.
The locals also use this legend to account for natural changes in the landscape. When the loch's water rise above their normal levels, legend tells that these are Eimhir's tears mourning her life lost on the land. Some even claim to have sighted her weeping on the rocks, her body now transformed into half woman, half sea creature. Some contest her form, instead calling her Selkie, the Nordic mythological figure of the sea, who must first shed tears into the water in order to become visible again to the human eye.
The legend also accounts for the geology of Inchnadamph. Clootie, infuriated by the broken promise of marriage summoned meteoric rocks from Chaos to obliterate Inchnadamph and MacLeod's kingdom. It is thought that this legend bears some relationship with the scientific findings that indicate north west Scotland was struck by an object from space around 1.2 billion years ago. Geologists from Aberdeen university described the event; "[a] massive impact would have melted rocks and thrown up an enormous cloud of vapour that scattered material over a large part of the region around Ullapool. The crater was rapidly buried by sandstone which helped to preserve the evidence."[6]
These legends are invoked to offer some mythical explanation for the unique geological and topographical character of Inchnadamph. Another version of the tale of the mermaid of Assynt relates to the creation of the Moine Thrust belt. Some believe Clootie's rage produced a tectonic rumbling from the earths core, resulting in the thrust westwards of the European plate, which is understood by geologists to account for the Moine Thrust belt.
The Highlands is a historical region of Scotland. Culturally, the Highlands and the Lowlands diverged from the Late Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots language replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands. The term is also used for the area north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, although the exact boundaries are not clearly defined, particularly to the east. The Great Glen divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands. The Scottish Gaelic name of A' Ghàidhealtachd literally means "the place of the Gaels" and traditionally, from a Gaelic-speaking point of view, includes both the Western Isles and the Highlands.
The area is very sparsely populated, with many mountain ranges dominating the region, and includes the highest mountain in the British Isles, Ben Nevis. During the 18th and early 19th centuries the population of the Highlands rose to around 300,000, but from c. 1841 and for the next 160 years, the natural increase in population was exceeded by emigration (mostly to Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and migration to the industrial cities of Scotland and England.) and passim The area is now one of the most sparsely populated in Europe. At 9.1/km2 (24/sq mi) in 2012, the population density in the Highlands and Islands is less than one seventh of Scotland's as a whole.
The Highland Council is the administrative body for much of the Highlands, with its administrative centre at Inverness. However, the Highlands also includes parts of the council areas of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Argyll and Bute, Moray, North Ayrshire, Perth and Kinross, Stirling and West Dunbartonshire.
The Scottish Highlands is the only area in the British Isles to have the taiga biome as it features concentrated populations of Scots pine forest: see Caledonian Forest. It is the most mountainous part of the United Kingdom.
Between the 15th century and the mid-20th century, the area differed from most of the Lowlands in terms of language. In Scottish Gaelic, the region is known as the Gàidhealtachd, because it was traditionally the Gaelic-speaking part of Scotland, although the language is now largely confined to The Hebrides. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably but have different meanings in their respective languages. Scottish English (in its Highland form) is the predominant language of the area today, though Highland English has been influenced by Gaelic speech to a significant extent. Historically, the "Highland line" distinguished the two Scottish cultures. While the Highland line broadly followed the geography of the Grampians in the south, it continued in the north, cutting off the north-eastern areas, that is Eastern Caithness, Orkney and Shetland, from the more Gaelic Highlands and Hebrides.
Historically, the major social unit of the Highlands was the clan. Scottish kings, particularly James VI, saw clans as a challenge to their authority; the Highlands was seen by many as a lawless region. The Scots of the Lowlands viewed the Highlanders as backward and more "Irish". The Highlands were seen as the overspill of Gaelic Ireland. They made this distinction by separating Germanic "Scots" English and the Gaelic by renaming it "Erse" a play on Eire. Following the Union of the Crowns, James VI had the military strength to back up any attempts to impose some control. The result was, in 1609, the Statutes of Iona which started the process of integrating clan leaders into Scottish society. The gradual changes continued into the 19th century, as clan chiefs thought of themselves less as patriarchal leaders of their people and more as commercial landlords. The first effect on the clansmen who were their tenants was the change to rents being payable in money rather than in kind. Later, rents were increased as Highland landowners sought to increase their income. This was followed, mostly in the period 1760–1850, by agricultural improvement that often (particularly in the Western Highlands) involved clearance of the population to make way for large scale sheep farms. Displaced tenants were set up in crofting communities in the process. The crofts were intended not to provide all the needs of their occupiers; they were expected to work in other industries such as kelping and fishing. Crofters came to rely substantially on seasonal migrant work, particularly in the Lowlands. This gave impetus to the learning of English, which was seen by many rural Gaelic speakers to be the essential "language of work".
Older historiography attributes the collapse of the clan system to the aftermath of the Jacobite risings. This is now thought less influential by historians. Following the Jacobite rising of 1745 the British government enacted a series of laws to try to suppress the clan system, including bans on the bearing of arms and the wearing of tartan, and limitations on the activities of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Most of this legislation was repealed by the end of the 18th century as the Jacobite threat subsided. There was soon a rehabilitation of Highland culture. Tartan was adopted for Highland regiments in the British Army, which poor Highlanders joined in large numbers in the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1790–1815). Tartan had largely been abandoned by the ordinary people of the region, but in the 1820s, tartan and the kilt were adopted by members of the social elite, not just in Scotland, but across Europe. The international craze for tartan, and for idealising a romanticised Highlands, was set off by the Ossian cycle, and further popularised by the works of Walter Scott. His "staging" of the visit of King George IV to Scotland in 1822 and the king's wearing of tartan resulted in a massive upsurge in demand for kilts and tartans that could not be met by the Scottish woollen industry. Individual clan tartans were largely designated in this period and they became a major symbol of Scottish identity. This "Highlandism", by which all of Scotland was identified with the culture of the Highlands, was cemented by Queen Victoria's interest in the country, her adoption of Balmoral as a major royal retreat, and her interest in "tartenry".
Recurrent famine affected the Highlands for much of its history, with significant instances as late as 1817 in the Eastern Highlands and the early 1850s in the West. Over the 18th century, the region had developed a trade of black cattle into Lowland markets, and this was balanced by imports of meal into the area. There was a critical reliance on this trade to provide sufficient food, and it is seen as an essential prerequisite for the population growth that started in the 18th century. Most of the Highlands, particularly in the North and West was short of the arable land that was essential for the mixed, run rig based, communal farming that existed before agricultural improvement was introduced into the region.[a] Between the 1760s and the 1830s there was a substantial trade in unlicensed whisky that had been distilled in the Highlands. Lowland distillers (who were not able to avoid the heavy taxation of this product) complained that Highland whisky made up more than half the market. The development of the cattle trade is taken as evidence that the pre-improvement Highlands was not an immutable system, but did exploit the economic opportunities that came its way. The illicit whisky trade demonstrates the entrepreneurial ability of the peasant classes.
Agricultural improvement reached the Highlands mostly over the period 1760 to 1850. Agricultural advisors, factors, land surveyors and others educated in the thinking of Adam Smith were keen to put into practice the new ideas taught in Scottish universities. Highland landowners, many of whom were burdened with chronic debts, were generally receptive to the advice they offered and keen to increase the income from their land. In the East and South the resulting change was similar to that in the Lowlands, with the creation of larger farms with single tenants, enclosure of the old run rig fields, introduction of new crops (such as turnips), land drainage and, as a consequence of all this, eviction, as part of the Highland clearances, of many tenants and cottars. Some of those cleared found employment on the new, larger farms, others moved to the accessible towns of the Lowlands.
In the West and North, evicted tenants were usually given tenancies in newly created crofting communities, while their former holdings were converted into large sheep farms. Sheep farmers could pay substantially higher rents than the run rig farmers and were much less prone to falling into arrears. Each croft was limited in size so that the tenants would have to find work elsewhere. The major alternatives were fishing and the kelp industry. Landlords took control of the kelp shores, deducting the wages earned by their tenants from the rent due and retaining the large profits that could be earned at the high prices paid for the processed product during the Napoleonic wars.
When the Napoleonic wars finished in 1815, the Highland industries were affected by the return to a peacetime economy. The price of black cattle fell, nearly halving between 1810 and the 1830s. Kelp prices had peaked in 1810, but reduced from £9 a ton in 1823 to £3 13s 4d a ton in 1828. Wool prices were also badly affected. This worsened the financial problems of debt-encumbered landlords. Then, in 1846, potato blight arrived in the Highlands, wiping out the essential subsistence crop for the overcrowded crofting communities. As the famine struck, the government made clear to landlords that it was their responsibility to provide famine relief for their tenants. The result of the economic downturn had been that a large proportion of Highland estates were sold in the first half of the 19th century. T M Devine points out that in the region most affected by the potato famine, by 1846, 70 per cent of the landowners were new purchasers who had not owned Highland property before 1800. More landlords were obliged to sell due to the cost of famine relief. Those who were protected from the worst of the crisis were those with extensive rental income from sheep farms. Government loans were made available for drainage works, road building and other improvements and many crofters became temporary migrants – taking work in the Lowlands. When the potato famine ceased in 1856, this established a pattern of more extensive working away from the Highlands.
The unequal concentration of land ownership remained an emotional and controversial subject, of enormous importance to the Highland economy, and eventually became a cornerstone of liberal radicalism. The poor crofters were politically powerless, and many of them turned to religion. They embraced the popularly oriented, fervently evangelical Presbyterian revival after 1800. Most joined the breakaway "Free Church" after 1843. This evangelical movement was led by lay preachers who themselves came from the lower strata, and whose preaching was implicitly critical of the established order. The religious change energised the crofters and separated them from the landlords; it helped prepare them for their successful and violent challenge to the landlords in the 1880s through the Highland Land League. Violence erupted, starting on the Isle of Skye, when Highland landlords cleared their lands for sheep and deer parks. It was quietened when the government stepped in, passing the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act, 1886 to reduce rents, guarantee fixity of tenure, and break up large estates to provide crofts for the homeless. This contrasted with the Irish Land War underway at the same time, where the Irish were intensely politicised through roots in Irish nationalism, while political dimensions were limited. In 1885 three Independent Crofter candidates were elected to Parliament, which listened to their pleas. The results included explicit security for the Scottish smallholders in the "crofting counties"; the legal right to bequeath tenancies to descendants; and the creation of a Crofting Commission. The Crofters as a political movement faded away by 1892, and the Liberal Party gained their votes.
Today, the Highlands are the largest of Scotland's whisky producing regions; the relevant area runs from Orkney to the Isle of Arran in the south and includes the northern isles and much of Inner and Outer Hebrides, Argyll, Stirlingshire, Arran, as well as sections of Perthshire and Aberdeenshire. (Other sources treat The Islands, except Islay, as a separate whisky producing region.) This massive area has over 30 distilleries, or 47 when the Islands sub-region is included in the count. According to one source, the top five are The Macallan, Glenfiddich, Aberlour, Glenfarclas and Balvenie. While Speyside is geographically within the Highlands, that region is specified as distinct in terms of whisky productions. Speyside single malt whiskies are produced by about 50 distilleries.
According to Visit Scotland, Highlands whisky is "fruity, sweet, spicy, malty". Another review states that Northern Highlands single malt is "sweet and full-bodied", the Eastern Highlands and Southern Highlands whiskies tend to be "lighter in texture" while the distilleries in the Western Highlands produce single malts with a "much peatier influence".
The Scottish Reformation achieved partial success in the Highlands. Roman Catholicism remained strong in some areas, owing to remote locations and the efforts of Franciscan missionaries from Ireland, who regularly came to celebrate Mass. There remain significant Catholic strongholds within the Highlands and Islands such as Moidart and Morar on the mainland and South Uist and Barra in the southern Outer Hebrides. The remoteness of the region and the lack of a Gaelic-speaking clergy undermined the missionary efforts of the established church. The later 18th century saw somewhat greater success, owing to the efforts of the SSPCK missionaries and to the disruption of traditional society after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. In the 19th century, the evangelical Free Churches, which were more accepting of Gaelic language and culture, grew rapidly, appealing much more strongly than did the established church.
For the most part, however, the Highlands are considered predominantly Protestant, belonging to the Church of Scotland. In contrast to the Catholic southern islands, the northern Outer Hebrides islands (Lewis, Harris and North Uist) have an exceptionally high proportion of their population belonging to the Protestant Free Church of Scotland or the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Outer Hebrides have been described as the last bastion of Calvinism in Britain and the Sabbath remains widely observed. Inverness and the surrounding area has a majority Protestant population, with most locals belonging to either The Kirk or the Free Church of Scotland. The church maintains a noticeable presence within the area, with church attendance notably higher than in other parts of Scotland. Religion continues to play an important role in Highland culture, with Sabbath observance still widely practised, particularly in the Hebrides.
In traditional Scottish geography, the Highlands refers to that part of Scotland north-west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which crosses mainland Scotland in a near-straight line from Helensburgh to Stonehaven. However the flat coastal lands that occupy parts of the counties of Nairnshire, Morayshire, Banffshire and Aberdeenshire are often excluded as they do not share the distinctive geographical and cultural features of the rest of the Highlands. The north-east of Caithness, as well as Orkney and Shetland, are also often excluded from the Highlands, although the Hebrides are usually included. The Highland area, as so defined, differed from the Lowlands in language and tradition, having preserved Gaelic speech and customs centuries after the anglicisation of the latter; this led to a growing perception of a divide, with the cultural distinction between Highlander and Lowlander first noted towards the end of the 14th century. In Aberdeenshire, the boundary between the Highlands and the Lowlands is not well defined. There is a stone beside the A93 road near the village of Dinnet on Royal Deeside which states 'You are now in the Highlands', although there are areas of Highland character to the east of this point.
A much wider definition of the Highlands is that used by the Scotch whisky industry. Highland single malts are produced at distilleries north of an imaginary line between Dundee and Greenock, thus including all of Aberdeenshire and Angus.
Inverness is regarded as the Capital of the Highlands, although less so in the Highland parts of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Perthshire and Stirlingshire which look more to Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, and Stirling as their commercial centres.
The Highland Council area, created as one of the local government regions of Scotland, has been a unitary council area since 1996. The council area excludes a large area of the southern and eastern Highlands, and the Western Isles, but includes Caithness. Highlands is sometimes used, however, as a name for the council area, as in the former Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service. Northern is also used to refer to the area, as in the former Northern Constabulary. These former bodies both covered the Highland council area and the island council areas of Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles.
Much of the Highlands area overlaps the Highlands and Islands area. An electoral region called Highlands and Islands is used in elections to the Scottish Parliament: this area includes Orkney and Shetland, as well as the Highland Council local government area, the Western Isles and most of the Argyll and Bute and Moray local government areas. Highlands and Islands has, however, different meanings in different contexts. It means Highland (the local government area), Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles in Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service. Northern, as in Northern Constabulary, refers to the same area as that covered by the fire and rescue service.
There have been trackways from the Lowlands to the Highlands since prehistoric times. Many traverse the Mounth, a spur of mountainous land that extends from the higher inland range to the North Sea slightly north of Stonehaven. The most well-known and historically important trackways are the Causey Mounth, Elsick Mounth, Cryne Corse Mounth and Cairnamounth.
Although most of the Highlands is geographically on the British mainland, it is somewhat less accessible than the rest of Britain; thus most UK couriers categorise it separately, alongside Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and other offshore islands. They thus charge additional fees for delivery to the Highlands, or exclude the area entirely. While the physical remoteness from the largest population centres inevitably leads to higher transit cost, there is confusion and consternation over the scale of the fees charged and the effectiveness of their communication, and the use of the word Mainland in their justification. Since the charges are often based on postcode areas, many far less remote areas, including some which are traditionally considered part of the lowlands, are also subject to these charges. Royal Mail is the only delivery network bound by a Universal Service Obligation to charge a uniform tariff across the UK. This, however, applies only to mail items and not larger packages which are dealt with by its Parcelforce division.
The Highlands lie to the north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which runs from Arran to Stonehaven. This part of Scotland is largely composed of ancient rocks from the Cambrian and Precambrian periods which were uplifted during the later Caledonian Orogeny. Smaller formations of Lewisian gneiss in the northwest are up to 3 billion years old. The overlying rocks of the Torridon Sandstone form mountains in the Torridon Hills such as Liathach and Beinn Eighe in Wester Ross.
These foundations are interspersed with many igneous intrusions of a more recent age, the remnants of which have formed mountain massifs such as the Cairngorms and the Cuillin of Skye. A significant exception to the above are the fossil-bearing beds of Old Red Sandstone found principally along the Moray Firth coast and partially down the Highland Boundary Fault. The Jurassic beds found in isolated locations on Skye and Applecross reflect the complex underlying geology. They are the original source of much North Sea oil. The Great Glen is formed along a transform fault which divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands.
The entire region was covered by ice sheets during the Pleistocene ice ages, save perhaps for a few nunataks. The complex geomorphology includes incised valleys and lochs carved by the action of mountain streams and ice, and a topography of irregularly distributed mountains whose summits have similar heights above sea-level, but whose bases depend upon the amount of denudation to which the plateau has been subjected in various places.
Climate
The region is much warmer than other areas at similar latitudes (such as Kamchatka in Russia, or Labrador in Canada) because of the Gulf Stream making it cool, damp and temperate. The Köppen climate classification is "Cfb" at low altitudes, then becoming "Cfc", "Dfc" and "ET" at higher altitudes.
Places of interest
An Teallach
Aonach Mòr (Nevis Range ski centre)
Arrochar Alps
Balmoral Castle
Balquhidder
Battlefield of Culloden
Beinn Alligin
Beinn Eighe
Ben Cruachan hydro-electric power station
Ben Lomond
Ben Macdui (second highest mountain in Scotland and UK)
Ben Nevis (highest mountain in Scotland and UK)
Cairngorms National Park
Cairngorm Ski centre near Aviemore
Cairngorm Mountains
Caledonian Canal
Cape Wrath
Carrick Castle
Castle Stalker
Castle Tioram
Chanonry Point
Conic Hill
Culloden Moor
Dunadd
Duart Castle
Durness
Eilean Donan
Fingal's Cave (Staffa)
Fort George
Glen Coe
Glen Etive
Glen Kinglas
Glen Lyon
Glen Orchy
Glenshee Ski Centre
Glen Shiel
Glen Spean
Glenfinnan (and its railway station and viaduct)
Grampian Mountains
Hebrides
Highland Folk Museum – The first open-air museum in the UK.
Highland Wildlife Park
Inveraray Castle
Inveraray Jail
Inverness Castle
Inverewe Garden
Iona Abbey
Isle of Staffa
Kilchurn Castle
Kilmartin Glen
Liathach
Lecht Ski Centre
Loch Alsh
Loch Ard
Loch Awe
Loch Assynt
Loch Earn
Loch Etive
Loch Fyne
Loch Goil
Loch Katrine
Loch Leven
Loch Linnhe
Loch Lochy
Loch Lomond
Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park
Loch Lubnaig
Loch Maree
Loch Morar
Loch Morlich
Loch Ness
Loch Nevis
Loch Rannoch
Loch Tay
Lochranza
Luss
Meall a' Bhuiridh (Glencoe Ski Centre)
Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary at Loch Creran
Rannoch Moor
Red Cuillin
Rest and Be Thankful stretch of A83
River Carron, Wester Ross
River Spey
River Tay
Ross and Cromarty
Smoo Cave
Stob Coire a' Chàirn
Stac Polly
Strathspey Railway
Sutherland
Tor Castle
Torridon Hills
Urquhart Castle
West Highland Line (scenic railway)
West Highland Way (Long-distance footpath)
Wester Ross
Ode To Wine
Day-colored wine,
night-colored wine,
wine with purple feet
or wine with topaz blood,
wine,
starry child
of earth,
wine, smooth
as a golden sword,
soft
as lascivious velvet,
wine, spiral-seashelled
and full of wonder,
amorous,
marine;
never has one goblet contained you,
one song, one man,
you are choral, gregarious,
at the least, you must be shared.
At times
you feed on mortal
memories;
your wave carries us
from tomb to tomb,
stonecutter of icy sepulchers,
and we weep
transitory tears;
your
glorious
spring dress
is different,
blood rises through the shoots,
wind incites the day,
nothing is left
of your immutable soul.
Wine
stirs the spring, happiness
bursts through the earth like a plant,
walls crumble,
and rocky cliffs,
chasms close,
as song is born.
A jug of wine, and thou beside me
in the wilderness,
sang the ancient poet.
Let the wine pitcher
add to the kiss of love its own.
My darling, suddenly
the line of your hip
becomes the brimming curve
of the wine goblet,
your breast is the grape cluster,
your nipples are the grapes,
the gleam of spirits lights your hair,
and your navel is a chaste seal
stamped on the vessel of your belly,
your love an inexhaustible
cascade of wine,
light that illuminates my senses,
the earthly splendor of life.
But you are more than love,
the fiery kiss,
the heat of fire,
more than the wine of life;
you are
the community of man,
translucency,
chorus of discipline,
abundance of flowers.
I like on the table,
when we're speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.
Drink it,
and remember in every
drop of gold,
in every topaz glass,
in every purple ladle,
that autumn labored
to fill the vessel with wine;
and in the ritual of his office,
let the simple man remember
to think of the soil and of his duty,
to propagate the canticle of the wine.
Pablo Neruda
Duncansby Head is the most northeasterly part of both the Scottish and British mainlands, slightly northeast of John o' Groats. It lies approximately 20 km (12 mi) east-southeast of Dunnet Head, the northernmost point of both the Scottish and British mainlands. Duncansby Head is located in Caithness, Highland, in north-eastern Scotland. The headland juts into the North Sea, with the Pentland Firth to its north and west and the Moray Firth to its south.
The point is marked by Duncansby Head Lighthouse, built by David Alan Stevenson in 1924.
A minor public road leads from John o' Groats to Duncansby Head, which makes Duncansby Head the farthest point by road from Land's End.
The Duncansby Head Site of Special Scientific Interest includes the 6.5-kilometre (4-mile) stretch of coast south to Skirza Head. It includes the Duncansby Stacks, prominent sea stacks just off the coast.
In 2016, it was reported in The Sunday Post newspaper that scientists from the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldemarston had proposed a nuclear weapon test on the Stacks of Duncansby in 1953, but that the prevailing wet weather was too much for contemporary electronics and the idea was shelved
The Highlands is a historical region of Scotland. Culturally, the Highlands and the Lowlands diverged from the Late Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots language replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands. The term is also used for the area north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, although the exact boundaries are not clearly defined, particularly to the east. The Great Glen divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands. The Scottish Gaelic name of A' Ghàidhealtachd literally means "the place of the Gaels" and traditionally, from a Gaelic-speaking point of view, includes both the Western Isles and the Highlands.
The area is very sparsely populated, with many mountain ranges dominating the region, and includes the highest mountain in the British Isles, Ben Nevis. During the 18th and early 19th centuries the population of the Highlands rose to around 300,000, but from c. 1841 and for the next 160 years, the natural increase in population was exceeded by emigration (mostly to Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and migration to the industrial cities of Scotland and England.) and passim The area is now one of the most sparsely populated in Europe. At 9.1/km2 (24/sq mi) in 2012, the population density in the Highlands and Islands is less than one seventh of Scotland's as a whole.
The Highland Council is the administrative body for much of the Highlands, with its administrative centre at Inverness. However, the Highlands also includes parts of the council areas of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Argyll and Bute, Moray, North Ayrshire, Perth and Kinross, Stirling and West Dunbartonshire.
The Scottish Highlands is the only area in the British Isles to have the taiga biome as it features concentrated populations of Scots pine forest: see Caledonian Forest. It is the most mountainous part of the United Kingdom.
Between the 15th century and the mid-20th century, the area differed from most of the Lowlands in terms of language. In Scottish Gaelic, the region is known as the Gàidhealtachd, because it was traditionally the Gaelic-speaking part of Scotland, although the language is now largely confined to The Hebrides. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably but have different meanings in their respective languages. Scottish English (in its Highland form) is the predominant language of the area today, though Highland English has been influenced by Gaelic speech to a significant extent. Historically, the "Highland line" distinguished the two Scottish cultures. While the Highland line broadly followed the geography of the Grampians in the south, it continued in the north, cutting off the north-eastern areas, that is Eastern Caithness, Orkney and Shetland, from the more Gaelic Highlands and Hebrides.
Historically, the major social unit of the Highlands was the clan. Scottish kings, particularly James VI, saw clans as a challenge to their authority; the Highlands was seen by many as a lawless region. The Scots of the Lowlands viewed the Highlanders as backward and more "Irish". The Highlands were seen as the overspill of Gaelic Ireland. They made this distinction by separating Germanic "Scots" English and the Gaelic by renaming it "Erse" a play on Eire. Following the Union of the Crowns, James VI had the military strength to back up any attempts to impose some control. The result was, in 1609, the Statutes of Iona which started the process of integrating clan leaders into Scottish society. The gradual changes continued into the 19th century, as clan chiefs thought of themselves less as patriarchal leaders of their people and more as commercial landlords. The first effect on the clansmen who were their tenants was the change to rents being payable in money rather than in kind. Later, rents were increased as Highland landowners sought to increase their income. This was followed, mostly in the period 1760–1850, by agricultural improvement that often (particularly in the Western Highlands) involved clearance of the population to make way for large scale sheep farms. Displaced tenants were set up in crofting communities in the process. The crofts were intended not to provide all the needs of their occupiers; they were expected to work in other industries such as kelping and fishing. Crofters came to rely substantially on seasonal migrant work, particularly in the Lowlands. This gave impetus to the learning of English, which was seen by many rural Gaelic speakers to be the essential "language of work".
Older historiography attributes the collapse of the clan system to the aftermath of the Jacobite risings. This is now thought less influential by historians. Following the Jacobite rising of 1745 the British government enacted a series of laws to try to suppress the clan system, including bans on the bearing of arms and the wearing of tartan, and limitations on the activities of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Most of this legislation was repealed by the end of the 18th century as the Jacobite threat subsided. There was soon a rehabilitation of Highland culture. Tartan was adopted for Highland regiments in the British Army, which poor Highlanders joined in large numbers in the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1790–1815). Tartan had largely been abandoned by the ordinary people of the region, but in the 1820s, tartan and the kilt were adopted by members of the social elite, not just in Scotland, but across Europe. The international craze for tartan, and for idealising a romanticised Highlands, was set off by the Ossian cycle, and further popularised by the works of Walter Scott. His "staging" of the visit of King George IV to Scotland in 1822 and the king's wearing of tartan resulted in a massive upsurge in demand for kilts and tartans that could not be met by the Scottish woollen industry. Individual clan tartans were largely designated in this period and they became a major symbol of Scottish identity. This "Highlandism", by which all of Scotland was identified with the culture of the Highlands, was cemented by Queen Victoria's interest in the country, her adoption of Balmoral as a major royal retreat, and her interest in "tartenry".
Recurrent famine affected the Highlands for much of its history, with significant instances as late as 1817 in the Eastern Highlands and the early 1850s in the West. Over the 18th century, the region had developed a trade of black cattle into Lowland markets, and this was balanced by imports of meal into the area. There was a critical reliance on this trade to provide sufficient food, and it is seen as an essential prerequisite for the population growth that started in the 18th century. Most of the Highlands, particularly in the North and West was short of the arable land that was essential for the mixed, run rig based, communal farming that existed before agricultural improvement was introduced into the region.[a] Between the 1760s and the 1830s there was a substantial trade in unlicensed whisky that had been distilled in the Highlands. Lowland distillers (who were not able to avoid the heavy taxation of this product) complained that Highland whisky made up more than half the market. The development of the cattle trade is taken as evidence that the pre-improvement Highlands was not an immutable system, but did exploit the economic opportunities that came its way. The illicit whisky trade demonstrates the entrepreneurial ability of the peasant classes.
Agricultural improvement reached the Highlands mostly over the period 1760 to 1850. Agricultural advisors, factors, land surveyors and others educated in the thinking of Adam Smith were keen to put into practice the new ideas taught in Scottish universities. Highland landowners, many of whom were burdened with chronic debts, were generally receptive to the advice they offered and keen to increase the income from their land. In the East and South the resulting change was similar to that in the Lowlands, with the creation of larger farms with single tenants, enclosure of the old run rig fields, introduction of new crops (such as turnips), land drainage and, as a consequence of all this, eviction, as part of the Highland clearances, of many tenants and cottars. Some of those cleared found employment on the new, larger farms, others moved to the accessible towns of the Lowlands.
In the West and North, evicted tenants were usually given tenancies in newly created crofting communities, while their former holdings were converted into large sheep farms. Sheep farmers could pay substantially higher rents than the run rig farmers and were much less prone to falling into arrears. Each croft was limited in size so that the tenants would have to find work elsewhere. The major alternatives were fishing and the kelp industry. Landlords took control of the kelp shores, deducting the wages earned by their tenants from the rent due and retaining the large profits that could be earned at the high prices paid for the processed product during the Napoleonic wars.
When the Napoleonic wars finished in 1815, the Highland industries were affected by the return to a peacetime economy. The price of black cattle fell, nearly halving between 1810 and the 1830s. Kelp prices had peaked in 1810, but reduced from £9 a ton in 1823 to £3 13s 4d a ton in 1828. Wool prices were also badly affected. This worsened the financial problems of debt-encumbered landlords. Then, in 1846, potato blight arrived in the Highlands, wiping out the essential subsistence crop for the overcrowded crofting communities. As the famine struck, the government made clear to landlords that it was their responsibility to provide famine relief for their tenants. The result of the economic downturn had been that a large proportion of Highland estates were sold in the first half of the 19th century. T M Devine points out that in the region most affected by the potato famine, by 1846, 70 per cent of the landowners were new purchasers who had not owned Highland property before 1800. More landlords were obliged to sell due to the cost of famine relief. Those who were protected from the worst of the crisis were those with extensive rental income from sheep farms. Government loans were made available for drainage works, road building and other improvements and many crofters became temporary migrants – taking work in the Lowlands. When the potato famine ceased in 1856, this established a pattern of more extensive working away from the Highlands.
The unequal concentration of land ownership remained an emotional and controversial subject, of enormous importance to the Highland economy, and eventually became a cornerstone of liberal radicalism. The poor crofters were politically powerless, and many of them turned to religion. They embraced the popularly oriented, fervently evangelical Presbyterian revival after 1800. Most joined the breakaway "Free Church" after 1843. This evangelical movement was led by lay preachers who themselves came from the lower strata, and whose preaching was implicitly critical of the established order. The religious change energised the crofters and separated them from the landlords; it helped prepare them for their successful and violent challenge to the landlords in the 1880s through the Highland Land League. Violence erupted, starting on the Isle of Skye, when Highland landlords cleared their lands for sheep and deer parks. It was quietened when the government stepped in, passing the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act, 1886 to reduce rents, guarantee fixity of tenure, and break up large estates to provide crofts for the homeless. This contrasted with the Irish Land War underway at the same time, where the Irish were intensely politicised through roots in Irish nationalism, while political dimensions were limited. In 1885 three Independent Crofter candidates were elected to Parliament, which listened to their pleas. The results included explicit security for the Scottish smallholders in the "crofting counties"; the legal right to bequeath tenancies to descendants; and the creation of a Crofting Commission. The Crofters as a political movement faded away by 1892, and the Liberal Party gained their votes.
Today, the Highlands are the largest of Scotland's whisky producing regions; the relevant area runs from Orkney to the Isle of Arran in the south and includes the northern isles and much of Inner and Outer Hebrides, Argyll, Stirlingshire, Arran, as well as sections of Perthshire and Aberdeenshire. (Other sources treat The Islands, except Islay, as a separate whisky producing region.) This massive area has over 30 distilleries, or 47 when the Islands sub-region is included in the count. According to one source, the top five are The Macallan, Glenfiddich, Aberlour, Glenfarclas and Balvenie. While Speyside is geographically within the Highlands, that region is specified as distinct in terms of whisky productions. Speyside single malt whiskies are produced by about 50 distilleries.
According to Visit Scotland, Highlands whisky is "fruity, sweet, spicy, malty". Another review states that Northern Highlands single malt is "sweet and full-bodied", the Eastern Highlands and Southern Highlands whiskies tend to be "lighter in texture" while the distilleries in the Western Highlands produce single malts with a "much peatier influence".
The Scottish Reformation achieved partial success in the Highlands. Roman Catholicism remained strong in some areas, owing to remote locations and the efforts of Franciscan missionaries from Ireland, who regularly came to celebrate Mass. There remain significant Catholic strongholds within the Highlands and Islands such as Moidart and Morar on the mainland and South Uist and Barra in the southern Outer Hebrides. The remoteness of the region and the lack of a Gaelic-speaking clergy undermined the missionary efforts of the established church. The later 18th century saw somewhat greater success, owing to the efforts of the SSPCK missionaries and to the disruption of traditional society after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. In the 19th century, the evangelical Free Churches, which were more accepting of Gaelic language and culture, grew rapidly, appealing much more strongly than did the established church.
For the most part, however, the Highlands are considered predominantly Protestant, belonging to the Church of Scotland. In contrast to the Catholic southern islands, the northern Outer Hebrides islands (Lewis, Harris and North Uist) have an exceptionally high proportion of their population belonging to the Protestant Free Church of Scotland or the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Outer Hebrides have been described as the last bastion of Calvinism in Britain and the Sabbath remains widely observed. Inverness and the surrounding area has a majority Protestant population, with most locals belonging to either The Kirk or the Free Church of Scotland. The church maintains a noticeable presence within the area, with church attendance notably higher than in other parts of Scotland. Religion continues to play an important role in Highland culture, with Sabbath observance still widely practised, particularly in the Hebrides.
In traditional Scottish geography, the Highlands refers to that part of Scotland north-west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which crosses mainland Scotland in a near-straight line from Helensburgh to Stonehaven. However the flat coastal lands that occupy parts of the counties of Nairnshire, Morayshire, Banffshire and Aberdeenshire are often excluded as they do not share the distinctive geographical and cultural features of the rest of the Highlands. The north-east of Caithness, as well as Orkney and Shetland, are also often excluded from the Highlands, although the Hebrides are usually included. The Highland area, as so defined, differed from the Lowlands in language and tradition, having preserved Gaelic speech and customs centuries after the anglicisation of the latter; this led to a growing perception of a divide, with the cultural distinction between Highlander and Lowlander first noted towards the end of the 14th century. In Aberdeenshire, the boundary between the Highlands and the Lowlands is not well defined. There is a stone beside the A93 road near the village of Dinnet on Royal Deeside which states 'You are now in the Highlands', although there are areas of Highland character to the east of this point.
A much wider definition of the Highlands is that used by the Scotch whisky industry. Highland single malts are produced at distilleries north of an imaginary line between Dundee and Greenock, thus including all of Aberdeenshire and Angus.
Inverness is regarded as the Capital of the Highlands, although less so in the Highland parts of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Perthshire and Stirlingshire which look more to Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, and Stirling as their commercial centres.
The Highland Council area, created as one of the local government regions of Scotland, has been a unitary council area since 1996. The council area excludes a large area of the southern and eastern Highlands, and the Western Isles, but includes Caithness. Highlands is sometimes used, however, as a name for the council area, as in the former Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service. Northern is also used to refer to the area, as in the former Northern Constabulary. These former bodies both covered the Highland council area and the island council areas of Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles.
Much of the Highlands area overlaps the Highlands and Islands area. An electoral region called Highlands and Islands is used in elections to the Scottish Parliament: this area includes Orkney and Shetland, as well as the Highland Council local government area, the Western Isles and most of the Argyll and Bute and Moray local government areas. Highlands and Islands has, however, different meanings in different contexts. It means Highland (the local government area), Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles in Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service. Northern, as in Northern Constabulary, refers to the same area as that covered by the fire and rescue service.
There have been trackways from the Lowlands to the Highlands since prehistoric times. Many traverse the Mounth, a spur of mountainous land that extends from the higher inland range to the North Sea slightly north of Stonehaven. The most well-known and historically important trackways are the Causey Mounth, Elsick Mounth, Cryne Corse Mounth and Cairnamounth.
Although most of the Highlands is geographically on the British mainland, it is somewhat less accessible than the rest of Britain; thus most UK couriers categorise it separately, alongside Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and other offshore islands. They thus charge additional fees for delivery to the Highlands, or exclude the area entirely. While the physical remoteness from the largest population centres inevitably leads to higher transit cost, there is confusion and consternation over the scale of the fees charged and the effectiveness of their communication, and the use of the word Mainland in their justification. Since the charges are often based on postcode areas, many far less remote areas, including some which are traditionally considered part of the lowlands, are also subject to these charges. Royal Mail is the only delivery network bound by a Universal Service Obligation to charge a uniform tariff across the UK. This, however, applies only to mail items and not larger packages which are dealt with by its Parcelforce division.
The Highlands lie to the north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which runs from Arran to Stonehaven. This part of Scotland is largely composed of ancient rocks from the Cambrian and Precambrian periods which were uplifted during the later Caledonian Orogeny. Smaller formations of Lewisian gneiss in the northwest are up to 3 billion years old. The overlying rocks of the Torridon Sandstone form mountains in the Torridon Hills such as Liathach and Beinn Eighe in Wester Ross.
These foundations are interspersed with many igneous intrusions of a more recent age, the remnants of which have formed mountain massifs such as the Cairngorms and the Cuillin of Skye. A significant exception to the above are the fossil-bearing beds of Old Red Sandstone found principally along the Moray Firth coast and partially down the Highland Boundary Fault. The Jurassic beds found in isolated locations on Skye and Applecross reflect the complex underlying geology. They are the original source of much North Sea oil. The Great Glen is formed along a transform fault which divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands.
The entire region was covered by ice sheets during the Pleistocene ice ages, save perhaps for a few nunataks. The complex geomorphology includes incised valleys and lochs carved by the action of mountain streams and ice, and a topography of irregularly distributed mountains whose summits have similar heights above sea-level, but whose bases depend upon the amount of denudation to which the plateau has been subjected in various places.
Climate
The region is much warmer than other areas at similar latitudes (such as Kamchatka in Russia, or Labrador in Canada) because of the Gulf Stream making it cool, damp and temperate. The Köppen climate classification is "Cfb" at low altitudes, then becoming "Cfc", "Dfc" and "ET" at higher altitudes.
Places of interest
An Teallach
Aonach Mòr (Nevis Range ski centre)
Arrochar Alps
Balmoral Castle
Balquhidder
Battlefield of Culloden
Beinn Alligin
Beinn Eighe
Ben Cruachan hydro-electric power station
Ben Lomond
Ben Macdui (second highest mountain in Scotland and UK)
Ben Nevis (highest mountain in Scotland and UK)
Cairngorms National Park
Cairngorm Ski centre near Aviemore
Cairngorm Mountains
Caledonian Canal
Cape Wrath
Carrick Castle
Castle Stalker
Castle Tioram
Chanonry Point
Conic Hill
Culloden Moor
Dunadd
Duart Castle
Durness
Eilean Donan
Fingal's Cave (Staffa)
Fort George
Glen Coe
Glen Etive
Glen Kinglas
Glen Lyon
Glen Orchy
Glenshee Ski Centre
Glen Shiel
Glen Spean
Glenfinnan (and its railway station and viaduct)
Grampian Mountains
Hebrides
Highland Folk Museum – The first open-air museum in the UK.
Highland Wildlife Park
Inveraray Castle
Inveraray Jail
Inverness Castle
Inverewe Garden
Iona Abbey
Isle of Staffa
Kilchurn Castle
Kilmartin Glen
Liathach
Lecht Ski Centre
Loch Alsh
Loch Ard
Loch Awe
Loch Assynt
Loch Earn
Loch Etive
Loch Fyne
Loch Goil
Loch Katrine
Loch Leven
Loch Linnhe
Loch Lochy
Loch Lomond
Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park
Loch Lubnaig
Loch Maree
Loch Morar
Loch Morlich
Loch Ness
Loch Nevis
Loch Rannoch
Loch Tay
Lochranza
Luss
Meall a' Bhuiridh (Glencoe Ski Centre)
Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary at Loch Creran
Rannoch Moor
Red Cuillin
Rest and Be Thankful stretch of A83
River Carron, Wester Ross
River Spey
River Tay
Ross and Cromarty
Smoo Cave
Stob Coire a' Chàirn
Stac Polly
Strathspey Railway
Sutherland
Tor Castle
Torridon Hills
Urquhart Castle
West Highland Line (scenic railway)
West Highland Way (Long-distance footpath)
Wester Ross
Supreme Power
Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
April 14, 2010, 12:00pm – 1:00pm
To watch the event, click here: www.americanprogress.org//events/2010/04/supreme.html
Scholars are asking the same questions about the role of the Supreme Court today as they were back in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s time when he tried to expand the Supreme Court and stack it with his supporters: “Was it the judge’s role to essentially pass on the wisdom of economic legislation? Or was it the judges’ role to essentially … let Congress do what it felt needed to be done to advance the general welfare?” Author Jeff Shesol posed these questions at a CAP event last Wednesday about his new book Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court. Shesol was joined by Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate, on a panel moderated by John Halpin, Senior Fellow at CAP.
Halpin summarized the book as a three-act drama of the stability of democracy itself. “One is a decades-long ideological battle between competing world views about government, the economy, and the Constitution,” he said, “the second is how this ideological battle plays out politically in relation to the Court in the 1930s. And then there’s the third act that’s a little more implied, which is what’s the long-term legacy of this battle, both ideologically and politically for the New Deal and for…debates about the Court and jurisprudence throughout the 20th century,” Halpin explained.
The Supreme Court shot down each item on President Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda beginning in 1935. The impoverished social and economic situation meant that violent revolution was a real threat in the United States by late 1936 and early 1937. President Roosevelt was looking for a solution that was “constitutional, and that was quick and that would be effective,” Shesol said. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mandate the number of seats on the Supreme Court, so President Roosevelt decided to expand the Court to 15 judges and pack it with liberals. His plan failed, split the Democratic Party, and transformed the American constitutional landscape.
“When we think about the Court-packing plan we have an idea that the Court was way out of line. That it was striking down good, good laws,” Lithwick said. “No, these were well-intentioned laws, but…it’s not the case…they were horrified by the really very quick…one after another churning out legislation,” she explained.
But by 1936, “the Court has covered the constitutional landscape and has knocked down not only laws that were sloppily drafted, but laws that were exceedingly carefully drafted,” Shesol said. The Court decided with sweeping opinions to “pre-emptively overrule any such legislation in the future” so President Roosevelt came to believe that no matter how legislation was drafted, it was the justices themselves who would prevent the advance of anything he tried to do, Shesol added.
President Roosevelt thought the Constitution “was a very flexible instrument” and that the doctrines used to strike down the New Deal were obsolete, Shesol explained. Yet it’s evident in the conservative justices’ letters that they “believe [President] Roosevelt is centralizing power in his own hands” and both the Court and [President] Roosevelt viewed this constitutional argument as one about the survival of democracy and believed that a dictatorship would rise out of the ashes of failure, Shesol said.
The competing ideologies of constitutional formalism versus the notion of an elastic, living constitution have as much of an effect on legislative decisions today as they did in President Roosevelt’s day. Lithwick described the book as “manna from heaven” because of its timeliness in the current discussion of “jurisprudential theories and originalism” evolving around President Barack Obama’s decision to criticize the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in his State of the Union address. “Eighty percent of the public hated the Citizens United decision,” she said. Clearly, the Court is “way out of whack” with public opinion.
Even today’s linguistic framework for conversations about the Supreme Court and presidential powers have not evolved much from the 1930s. Organic law and theories of evolution are still used to defend the living Constitution argument, versus constitutional formalism’s “language about how the constitution is set in stone, how it’s sort of oracular, and how it’s divine and this notion that the constitution is the secular Ten Commandments, it’s immutable, it doesn’t change,” Lithwick said.
There is a “perfect alignment between one’s economic views and one’s constitutional views in this way,” Shesol added. “If you believed that reform was essential…you tended to see the necessity to have the constitution … evolve with our understanding of contemporary realities. If you were pretty comfortable with the established order…you tended to be drawn to a kind of jurisprudence…that really had no room for these wild social experiments,” he said.
The prevailing Court model right now is to be an umpire with “the language of constraint” and do as little as possible so that you don’t appear to support more presidential power, Lithwick lamented. “We happen to be in a sort of trough right now in history where to talk about the idea that the Constitution seeks to protect minorities or seeks to protect the underprivileged is to look reckless,” she said. It has also become somewhat taboo to challenge the finite nature of the Constitution and insist that it’s a living document that should fit the times.
Conservatives have dominated the conversation on the Constitution for the last couple of decades, and we need to hear progressives assert their points of view, Shesol said. “What [President] Roosevelt understood and what he constantly reiterated is that this argument between these two notions of the Constitution goes back to the nation’s founding…and so [President] Roosevelt made this argument with a sense of supreme self-confidence that he was true to the intentions of the founders,” Shesol continued, “And we have somehow—on the progressive side—allowed the conservatives…to get away with the argument that the founders were universally in favor of smaller, weaker government, and state’s rights and so forth…and [President] Roosevelt didn’t believe that. I don’t imagine President Obama believes it either but it would be useful thing to hear him say forcefully.”
The two moments in time are very similar, but the key difference is that now we don’t have “a full-fledged coherent” progressive view of the Constitution, Lithwick said. This is a much more “one-sided view of the Constitution…but this is a moment where the president has decided to take on the Court” with Citizens United, she explained. Yet his argument against the decision has been a pragmatic one—that this decision can open up our elections to foreign interests—rather than a constitutional argument, despite the fact that he’s a constitutional professor.
“[President] Roosevelt was defending a whole set of policies that saved the country, that saved capitalism, created a modern social welfare system and renewed the concept of equal opportunity,” Halpin said. “Perhaps part of the problem today is that the issues outside of, say, the health bill, don’t seem as pressing.”
Featured Speakers:
Jeff Shesol, author, Supreme Power
Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor, Slate
Moderated by:
John Halpin, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
PHOTO CREDIT:
Ralph Alswang
Photographer
202-487-5025
ralph@ralphphoto.com
We have a snowy winter here in Russia...
Once, many years ago, we had a street cleaner whose name was Ignatich. He was one of those people whose age is difficult to determine. He can be recognized from afar by a shaggy beard and mustache. He wore the same clothes in the winter and summer: cap with ear-flaps, striped vest, valenki and quilted jacket that never was buttoned up even in the dead of winter. Lacking education, he could argue long about world politics or tell you about the dialectic of Hegel and Kant, sitting in his back room and eating immutable "bullheads in a tomato sauce."
He was building ice-hills and often gave us candies when we were kids.
The MOC representing the moment while Ignatich has a break for a smoking. (not propaganda)
From www.artic.edu/artexplorer/search.php?tab=2&resource=272:
A study of van Gogh's visually and psychologically powerful landscape of a small, enclosed park near his home.
In February 1888, Vincent van Gogh left Paris for Arles, in southern France, hoping that the warm climate would renew his art. Installed in a small residence known as the Yellow House, van Gogh soon began to envision "The Studio of the South," an artists' cooperative whose presiding genius would be Paul Gauguin, whom he had met the previous November. Gauguin did go to Arles that October—supported by Vincent's brother Theo, an art dealer—but the high-strung temperaments of both artists made prolonged cohabitation difficult. After nine weeks, van Gogh suffered a breakdown and mutilated his own left ear, prompting Gauguin's return to Paris.
In anticipation of Gauguin's arrival in Arles, van Gogh embarked on a number of paintings intended for Gauguin's bedroom. Four of these works depict the Poet's Garden, a small, enclosed public park directly in front of the Yellow House. "I have tried to distill in the decoration . . . the immutable character of this country," van Gogh wrote to Gauguin, noting further that he had sought to picture the motif "in such a way that one is put in mind of the old poet from these parts (or rather from Avignon), Petrarch, and of the new poet from these parts—Paul Gauguin."
The view is unprepossessing, but van Gogh infused the park's unkempt grass and trees with great vitality by means of repetitive brush strokes and thick impasto, especially in the chrome-yellow sky and scraggly foliage. Prominent in this teeming, autumnal tapestry are a compact, round bush and a "weeping" tree (van Gogh's own characterization); their contrasting forms evoke the psychological tension between resolve and release. At the left, we glimpse the purplish tower of the church of St. Trophime, the only reminder of the bustling town beyond the garden walls.
An analysis of the artist's painting of an Arles garden, including its emotional and symbolic meaning for van Gogh.
On February 20, 1888, van Gogh arrived in the southern Provençal town of Arles, France. With the financial help of his brother Theo, he was able to rent, furnish, and ultimately move into the Yellow House in September. Van Gogh's second-floor bedroom looked directly over Place Lamartine, a small public park that served as a lush oasis amidst the active town of Arles. This painting depicts the garden's southeast section as confirmed by the appearance of the pale blue-purple belfry of the medieval church of Sainte Trophîme just visible past the foliage in the background.
In a letter written around mid–September, van Gogh states that he has just created a painting of "a corner of a garden with a weeping tree, grass, round clipped cedar shrubs and an oleander bushthere is a citron sky over everything, and also the colors have the richness and intensity of autumn." This serene, sunny landscape was the first of a four-painting series destined as a décoration—a series of linked pictures—for the bedroom Gauguin would occupy in the Yellow House. With Gauguin's bedroom as its destination, this series enabled van Gogh to engage in an ongoing dialogue with his potential collaborator. In their letters the two artists exchanged ideas, questions, and artistic philosophies; the Poet's Garden paintings became visual manifestations of the letters' words.
The garden's vitality, from its unkempt grass to its thriving trees, is conveyed by van Gogh's repetitive brushstrokes and his use of thick impasto. Seasons appear to change before our eyes from the lush greens of summer to the crisp deep golds of fall. The "citron" sky consists of layered horizontal strokes of yellow and lime, giving the sky both solidity and vibrancy. Rather than focusing on the optical effect of juxtaposed complementary colors, here van Gogh seems to be more interested in the total effect of a more limited range of colors.
By calling the painting The Poet's Garden, van Gogh intentionally linked the image to the 14th-century poets Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), about whom he had been reading in a recently published article on Italian Renaissance literature. Van Gogh's thoughts dwelt on Petrarch because he recalled that the poet had lived in nearby Avignon. As the artist wrote, "What I wanted was to paint the garden in such a way that one would think of the old poet from here (or rather from Avignon), Petrarch, and at the same time of the new poet living here—Paul Gauguin" In other words, van Gogh hoped that his artistic partnership with Gauguin would parallel the passionate, spiritual, and intellectual mentor-student relationship shared by the earlier poets. Van Gogh envisioned himself as Boccaccio, tutored by the older poet-artist, Gauguin.
Further symbolic associations may be found in van Gogh's inclusion of the oleander bush, the scraggly limbs of the weeping tree, and the upright cypress tree. Van Gogh attached meaning to the painting based on personal and conventional symbols: for him, the oleander bush was symbolic of Boccaccio and of hope that the new collaboration of the two painters would be fruitful; the "weeping" tree expressed mourning and loss; while the cypress was a symbol of death and immortality. Such symbolic imagery conveys van Gogh's doubts and fears that Gauguin would not come to Arles, and that they would never realize the dream of a Studio of the South. His fears, however, were allayed as the new poet (Gauguin) arrived in Arles to stay in his own bedroom overlooking Place Lamartine's Poet's Garden approximately one month later.
Tain is a royal burgh and parish in the County of Ross, in the Highlands of Scotland.
The name derives from the nearby River Tain, the name of which comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'flow'. The Gaelic name, Baile Dubhthaich, means 'Duthac's town', after a local saint also known as Duthus.
Tain was granted its first royal charter in 1066, making it Scotland's oldest royal burgh, commemorated in 1966 with the opening of the Rose Garden by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. The 1066 charter, granted by King Malcolm III, confirmed Tain as a sanctuary, where people could claim the protection of the church, and an immunity, in which resident merchants and traders were exempt from certain taxes.
Little is known of earlier history although the town owed much of its importance to Duthac. He was an early Christian figure, perhaps 8th or 9th century, whose shrine had become so important by 1066 that it resulted in the royal charter. The ruined chapel near the mouth of the river was said to have been built on the site of his birth. Duthac became an official saint in 1419 and by the late Middle Ages his shrine was an important place of pilgrimage in Scotland. King James IV came at least once a year throughout his reign to achieve both spiritual and political aims.
A leading landowning family of the area, the Clan Munro, provided political and religious figures to the town, including the dissenter the Rev. John Munro of Tain (died ca. 1630).
The early Duthac Chapel was the centre of a sanctuary. Fugitives were by tradition given sanctuary in several square miles marked by boundary stones. During the First War of Scottish Independence, Robert the Bruce sent his wife and daughter to the sanctuary for safety. The sanctuary was violated and they were captured by forces loyal to William II, Earl of Ross who handed them over to Edward I of England.
Tain railway station is on the Far North Line. The station is unmanned; in its heyday it had 30 staff. The station was opened by the Highland Railway on 1 January 1864. From 1 January 1923, the station was owned by the London Midland and Scottish Railway. Then in 1948 the British railways were nationalised as British Railways. After the railways were privatised, the station was served by ScotRail.
Notable buildings in the town include Tain Tolbooth and St Duthus Collegiate Church. The town also has a local history museum, Tain Through Time, and the Glenmorangie distillery.
Tain has two primary schools; Craighill (274 pupils as of April 2011) and Knockbreck (just under 120 pupils as of April 2011). There is also a secondary school, Tain Royal Academy, with 590 pupils as of January 2017.
With conflict looming in the 1930s, an aerodrome large enough for bombers was built next to the town on low alluvial land known as the Fendom bordering the Dornoch Firth.[11] It was home to British, Czech (311 Sqn) and Polish airmen during the Second World War.
It was abandoned as a flying location after the war and converted to a bombing range for the Fleet Air Arm. In 1939 RAF Lossiemouth opened and was used until 1946 when the airfield was transferred to the Admiralty and becoming Royal Naval Air Station (RNAS) Lossiemouth then returning to the RAF in 1972 as an RAF airfield and the Tain range reverted to the RAF. Large parts of the original aerodrome were returned to civilian use after the Second World War and some are still accessible.
Tain Golf Club offers a Championship length links golf course. Overlooking the Dornoch Firth, the course was first designed by Old Tom Morris in 1890.
Tain is represented in the Scottish Football Association affiliated North Caledonian Football League by senior football club St Duthus Football Club during the regular football season.
The Gizzen Briggs are sandbars at the entrance to the Dornoch Firth, and with the right wind, they can be heard at low tide. The so-called "million dollar view" to the north-west of Tain, accessible via the A836 westward towards Bonar Bridge and then the B9176 Struie Road, gives a panoramic view of Dornoch Firth and Sutherland.
Five important castles are in the vicinity – Carbisdale Castle, built for the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland and now a youth hostel; Skibo Castle, once home of the industrialist Andrew Carnegie and now a hotel; Dunrobin Castle, ancestral seat of the Duke of Sutherland (castle and gardens open to the public); Balnagown Castle, ancestral seat of the Clan Ross, restored and owned by Mohammed Al Fayed; and Ballone Castle, restored by the owners of a local crafts business.
Highland Fine Cheeses, run by Ruaridh Stone (the brother of Liberal Democrat MP Jamie Stone), have a factory at Blarliath Farm, Tain.
Just outside Hill of Fearn near Tain lies the site of the medieval Fearn Abbey.
Tain was a parliamentary burgh, combined with Dingwall, Dornoch, Kirkwall and Wick in the Northern Burghs constituency of the House of Commons of the Parliament of Great Britain from 1708 to 1801 and of the Parliament of the United Kingdom from 1801 to 1918. The constituency was a district of burghs known also as Tain Burghs until 1832, and then as Wick Burghs. It was represented by one Member of Parliament (MP). In 1918 the constituency was abolished, and Tain was merged into Ross and Cromarty.
Notable people
Saint Duthac (1000–1065), 11th century saint
Sir John Fraser (1885–1947), surgeon
Peter Fraser (1884–1950), 24th prime minister of New Zealand, was born in Hill of Fearn, near Tain.
George MacKenzie (1886–1957), president of the Institute of Banking, 1941–45
Rev John Munro of Tain, 17th-century religious dissenter, was a minister here.
David Robertson (born 1962), former Free Church of Scotland moderator and Christian commentator, grew up in Portmahomack.
Elizabeth Ness MacBean Ross (1878–1915), physician who was raised here and attended Tain Royal Academy.
John Ross (1726–1800), merchant during the American Revolution
Walter Ross Taylor (1805–1896), served as Moderator of the General Assembly to the Free Church of Scotland in 1884.
Professor Thomas Summers West (1927–2010), an internationally acclaimed analytical chemist, went to school at Tain Royal Academy.
The Highlands is a historical region of Scotland. Culturally, the Highlands and the Lowlands diverged from the Late Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots language replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands. The term is also used for the area north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, although the exact boundaries are not clearly defined, particularly to the east. The Great Glen divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands. The Scottish Gaelic name of A' Ghàidhealtachd literally means "the place of the Gaels" and traditionally, from a Gaelic-speaking point of view, includes both the Western Isles and the Highlands.
The area is very sparsely populated, with many mountain ranges dominating the region, and includes the highest mountain in the British Isles, Ben Nevis. During the 18th and early 19th centuries the population of the Highlands rose to around 300,000, but from c. 1841 and for the next 160 years, the natural increase in population was exceeded by emigration (mostly to Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and migration to the industrial cities of Scotland and England.) and passim The area is now one of the most sparsely populated in Europe. At 9.1/km2 (24/sq mi) in 2012, the population density in the Highlands and Islands is less than one seventh of Scotland's as a whole.
The Highland Council is the administrative body for much of the Highlands, with its administrative centre at Inverness. However, the Highlands also includes parts of the council areas of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Argyll and Bute, Moray, North Ayrshire, Perth and Kinross, Stirling and West Dunbartonshire.
The Scottish Highlands is the only area in the British Isles to have the taiga biome as it features concentrated populations of Scots pine forest: see Caledonian Forest. It is the most mountainous part of the United Kingdom.
Between the 15th century and the mid-20th century, the area differed from most of the Lowlands in terms of language. In Scottish Gaelic, the region is known as the Gàidhealtachd, because it was traditionally the Gaelic-speaking part of Scotland, although the language is now largely confined to The Hebrides. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably but have different meanings in their respective languages. Scottish English (in its Highland form) is the predominant language of the area today, though Highland English has been influenced by Gaelic speech to a significant extent. Historically, the "Highland line" distinguished the two Scottish cultures. While the Highland line broadly followed the geography of the Grampians in the south, it continued in the north, cutting off the north-eastern areas, that is Eastern Caithness, Orkney and Shetland, from the more Gaelic Highlands and Hebrides.
Historically, the major social unit of the Highlands was the clan. Scottish kings, particularly James VI, saw clans as a challenge to their authority; the Highlands was seen by many as a lawless region. The Scots of the Lowlands viewed the Highlanders as backward and more "Irish". The Highlands were seen as the overspill of Gaelic Ireland. They made this distinction by separating Germanic "Scots" English and the Gaelic by renaming it "Erse" a play on Eire. Following the Union of the Crowns, James VI had the military strength to back up any attempts to impose some control. The result was, in 1609, the Statutes of Iona which started the process of integrating clan leaders into Scottish society. The gradual changes continued into the 19th century, as clan chiefs thought of themselves less as patriarchal leaders of their people and more as commercial landlords. The first effect on the clansmen who were their tenants was the change to rents being payable in money rather than in kind. Later, rents were increased as Highland landowners sought to increase their income. This was followed, mostly in the period 1760–1850, by agricultural improvement that often (particularly in the Western Highlands) involved clearance of the population to make way for large scale sheep farms. Displaced tenants were set up in crofting communities in the process. The crofts were intended not to provide all the needs of their occupiers; they were expected to work in other industries such as kelping and fishing. Crofters came to rely substantially on seasonal migrant work, particularly in the Lowlands. This gave impetus to the learning of English, which was seen by many rural Gaelic speakers to be the essential "language of work".
Older historiography attributes the collapse of the clan system to the aftermath of the Jacobite risings. This is now thought less influential by historians. Following the Jacobite rising of 1745 the British government enacted a series of laws to try to suppress the clan system, including bans on the bearing of arms and the wearing of tartan, and limitations on the activities of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Most of this legislation was repealed by the end of the 18th century as the Jacobite threat subsided. There was soon a rehabilitation of Highland culture. Tartan was adopted for Highland regiments in the British Army, which poor Highlanders joined in large numbers in the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1790–1815). Tartan had largely been abandoned by the ordinary people of the region, but in the 1820s, tartan and the kilt were adopted by members of the social elite, not just in Scotland, but across Europe. The international craze for tartan, and for idealising a romanticised Highlands, was set off by the Ossian cycle, and further popularised by the works of Walter Scott. His "staging" of the visit of King George IV to Scotland in 1822 and the king's wearing of tartan resulted in a massive upsurge in demand for kilts and tartans that could not be met by the Scottish woollen industry. Individual clan tartans were largely designated in this period and they became a major symbol of Scottish identity. This "Highlandism", by which all of Scotland was identified with the culture of the Highlands, was cemented by Queen Victoria's interest in the country, her adoption of Balmoral as a major royal retreat, and her interest in "tartenry".
Recurrent famine affected the Highlands for much of its history, with significant instances as late as 1817 in the Eastern Highlands and the early 1850s in the West. Over the 18th century, the region had developed a trade of black cattle into Lowland markets, and this was balanced by imports of meal into the area. There was a critical reliance on this trade to provide sufficient food, and it is seen as an essential prerequisite for the population growth that started in the 18th century. Most of the Highlands, particularly in the North and West was short of the arable land that was essential for the mixed, run rig based, communal farming that existed before agricultural improvement was introduced into the region.[a] Between the 1760s and the 1830s there was a substantial trade in unlicensed whisky that had been distilled in the Highlands. Lowland distillers (who were not able to avoid the heavy taxation of this product) complained that Highland whisky made up more than half the market. The development of the cattle trade is taken as evidence that the pre-improvement Highlands was not an immutable system, but did exploit the economic opportunities that came its way. The illicit whisky trade demonstrates the entrepreneurial ability of the peasant classes.
Agricultural improvement reached the Highlands mostly over the period 1760 to 1850. Agricultural advisors, factors, land surveyors and others educated in the thinking of Adam Smith were keen to put into practice the new ideas taught in Scottish universities. Highland landowners, many of whom were burdened with chronic debts, were generally receptive to the advice they offered and keen to increase the income from their land. In the East and South the resulting change was similar to that in the Lowlands, with the creation of larger farms with single tenants, enclosure of the old run rig fields, introduction of new crops (such as turnips), land drainage and, as a consequence of all this, eviction, as part of the Highland clearances, of many tenants and cottars. Some of those cleared found employment on the new, larger farms, others moved to the accessible towns of the Lowlands.
In the West and North, evicted tenants were usually given tenancies in newly created crofting communities, while their former holdings were converted into large sheep farms. Sheep farmers could pay substantially higher rents than the run rig farmers and were much less prone to falling into arrears. Each croft was limited in size so that the tenants would have to find work elsewhere. The major alternatives were fishing and the kelp industry. Landlords took control of the kelp shores, deducting the wages earned by their tenants from the rent due and retaining the large profits that could be earned at the high prices paid for the processed product during the Napoleonic wars.
When the Napoleonic wars finished in 1815, the Highland industries were affected by the return to a peacetime economy. The price of black cattle fell, nearly halving between 1810 and the 1830s. Kelp prices had peaked in 1810, but reduced from £9 a ton in 1823 to £3 13s 4d a ton in 1828. Wool prices were also badly affected. This worsened the financial problems of debt-encumbered landlords. Then, in 1846, potato blight arrived in the Highlands, wiping out the essential subsistence crop for the overcrowded crofting communities. As the famine struck, the government made clear to landlords that it was their responsibility to provide famine relief for their tenants. The result of the economic downturn had been that a large proportion of Highland estates were sold in the first half of the 19th century. T M Devine points out that in the region most affected by the potato famine, by 1846, 70 per cent of the landowners were new purchasers who had not owned Highland property before 1800. More landlords were obliged to sell due to the cost of famine relief. Those who were protected from the worst of the crisis were those with extensive rental income from sheep farms. Government loans were made available for drainage works, road building and other improvements and many crofters became temporary migrants – taking work in the Lowlands. When the potato famine ceased in 1856, this established a pattern of more extensive working away from the Highlands.
The unequal concentration of land ownership remained an emotional and controversial subject, of enormous importance to the Highland economy, and eventually became a cornerstone of liberal radicalism. The poor crofters were politically powerless, and many of them turned to religion. They embraced the popularly oriented, fervently evangelical Presbyterian revival after 1800. Most joined the breakaway "Free Church" after 1843. This evangelical movement was led by lay preachers who themselves came from the lower strata, and whose preaching was implicitly critical of the established order. The religious change energised the crofters and separated them from the landlords; it helped prepare them for their successful and violent challenge to the landlords in the 1880s through the Highland Land League. Violence erupted, starting on the Isle of Skye, when Highland landlords cleared their lands for sheep and deer parks. It was quietened when the government stepped in, passing the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act, 1886 to reduce rents, guarantee fixity of tenure, and break up large estates to provide crofts for the homeless. This contrasted with the Irish Land War underway at the same time, where the Irish were intensely politicised through roots in Irish nationalism, while political dimensions were limited. In 1885 three Independent Crofter candidates were elected to Parliament, which listened to their pleas. The results included explicit security for the Scottish smallholders in the "crofting counties"; the legal right to bequeath tenancies to descendants; and the creation of a Crofting Commission. The Crofters as a political movement faded away by 1892, and the Liberal Party gained their votes.
Today, the Highlands are the largest of Scotland's whisky producing regions; the relevant area runs from Orkney to the Isle of Arran in the south and includes the northern isles and much of Inner and Outer Hebrides, Argyll, Stirlingshire, Arran, as well as sections of Perthshire and Aberdeenshire. (Other sources treat The Islands, except Islay, as a separate whisky producing region.) This massive area has over 30 distilleries, or 47 when the Islands sub-region is included in the count. According to one source, the top five are The Macallan, Glenfiddich, Aberlour, Glenfarclas and Balvenie. While Speyside is geographically within the Highlands, that region is specified as distinct in terms of whisky productions. Speyside single malt whiskies are produced by about 50 distilleries.
According to Visit Scotland, Highlands whisky is "fruity, sweet, spicy, malty". Another review states that Northern Highlands single malt is "sweet and full-bodied", the Eastern Highlands and Southern Highlands whiskies tend to be "lighter in texture" while the distilleries in the Western Highlands produce single malts with a "much peatier influence".
The Scottish Reformation achieved partial success in the Highlands. Roman Catholicism remained strong in some areas, owing to remote locations and the efforts of Franciscan missionaries from Ireland, who regularly came to celebrate Mass. There remain significant Catholic strongholds within the Highlands and Islands such as Moidart and Morar on the mainland and South Uist and Barra in the southern Outer Hebrides. The remoteness of the region and the lack of a Gaelic-speaking clergy undermined the missionary efforts of the established church. The later 18th century saw somewhat greater success, owing to the efforts of the SSPCK missionaries and to the disruption of traditional society after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. In the 19th century, the evangelical Free Churches, which were more accepting of Gaelic language and culture, grew rapidly, appealing much more strongly than did the established church.
For the most part, however, the Highlands are considered predominantly Protestant, belonging to the Church of Scotland. In contrast to the Catholic southern islands, the northern Outer Hebrides islands (Lewis, Harris and North Uist) have an exceptionally high proportion of their population belonging to the Protestant Free Church of Scotland or the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Outer Hebrides have been described as the last bastion of Calvinism in Britain and the Sabbath remains widely observed. Inverness and the surrounding area has a majority Protestant population, with most locals belonging to either The Kirk or the Free Church of Scotland. The church maintains a noticeable presence within the area, with church attendance notably higher than in other parts of Scotland. Religion continues to play an important role in Highland culture, with Sabbath observance still widely practised, particularly in the Hebrides.
In traditional Scottish geography, the Highlands refers to that part of Scotland north-west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which crosses mainland Scotland in a near-straight line from Helensburgh to Stonehaven. However the flat coastal lands that occupy parts of the counties of Nairnshire, Morayshire, Banffshire and Aberdeenshire are often excluded as they do not share the distinctive geographical and cultural features of the rest of the Highlands. The north-east of Caithness, as well as Orkney and Shetland, are also often excluded from the Highlands, although the Hebrides are usually included. The Highland area, as so defined, differed from the Lowlands in language and tradition, having preserved Gaelic speech and customs centuries after the anglicisation of the latter; this led to a growing perception of a divide, with the cultural distinction between Highlander and Lowlander first noted towards the end of the 14th century. In Aberdeenshire, the boundary between the Highlands and the Lowlands is not well defined. There is a stone beside the A93 road near the village of Dinnet on Royal Deeside which states 'You are now in the Highlands', although there are areas of Highland character to the east of this point.
A much wider definition of the Highlands is that used by the Scotch whisky industry. Highland single malts are produced at distilleries north of an imaginary line between Dundee and Greenock, thus including all of Aberdeenshire and Angus.
Inverness is regarded as the Capital of the Highlands, although less so in the Highland parts of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Perthshire and Stirlingshire which look more to Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, and Stirling as their commercial centres.
The Highland Council area, created as one of the local government regions of Scotland, has been a unitary council area since 1996. The council area excludes a large area of the southern and eastern Highlands, and the Western Isles, but includes Caithness. Highlands is sometimes used, however, as a name for the council area, as in the former Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service. Northern is also used to refer to the area, as in the former Northern Constabulary. These former bodies both covered the Highland council area and the island council areas of Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles.
Much of the Highlands area overlaps the Highlands and Islands area. An electoral region called Highlands and Islands is used in elections to the Scottish Parliament: this area includes Orkney and Shetland, as well as the Highland Council local government area, the Western Isles and most of the Argyll and Bute and Moray local government areas. Highlands and Islands has, however, different meanings in different contexts. It means Highland (the local government area), Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles in Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service. Northern, as in Northern Constabulary, refers to the same area as that covered by the fire and rescue service.
There have been trackways from the Lowlands to the Highlands since prehistoric times. Many traverse the Mounth, a spur of mountainous land that extends from the higher inland range to the North Sea slightly north of Stonehaven. The most well-known and historically important trackways are the Causey Mounth, Elsick Mounth, Cryne Corse Mounth and Cairnamounth.
Although most of the Highlands is geographically on the British mainland, it is somewhat less accessible than the rest of Britain; thus most UK couriers categorise it separately, alongside Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and other offshore islands. They thus charge additional fees for delivery to the Highlands, or exclude the area entirely. While the physical remoteness from the largest population centres inevitably leads to higher transit cost, there is confusion and consternation over the scale of the fees charged and the effectiveness of their communication, and the use of the word Mainland in their justification. Since the charges are often based on postcode areas, many far less remote areas, including some which are traditionally considered part of the lowlands, are also subject to these charges. Royal Mail is the only delivery network bound by a Universal Service Obligation to charge a uniform tariff across the UK. This, however, applies only to mail items and not larger packages which are dealt with by its Parcelforce division.
The Highlands lie to the north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which runs from Arran to Stonehaven. This part of Scotland is largely composed of ancient rocks from the Cambrian and Precambrian periods which were uplifted during the later Caledonian Orogeny. Smaller formations of Lewisian gneiss in the northwest are up to 3 billion years old. The overlying rocks of the Torridon Sandstone form mountains in the Torridon Hills such as Liathach and Beinn Eighe in Wester Ross.
These foundations are interspersed with many igneous intrusions of a more recent age, the remnants of which have formed mountain massifs such as the Cairngorms and the Cuillin of Skye. A significant exception to the above are the fossil-bearing beds of Old Red Sandstone found principally along the Moray Firth coast and partially down the Highland Boundary Fault. The Jurassic beds found in isolated locations on Skye and Applecross reflect the complex underlying geology. They are the original source of much North Sea oil. The Great Glen is formed along a transform fault which divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands.
The entire region was covered by ice sheets during the Pleistocene ice ages, save perhaps for a few nunataks. The complex geomorphology includes incised valleys and lochs carved by the action of mountain streams and ice, and a topography of irregularly distributed mountains whose summits have similar heights above sea-level, but whose bases depend upon the amount of denudation to which the plateau has been subjected in various places.
Climate
The region is much warmer than other areas at similar latitudes (such as Kamchatka in Russia, or Labrador in Canada) because of the Gulf Stream making it cool, damp and temperate. The Köppen climate classification is "Cfb" at low altitudes, then becoming "Cfc", "Dfc" and "ET" at higher altitudes.
Places of interest
An Teallach
Aonach Mòr (Nevis Range ski centre)
Arrochar Alps
Balmoral Castle
Balquhidder
Battlefield of Culloden
Beinn Alligin
Beinn Eighe
Ben Cruachan hydro-electric power station
Ben Lomond
Ben Macdui (second highest mountain in Scotland and UK)
Ben Nevis (highest mountain in Scotland and UK)
Cairngorms National Park
Cairngorm Ski centre near Aviemore
Cairngorm Mountains
Caledonian Canal
Cape Wrath
Carrick Castle
Castle Stalker
Castle Tioram
Chanonry Point
Conic Hill
Culloden Moor
Dunadd
Duart Castle
Durness
Eilean Donan
Fingal's Cave (Staffa)
Fort George
Glen Coe
Glen Etive
Glen Kinglas
Glen Lyon
Glen Orchy
Glenshee Ski Centre
Glen Shiel
Glen Spean
Glenfinnan (and its railway station and viaduct)
Grampian Mountains
Hebrides
Highland Folk Museum – The first open-air museum in the UK.
Highland Wildlife Park
Inveraray Castle
Inveraray Jail
Inverness Castle
Inverewe Garden
Iona Abbey
Isle of Staffa
Kilchurn Castle
Kilmartin Glen
Liathach
Lecht Ski Centre
Loch Alsh
Loch Ard
Loch Awe
Loch Assynt
Loch Earn
Loch Etive
Loch Fyne
Loch Goil
Loch Katrine
Loch Leven
Loch Linnhe
Loch Lochy
Loch Lomond
Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park
Loch Lubnaig
Loch Maree
Loch Morar
Loch Morlich
Loch Ness
Loch Nevis
Loch Rannoch
Loch Tay
Lochranza
Luss
Meall a' Bhuiridh (Glencoe Ski Centre)
Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary at Loch Creran
Rannoch Moor
Red Cuillin
Rest and Be Thankful stretch of A83
River Carron, Wester Ross
River Spey
River Tay
Ross and Cromarty
Smoo Cave
Stob Coire a' Chàirn
Stac Polly
Strathspey Railway
Sutherland
Tor Castle
Torridon Hills
Urquhart Castle
West Highland Line (scenic railway)
West Highland Way (Long-distance footpath)
Wester Ross
Supreme Power
Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
April 14, 2010, 12:00pm – 1:00pm
To watch the event, click here: www.americanprogress.org//events/2010/04/supreme.html
Scholars are asking the same questions about the role of the Supreme Court today as they were back in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s time when he tried to expand the Supreme Court and stack it with his supporters: “Was it the judge’s role to essentially pass on the wisdom of economic legislation? Or was it the judges’ role to essentially … let Congress do what it felt needed to be done to advance the general welfare?” Author Jeff Shesol posed these questions at a CAP event last Wednesday about his new book Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court. Shesol was joined by Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate, on a panel moderated by John Halpin, Senior Fellow at CAP.
Halpin summarized the book as a three-act drama of the stability of democracy itself. “One is a decades-long ideological battle between competing world views about government, the economy, and the Constitution,” he said, “the second is how this ideological battle plays out politically in relation to the Court in the 1930s. And then there’s the third act that’s a little more implied, which is what’s the long-term legacy of this battle, both ideologically and politically for the New Deal and for…debates about the Court and jurisprudence throughout the 20th century,” Halpin explained.
The Supreme Court shot down each item on President Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda beginning in 1935. The impoverished social and economic situation meant that violent revolution was a real threat in the United States by late 1936 and early 1937. President Roosevelt was looking for a solution that was “constitutional, and that was quick and that would be effective,” Shesol said. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mandate the number of seats on the Supreme Court, so President Roosevelt decided to expand the Court to 15 judges and pack it with liberals. His plan failed, split the Democratic Party, and transformed the American constitutional landscape.
“When we think about the Court-packing plan we have an idea that the Court was way out of line. That it was striking down good, good laws,” Lithwick said. “No, these were well-intentioned laws, but…it’s not the case…they were horrified by the really very quick…one after another churning out legislation,” she explained.
But by 1936, “the Court has covered the constitutional landscape and has knocked down not only laws that were sloppily drafted, but laws that were exceedingly carefully drafted,” Shesol said. The Court decided with sweeping opinions to “pre-emptively overrule any such legislation in the future” so President Roosevelt came to believe that no matter how legislation was drafted, it was the justices themselves who would prevent the advance of anything he tried to do, Shesol added.
President Roosevelt thought the Constitution “was a very flexible instrument” and that the doctrines used to strike down the New Deal were obsolete, Shesol explained. Yet it’s evident in the conservative justices’ letters that they “believe [President] Roosevelt is centralizing power in his own hands” and both the Court and [President] Roosevelt viewed this constitutional argument as one about the survival of democracy and believed that a dictatorship would rise out of the ashes of failure, Shesol said.
The competing ideologies of constitutional formalism versus the notion of an elastic, living constitution have as much of an effect on legislative decisions today as they did in President Roosevelt’s day. Lithwick described the book as “manna from heaven” because of its timeliness in the current discussion of “jurisprudential theories and originalism” evolving around President Barack Obama’s decision to criticize the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in his State of the Union address. “Eighty percent of the public hated the Citizens United decision,” she said. Clearly, the Court is “way out of whack” with public opinion.
Even today’s linguistic framework for conversations about the Supreme Court and presidential powers have not evolved much from the 1930s. Organic law and theories of evolution are still used to defend the living Constitution argument, versus constitutional formalism’s “language about how the constitution is set in stone, how it’s sort of oracular, and how it’s divine and this notion that the constitution is the secular Ten Commandments, it’s immutable, it doesn’t change,” Lithwick said.
There is a “perfect alignment between one’s economic views and one’s constitutional views in this way,” Shesol added. “If you believed that reform was essential…you tended to see the necessity to have the constitution … evolve with our understanding of contemporary realities. If you were pretty comfortable with the established order…you tended to be drawn to a kind of jurisprudence…that really had no room for these wild social experiments,” he said.
The prevailing Court model right now is to be an umpire with “the language of constraint” and do as little as possible so that you don’t appear to support more presidential power, Lithwick lamented. “We happen to be in a sort of trough right now in history where to talk about the idea that the Constitution seeks to protect minorities or seeks to protect the underprivileged is to look reckless,” she said. It has also become somewhat taboo to challenge the finite nature of the Constitution and insist that it’s a living document that should fit the times.
Conservatives have dominated the conversation on the Constitution for the last couple of decades, and we need to hear progressives assert their points of view, Shesol said. “What [President] Roosevelt understood and what he constantly reiterated is that this argument between these two notions of the Constitution goes back to the nation’s founding…and so [President] Roosevelt made this argument with a sense of supreme self-confidence that he was true to the intentions of the founders,” Shesol continued, “And we have somehow—on the progressive side—allowed the conservatives…to get away with the argument that the founders were universally in favor of smaller, weaker government, and state’s rights and so forth…and [President] Roosevelt didn’t believe that. I don’t imagine President Obama believes it either but it would be useful thing to hear him say forcefully.”
The two moments in time are very similar, but the key difference is that now we don’t have “a full-fledged coherent” progressive view of the Constitution, Lithwick said. This is a much more “one-sided view of the Constitution…but this is a moment where the president has decided to take on the Court” with Citizens United, she explained. Yet his argument against the decision has been a pragmatic one—that this decision can open up our elections to foreign interests—rather than a constitutional argument, despite the fact that he’s a constitutional professor.
“[President] Roosevelt was defending a whole set of policies that saved the country, that saved capitalism, created a modern social welfare system and renewed the concept of equal opportunity,” Halpin said. “Perhaps part of the problem today is that the issues outside of, say, the health bill, don’t seem as pressing.”
Featured Speakers:
Jeff Shesol, author, Supreme Power
Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor, Slate
Moderated by:
John Halpin, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
PHOTO CREDIT:
Ralph Alswang
Photographer
202-487-5025
ralph@ralphphoto.com
by: Flaming Lotus Girls
from: San Francisco, CA
year: 2017
Suspended 20 feet above the Playa, NOETICA looks solid and imposing. The artwork evokes universal themes and flows from one portion of the sculpture to another. Upon nearing, it becomes clear that the piece is in sinuous and seductive motion, and that the movements are interconnected from cube to cube; just as ideas, originally thought of as fixed and immutable, become fluid and linked with cooperation and communication. Viewers participate in creating this movement, and interact with the piece by working together to move the smaller joystick, causing the larger piece to move in a similar fashion. Coordinated movement is rewarded with fire and lighting effects. At night, poofers dance in the sky as golden images move on the playa surface below.
URL: m.facebook.com/Flaminglotusgirls/ Contact: info@flaminglotus.com
Supreme Power
Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
April 14, 2010, 12:00pm – 1:00pm
To watch the event, click here: www.americanprogress.org//events/2010/04/supreme.html
Scholars are asking the same questions about the role of the Supreme Court today as they were back in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s time when he tried to expand the Supreme Court and stack it with his supporters: “Was it the judge’s role to essentially pass on the wisdom of economic legislation? Or was it the judges’ role to essentially … let Congress do what it felt needed to be done to advance the general welfare?” Author Jeff Shesol posed these questions at a CAP event last Wednesday about his new book Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court. Shesol was joined by Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate, on a panel moderated by John Halpin, Senior Fellow at CAP.
Halpin summarized the book as a three-act drama of the stability of democracy itself. “One is a decades-long ideological battle between competing world views about government, the economy, and the Constitution,” he said, “the second is how this ideological battle plays out politically in relation to the Court in the 1930s. And then there’s the third act that’s a little more implied, which is what’s the long-term legacy of this battle, both ideologically and politically for the New Deal and for…debates about the Court and jurisprudence throughout the 20th century,” Halpin explained.
The Supreme Court shot down each item on President Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda beginning in 1935. The impoverished social and economic situation meant that violent revolution was a real threat in the United States by late 1936 and early 1937. President Roosevelt was looking for a solution that was “constitutional, and that was quick and that would be effective,” Shesol said. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mandate the number of seats on the Supreme Court, so President Roosevelt decided to expand the Court to 15 judges and pack it with liberals. His plan failed, split the Democratic Party, and transformed the American constitutional landscape.
“When we think about the Court-packing plan we have an idea that the Court was way out of line. That it was striking down good, good laws,” Lithwick said. “No, these were well-intentioned laws, but…it’s not the case…they were horrified by the really very quick…one after another churning out legislation,” she explained.
But by 1936, “the Court has covered the constitutional landscape and has knocked down not only laws that were sloppily drafted, but laws that were exceedingly carefully drafted,” Shesol said. The Court decided with sweeping opinions to “pre-emptively overrule any such legislation in the future” so President Roosevelt came to believe that no matter how legislation was drafted, it was the justices themselves who would prevent the advance of anything he tried to do, Shesol added.
President Roosevelt thought the Constitution “was a very flexible instrument” and that the doctrines used to strike down the New Deal were obsolete, Shesol explained. Yet it’s evident in the conservative justices’ letters that they “believe [President] Roosevelt is centralizing power in his own hands” and both the Court and [President] Roosevelt viewed this constitutional argument as one about the survival of democracy and believed that a dictatorship would rise out of the ashes of failure, Shesol said.
The competing ideologies of constitutional formalism versus the notion of an elastic, living constitution have as much of an effect on legislative decisions today as they did in President Roosevelt’s day. Lithwick described the book as “manna from heaven” because of its timeliness in the current discussion of “jurisprudential theories and originalism” evolving around President Barack Obama’s decision to criticize the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in his State of the Union address. “Eighty percent of the public hated the Citizens United decision,” she said. Clearly, the Court is “way out of whack” with public opinion.
Even today’s linguistic framework for conversations about the Supreme Court and presidential powers have not evolved much from the 1930s. Organic law and theories of evolution are still used to defend the living Constitution argument, versus constitutional formalism’s “language about how the constitution is set in stone, how it’s sort of oracular, and how it’s divine and this notion that the constitution is the secular Ten Commandments, it’s immutable, it doesn’t change,” Lithwick said.
There is a “perfect alignment between one’s economic views and one’s constitutional views in this way,” Shesol added. “If you believed that reform was essential…you tended to see the necessity to have the constitution … evolve with our understanding of contemporary realities. If you were pretty comfortable with the established order…you tended to be drawn to a kind of jurisprudence…that really had no room for these wild social experiments,” he said.
The prevailing Court model right now is to be an umpire with “the language of constraint” and do as little as possible so that you don’t appear to support more presidential power, Lithwick lamented. “We happen to be in a sort of trough right now in history where to talk about the idea that the Constitution seeks to protect minorities or seeks to protect the underprivileged is to look reckless,” she said. It has also become somewhat taboo to challenge the finite nature of the Constitution and insist that it’s a living document that should fit the times.
Conservatives have dominated the conversation on the Constitution for the last couple of decades, and we need to hear progressives assert their points of view, Shesol said. “What [President] Roosevelt understood and what he constantly reiterated is that this argument between these two notions of the Constitution goes back to the nation’s founding…and so [President] Roosevelt made this argument with a sense of supreme self-confidence that he was true to the intentions of the founders,” Shesol continued, “And we have somehow—on the progressive side—allowed the conservatives…to get away with the argument that the founders were universally in favor of smaller, weaker government, and state’s rights and so forth…and [President] Roosevelt didn’t believe that. I don’t imagine President Obama believes it either but it would be useful thing to hear him say forcefully.”
The two moments in time are very similar, but the key difference is that now we don’t have “a full-fledged coherent” progressive view of the Constitution, Lithwick said. This is a much more “one-sided view of the Constitution…but this is a moment where the president has decided to take on the Court” with Citizens United, she explained. Yet his argument against the decision has been a pragmatic one—that this decision can open up our elections to foreign interests—rather than a constitutional argument, despite the fact that he’s a constitutional professor.
“[President] Roosevelt was defending a whole set of policies that saved the country, that saved capitalism, created a modern social welfare system and renewed the concept of equal opportunity,” Halpin said. “Perhaps part of the problem today is that the issues outside of, say, the health bill, don’t seem as pressing.”
Featured Speakers:
Jeff Shesol, author, Supreme Power
Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor, Slate
Moderated by:
John Halpin, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
PHOTO CREDIT:
Ralph Alswang
Photographer
202-487-5025
ralph@ralphphoto.com
When historians of art apply the term “sacred” to any and every work that has a religious subject, they overlook the fact that art is essentially form. An art cannot be called sacred solely because its subjects derive from spiritual truths; its formal language must also derive from the same source. This is by no means the case with a religious art like that of the Renaissance or Baroque periods, which, as far as style is concerned, in no way differs from the fundamentally profane art of those periods; neither its subjects, which, in a wholly outward and so to speak literary manner, it takes from religion, nor the devotional feelings with which it is often permeated, nor even the nobility of soul which sometimes finds expression in it, suffice to confer on it a truly sacred character. No art merits the epithet sacred unless its very forms reflect the spiritual vision characteristic of a particular religion.
Every form “vehicles” a particular quality of being. The religious subject of a work of art can be merely superimposed on a form, in which case it lacks any relation to the formal “language” of the work, as is demonstrated by Christian art since the Renaissance. Such productions are merely profane works of art with a religious theme.
On the other hand, there is no sacred art which is profane in form, for there is a rigorous analogy between form and spirit. A spiritual vision necessarily finds its expression in a particular formal language. If this language has been forgotten—with the result that a socalled sacred art draws its forms from absolutely any kind of profane art—it means that a spiritual vision of things no longer exists.
It would be meaningless to seek to excuse the protean style of a religious art, or its indefinite and ill-defined character, on the grounds of the universality of dogma or the freedom of the spirit. Granted that spirituality in itself is independent of forms, this in no way implies that it can be expressed and transmitted by any and every kind of form. Through its qualitative essence, form has a place in the sensible order analogous to that of truth in the intellectual order; this is the significance of the Greek notion of eidos.
Just as a mental form, such as a dogma or a doctrine, can be an adequate, albeit limited, reflection of a Divine Truth, so a sensible form can retrace a truth or a reality which transcends both the plane of sensible forms and the plane of thought. Every sacred art is therefore founded on a science of forms, or in other words, on the symbolism inherent in forms.
It must be borne in mind that a sacred symbol is not merely a conventional sign; it manifests its archetype by virtue of a certain ontological law.
As Ananda Coomaraswamy has observed, a sacred symbol is, in a sense, that which it expresses. For this very reason, traditional symbolism is never devoid of beauty. In the terms of a spiritual vision of the world, the beauty of an object is nothing other than the transparency of its existential envelopes. An art worthy of the name is beautiful because it is true.
It is neither possible nor necessary that every artist or craftsman engaged in sacred art be conscious of the Divine Law inherent in forms; he will only know certain aspects of it, or certain applications that arise within the limits of the rules of his craft. These rules will enable him to paint an icon, to fashion a sacred vessel, or to practice calligraphy in a liturgically valid manner, without it being necessary for him to know the ultimate significance of the symbols he is working with. It is tradition that transmits the sacred models and the working rules, and thereby guarantees the spiritual validity of the forms.
Tradition possesses a secret power which is communicated to an entire civilization and determines even those arts and crafts whose immediate objects include nothing particularly sacred.
This power creates the style of a traditional civilization. A style—something that cannot be imitated from the outside—is perpetuated without difficulty, in a quasi-organic manner, by the sole power of the spirit by which it is animated.
One of the most tenacious of modern prejudices is the one that opposes the impersonal and objective rules of an art for fear that they might stifle creative genius. In reality, there is no traditional work—one governed by immutable principles—which does not give sensible expression to creative joy in the soul; modern individualism, on the other hand, has produced, apart from a few works of genius which are nevertheless spiritually barren, all the ugliness—the endless and hopeless ugliness—of the forms that fill the “ordinary life” of our time.
One of the fundamental conditions of happiness is to know that everything one does has an eternal meaning; but who at the present time can still conceive of a civilization in which all its vital aspects are developed “in the likeness of Heaven”? In a theocentric society, the humblest activity participates in this heavenly benediction.
The ultimate objective of sacred art is not to evoke feelings or communicate impressions; it is a symbol, and as such it employs simple and primordial means. It cannot in any case be anything more than allusive, its real object being ineffable. It is of angelic origin, because its models reflect supra-formal realities. By recapitulating the creation—the “Divine art”—in parables, it demonstrates the symbolical nature of the world, and so liberates the human spirit from its attachment to crude and ephemeral “facts”.
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Titus Burckhardt: The Universality of Sacred Art
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Icon: The vision of St. Eulogius
The theme of this icon is drawn from the sayings of the Desert Fathers, intended for the spiritual edification of monks. It illustrates the story of the vision of Eulogius of Alexandria. During a service, he saw angels distributing gold, silver, and bronze coins to the monks according to their degree of asceticism; the negligent were given nothing.
In the foreground, two holy abbots who are doubtless Sergius of Radonezh and Cyril of Belozersk bow down before a bowl containing offerings of bread. Their blessing prefigures the Eucharist, evoked by the Virgin and Child—an image of the Incarnation aligned with the altar, a promise of the Sacrifice and Resurrection.
C’était un vieux solitaire, un de ces vieux sans âge. Vieux dès sa retraite et durant les décennies qui suivirent, sans qu'il ne changea plus.
Il ne parlait jamais a personne a croire qu il avait même oublié le prénom de tous ses proches, que jamais ils n’entendirent les nommer. Un vieux qui tous les jours du reste de sa vie se mettait en route, dodelinant dune prothèse de hanche à l'autre. Il marchait sur l'ancien chemin muletier et disparaissait chaque fois au premier virage Mais tout le monde savait ou il allait. Sur son lopin de terre, un endroit qui sent la nostalgie, un lieu ou le temps s'est arrêté. Mais personne ne savait ce qu il y faisait, sur cette friche abandonnée.
Il s’asseyait tous les jours au même endroit, sur la même pierre. Sous le plus beau de ses oliviers. Celui qui semblait avoir reçu tous les bienfaits de la nature, même encore jeune, Il était déjà majestueux, et forçait le respect.
C’était l'olivier le plus productif, donnant les plus beaux fruits. Pourtant le seul dont le vieux n'en ramassa jamais un seul, redonnant a la terre ce qu'elle avait produit, de plus beau, pour un cycle perpétuel. Étrangement il ne l'avait jamais taillé. Ne pouvant se résoudre a lui couper les bras. Mais ce qu'il craignait par dessus tout c'était cet aspect mort avant la repousse, il n'aurait pu le vivre.
Le rituel était immuable, pourtant aucun jour ne se ressemblait. Durant les longues heures assis sous sa protection, il l'attendait puis l'écoutait. Le moindre souffle de vent, se muait en souffle de vie. Le bruissement de ses feuilles se métamorphosait en chuchotement, parfois des cris ou des pitreries. Les jours de grâce, il lui parlait vraiment, alors on aurait pu surprendre le vieil homme, lui répondre. Le vieux silencieux parlait donc, mais seulement à son Dieu.
L'hiver il y avait des jours de colère et des bourrasques de rage. Qu'ils se pardonnaient, au printemps, à la plus belle époque de la floraison. Les milliers de petites fleurs blanches, l'habillaient de ses habits de noce. Le vent jouait sa plus belle mélodie, il chantait la vie. Les petites étoiles, finissaient par joncher le sol, alors il était sur un nuage parmi les cieux, au paradis, ensemble.
Les jours les plus durs étaient ceux de l’été, lorsque la chaleur était suffocante, pas un brin d'air pas un mot, seulement le silence et le vide de l'attente. Alors on pouvait voir des gouttelettes couler le long de ses joues, et tomber à terre, pour se mêler à ses racines.
Après des années, d'attente, ils se rejoignirent pour toujours. Les cendres de mon grand père, furent rependues, au pied de l'Olivier, qu'il avait planté avec son fils, parti bien trop jeune. Ils continuent encore aujourd'hui à se nourrir l'un de l'autre. Cet arbre généalogique qui prend racine sur ma terre, est aujourd'hui le lieu de halte des randonneurs sur le chemin des moulins. C'est sous sa protection qu'a été mis un banc et une table, où les promeneurs qui savent écouter, peuvent entendre leur histoire.
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He was an old loner, one of those ageless old men. Old from the moment he retired and for decades afterward, he never changed.
He never spoke to anyone, as if he had even forgotten the first names of all his loved ones, whom they never heard called. An old man who, every day for the rest of his life, set out on a journey, swaying from one hip replacement to the next. He walked along the old mule track and disappeared around the first bend. But everyone knew where he was going. To his plot of land, a place that smacks of nostalgia, a place where time has stood still. But no one knew what he was doing there, on this abandoned wasteland.
He sat every day in the same spot, on the same stone. Under the most beautiful of his olive trees. He who seemed to have received all of nature's blessings, even while still young, was already majestic and commanded respect.
It was the most productive olive tree, yielding the most beautiful fruit. Yet it was the only one from which the old man never picked a single one, giving back to the earth what it had produced, the most beautiful, for a perpetual cycle. Strangely, he had never pruned it. Unable to bring himself to cut off its arms. But what he feared above all was that dead appearance before regrowth; he would not have been able to (re)live it.
The ritual was immutable, yet no two days were alike. During the long hours sitting under her protection, he waited for her and then listened. The slightest breath of wind turned into a breath of life. The rustling of his leaves metamorphosed into whispers, sometimes cries or antics. On days of grace, he truly spoke to her, then one could have surprised the old man, answered him. The silent old man spoke, then, but only to his God.
In winter, there were days of anger and gusts of rage. They were forgiven, in spring, at the most beautiful time of bloom. The thousands of small white flowers dressed him in his wedding attire. The wind played its most beautiful melody, it sang of life. The small stars ended up strewn across the ground, then he was on a cloud among the precious, in paradise, together.
The hardest days were those of summer, when the heat was stifling, not a breath of air, not a word, only silence and the emptiness of waiting. Then you could see droplets running down her cheeks, falling to the ground, to mingle with her roots.
After years of waiting, they were reunited forever. My grandfather's ashes were spread at the foot of the olive tree he had planted with his son, who had passed away far too young. They continue to nourish each other to this day. This family tree, which takes root on my land, is now a stopping place for hikers on the path to the mills. It is under its protection that a bench and a table were placed, where walkers who know how to listen can hear their story.
Falls of Shin is a waterfall on the River Shin, in northern Scotland, near the villages of Bonar Bridge and Lairg.
Falls of Shin had a popular visitor centre, managed as part of Balnagown Estates, a company owned by former Harrods boss Mohamed Al-Fayed. This included a restaurant, a branch of Harrods, and a waxwork model of Al-Fayed. The visitor centre was destroyed by a fire in May 2013. Balnagown Estates have since been working with the Kyle of Sutherland Development Trust to develop a new visitor attraction. In May 2017, the new visitor centre opened following the successful construction carried out by William Gray Construction. The opening event was dubbed "Celebra-Shin". The cafe is currently operated by Mac & Wild- a company created by Andy Waugh and Calum MacKinnon with 2 restaurants in London and Falls of Shin being their third.
The Falls of Shin were dynamited to improve the salmon access.
Aside from the Salmon Viewing Platform, the site also comprises a Mini Golf Course, Woodland Walks and a large Children's Playpark.
The Highlands is a historical region of Scotland. Culturally, the Highlands and the Lowlands diverged from the Late Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots language replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands. The term is also used for the area north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, although the exact boundaries are not clearly defined, particularly to the east. The Great Glen divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands. The Scottish Gaelic name of A' Ghàidhealtachd literally means "the place of the Gaels" and traditionally, from a Gaelic-speaking point of view, includes both the Western Isles and the Highlands.
The area is very sparsely populated, with many mountain ranges dominating the region, and includes the highest mountain in the British Isles, Ben Nevis. During the 18th and early 19th centuries the population of the Highlands rose to around 300,000, but from c. 1841 and for the next 160 years, the natural increase in population was exceeded by emigration (mostly to Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and migration to the industrial cities of Scotland and England.) and passim The area is now one of the most sparsely populated in Europe. At 9.1/km2 (24/sq mi) in 2012, the population density in the Highlands and Islands is less than one seventh of Scotland's as a whole.
The Highland Council is the administrative body for much of the Highlands, with its administrative centre at Inverness. However, the Highlands also includes parts of the council areas of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Argyll and Bute, Moray, North Ayrshire, Perth and Kinross, Stirling and West Dunbartonshire.
The Scottish Highlands is the only area in the British Isles to have the taiga biome as it features concentrated populations of Scots pine forest: see Caledonian Forest. It is the most mountainous part of the United Kingdom.
Between the 15th century and the mid-20th century, the area differed from most of the Lowlands in terms of language. In Scottish Gaelic, the region is known as the Gàidhealtachd, because it was traditionally the Gaelic-speaking part of Scotland, although the language is now largely confined to The Hebrides. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably but have different meanings in their respective languages. Scottish English (in its Highland form) is the predominant language of the area today, though Highland English has been influenced by Gaelic speech to a significant extent. Historically, the "Highland line" distinguished the two Scottish cultures. While the Highland line broadly followed the geography of the Grampians in the south, it continued in the north, cutting off the north-eastern areas, that is Eastern Caithness, Orkney and Shetland, from the more Gaelic Highlands and Hebrides.
Historically, the major social unit of the Highlands was the clan. Scottish kings, particularly James VI, saw clans as a challenge to their authority; the Highlands was seen by many as a lawless region. The Scots of the Lowlands viewed the Highlanders as backward and more "Irish". The Highlands were seen as the overspill of Gaelic Ireland. They made this distinction by separating Germanic "Scots" English and the Gaelic by renaming it "Erse" a play on Eire. Following the Union of the Crowns, James VI had the military strength to back up any attempts to impose some control. The result was, in 1609, the Statutes of Iona which started the process of integrating clan leaders into Scottish society. The gradual changes continued into the 19th century, as clan chiefs thought of themselves less as patriarchal leaders of their people and more as commercial landlords. The first effect on the clansmen who were their tenants was the change to rents being payable in money rather than in kind. Later, rents were increased as Highland landowners sought to increase their income. This was followed, mostly in the period 1760–1850, by agricultural improvement that often (particularly in the Western Highlands) involved clearance of the population to make way for large scale sheep farms. Displaced tenants were set up in crofting communities in the process. The crofts were intended not to provide all the needs of their occupiers; they were expected to work in other industries such as kelping and fishing. Crofters came to rely substantially on seasonal migrant work, particularly in the Lowlands. This gave impetus to the learning of English, which was seen by many rural Gaelic speakers to be the essential "language of work".
Older historiography attributes the collapse of the clan system to the aftermath of the Jacobite risings. This is now thought less influential by historians. Following the Jacobite rising of 1745 the British government enacted a series of laws to try to suppress the clan system, including bans on the bearing of arms and the wearing of tartan, and limitations on the activities of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Most of this legislation was repealed by the end of the 18th century as the Jacobite threat subsided. There was soon a rehabilitation of Highland culture. Tartan was adopted for Highland regiments in the British Army, which poor Highlanders joined in large numbers in the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1790–1815). Tartan had largely been abandoned by the ordinary people of the region, but in the 1820s, tartan and the kilt were adopted by members of the social elite, not just in Scotland, but across Europe. The international craze for tartan, and for idealising a romanticised Highlands, was set off by the Ossian cycle, and further popularised by the works of Walter Scott. His "staging" of the visit of King George IV to Scotland in 1822 and the king's wearing of tartan resulted in a massive upsurge in demand for kilts and tartans that could not be met by the Scottish woollen industry. Individual clan tartans were largely designated in this period and they became a major symbol of Scottish identity. This "Highlandism", by which all of Scotland was identified with the culture of the Highlands, was cemented by Queen Victoria's interest in the country, her adoption of Balmoral as a major royal retreat, and her interest in "tartenry".
Recurrent famine affected the Highlands for much of its history, with significant instances as late as 1817 in the Eastern Highlands and the early 1850s in the West. Over the 18th century, the region had developed a trade of black cattle into Lowland markets, and this was balanced by imports of meal into the area. There was a critical reliance on this trade to provide sufficient food, and it is seen as an essential prerequisite for the population growth that started in the 18th century. Most of the Highlands, particularly in the North and West was short of the arable land that was essential for the mixed, run rig based, communal farming that existed before agricultural improvement was introduced into the region.[a] Between the 1760s and the 1830s there was a substantial trade in unlicensed whisky that had been distilled in the Highlands. Lowland distillers (who were not able to avoid the heavy taxation of this product) complained that Highland whisky made up more than half the market. The development of the cattle trade is taken as evidence that the pre-improvement Highlands was not an immutable system, but did exploit the economic opportunities that came its way. The illicit whisky trade demonstrates the entrepreneurial ability of the peasant classes.
Agricultural improvement reached the Highlands mostly over the period 1760 to 1850. Agricultural advisors, factors, land surveyors and others educated in the thinking of Adam Smith were keen to put into practice the new ideas taught in Scottish universities. Highland landowners, many of whom were burdened with chronic debts, were generally receptive to the advice they offered and keen to increase the income from their land. In the East and South the resulting change was similar to that in the Lowlands, with the creation of larger farms with single tenants, enclosure of the old run rig fields, introduction of new crops (such as turnips), land drainage and, as a consequence of all this, eviction, as part of the Highland clearances, of many tenants and cottars. Some of those cleared found employment on the new, larger farms, others moved to the accessible towns of the Lowlands.
In the West and North, evicted tenants were usually given tenancies in newly created crofting communities, while their former holdings were converted into large sheep farms. Sheep farmers could pay substantially higher rents than the run rig farmers and were much less prone to falling into arrears. Each croft was limited in size so that the tenants would have to find work elsewhere. The major alternatives were fishing and the kelp industry. Landlords took control of the kelp shores, deducting the wages earned by their tenants from the rent due and retaining the large profits that could be earned at the high prices paid for the processed product during the Napoleonic wars.
When the Napoleonic wars finished in 1815, the Highland industries were affected by the return to a peacetime economy. The price of black cattle fell, nearly halving between 1810 and the 1830s. Kelp prices had peaked in 1810, but reduced from £9 a ton in 1823 to £3 13s 4d a ton in 1828. Wool prices were also badly affected. This worsened the financial problems of debt-encumbered landlords. Then, in 1846, potato blight arrived in the Highlands, wiping out the essential subsistence crop for the overcrowded crofting communities. As the famine struck, the government made clear to landlords that it was their responsibility to provide famine relief for their tenants. The result of the economic downturn had been that a large proportion of Highland estates were sold in the first half of the 19th century. T M Devine points out that in the region most affected by the potato famine, by 1846, 70 per cent of the landowners were new purchasers who had not owned Highland property before 1800. More landlords were obliged to sell due to the cost of famine relief. Those who were protected from the worst of the crisis were those with extensive rental income from sheep farms. Government loans were made available for drainage works, road building and other improvements and many crofters became temporary migrants – taking work in the Lowlands. When the potato famine ceased in 1856, this established a pattern of more extensive working away from the Highlands.
The unequal concentration of land ownership remained an emotional and controversial subject, of enormous importance to the Highland economy, and eventually became a cornerstone of liberal radicalism. The poor crofters were politically powerless, and many of them turned to religion. They embraced the popularly oriented, fervently evangelical Presbyterian revival after 1800. Most joined the breakaway "Free Church" after 1843. This evangelical movement was led by lay preachers who themselves came from the lower strata, and whose preaching was implicitly critical of the established order. The religious change energised the crofters and separated them from the landlords; it helped prepare them for their successful and violent challenge to the landlords in the 1880s through the Highland Land League. Violence erupted, starting on the Isle of Skye, when Highland landlords cleared their lands for sheep and deer parks. It was quietened when the government stepped in, passing the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act, 1886 to reduce rents, guarantee fixity of tenure, and break up large estates to provide crofts for the homeless. This contrasted with the Irish Land War underway at the same time, where the Irish were intensely politicised through roots in Irish nationalism, while political dimensions were limited. In 1885 three Independent Crofter candidates were elected to Parliament, which listened to their pleas. The results included explicit security for the Scottish smallholders in the "crofting counties"; the legal right to bequeath tenancies to descendants; and the creation of a Crofting Commission. The Crofters as a political movement faded away by 1892, and the Liberal Party gained their votes.
Today, the Highlands are the largest of Scotland's whisky producing regions; the relevant area runs from Orkney to the Isle of Arran in the south and includes the northern isles and much of Inner and Outer Hebrides, Argyll, Stirlingshire, Arran, as well as sections of Perthshire and Aberdeenshire. (Other sources treat The Islands, except Islay, as a separate whisky producing region.) This massive area has over 30 distilleries, or 47 when the Islands sub-region is included in the count. According to one source, the top five are The Macallan, Glenfiddich, Aberlour, Glenfarclas and Balvenie. While Speyside is geographically within the Highlands, that region is specified as distinct in terms of whisky productions. Speyside single malt whiskies are produced by about 50 distilleries.
According to Visit Scotland, Highlands whisky is "fruity, sweet, spicy, malty". Another review states that Northern Highlands single malt is "sweet and full-bodied", the Eastern Highlands and Southern Highlands whiskies tend to be "lighter in texture" while the distilleries in the Western Highlands produce single malts with a "much peatier influence".
The Scottish Reformation achieved partial success in the Highlands. Roman Catholicism remained strong in some areas, owing to remote locations and the efforts of Franciscan missionaries from Ireland, who regularly came to celebrate Mass. There remain significant Catholic strongholds within the Highlands and Islands such as Moidart and Morar on the mainland and South Uist and Barra in the southern Outer Hebrides. The remoteness of the region and the lack of a Gaelic-speaking clergy undermined the missionary efforts of the established church. The later 18th century saw somewhat greater success, owing to the efforts of the SSPCK missionaries and to the disruption of traditional society after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. In the 19th century, the evangelical Free Churches, which were more accepting of Gaelic language and culture, grew rapidly, appealing much more strongly than did the established church.
For the most part, however, the Highlands are considered predominantly Protestant, belonging to the Church of Scotland. In contrast to the Catholic southern islands, the northern Outer Hebrides islands (Lewis, Harris and North Uist) have an exceptionally high proportion of their population belonging to the Protestant Free Church of Scotland or the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Outer Hebrides have been described as the last bastion of Calvinism in Britain and the Sabbath remains widely observed. Inverness and the surrounding area has a majority Protestant population, with most locals belonging to either The Kirk or the Free Church of Scotland. The church maintains a noticeable presence within the area, with church attendance notably higher than in other parts of Scotland. Religion continues to play an important role in Highland culture, with Sabbath observance still widely practised, particularly in the Hebrides.
In traditional Scottish geography, the Highlands refers to that part of Scotland north-west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which crosses mainland Scotland in a near-straight line from Helensburgh to Stonehaven. However the flat coastal lands that occupy parts of the counties of Nairnshire, Morayshire, Banffshire and Aberdeenshire are often excluded as they do not share the distinctive geographical and cultural features of the rest of the Highlands. The north-east of Caithness, as well as Orkney and Shetland, are also often excluded from the Highlands, although the Hebrides are usually included. The Highland area, as so defined, differed from the Lowlands in language and tradition, having preserved Gaelic speech and customs centuries after the anglicisation of the latter; this led to a growing perception of a divide, with the cultural distinction between Highlander and Lowlander first noted towards the end of the 14th century. In Aberdeenshire, the boundary between the Highlands and the Lowlands is not well defined. There is a stone beside the A93 road near the village of Dinnet on Royal Deeside which states 'You are now in the Highlands', although there are areas of Highland character to the east of this point.
A much wider definition of the Highlands is that used by the Scotch whisky industry. Highland single malts are produced at distilleries north of an imaginary line between Dundee and Greenock, thus including all of Aberdeenshire and Angus.
Inverness is regarded as the Capital of the Highlands, although less so in the Highland parts of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Perthshire and Stirlingshire which look more to Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, and Stirling as their commercial centres.
The Highland Council area, created as one of the local government regions of Scotland, has been a unitary council area since 1996. The council area excludes a large area of the southern and eastern Highlands, and the Western Isles, but includes Caithness. Highlands is sometimes used, however, as a name for the council area, as in the former Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service. Northern is also used to refer to the area, as in the former Northern Constabulary. These former bodies both covered the Highland council area and the island council areas of Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles.
Much of the Highlands area overlaps the Highlands and Islands area. An electoral region called Highlands and Islands is used in elections to the Scottish Parliament: this area includes Orkney and Shetland, as well as the Highland Council local government area, the Western Isles and most of the Argyll and Bute and Moray local government areas. Highlands and Islands has, however, different meanings in different contexts. It means Highland (the local government area), Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles in Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service. Northern, as in Northern Constabulary, refers to the same area as that covered by the fire and rescue service.
There have been trackways from the Lowlands to the Highlands since prehistoric times. Many traverse the Mounth, a spur of mountainous land that extends from the higher inland range to the North Sea slightly north of Stonehaven. The most well-known and historically important trackways are the Causey Mounth, Elsick Mounth, Cryne Corse Mounth and Cairnamounth.
Although most of the Highlands is geographically on the British mainland, it is somewhat less accessible than the rest of Britain; thus most UK couriers categorise it separately, alongside Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and other offshore islands. They thus charge additional fees for delivery to the Highlands, or exclude the area entirely. While the physical remoteness from the largest population centres inevitably leads to higher transit cost, there is confusion and consternation over the scale of the fees charged and the effectiveness of their communication, and the use of the word Mainland in their justification. Since the charges are often based on postcode areas, many far less remote areas, including some which are traditionally considered part of the lowlands, are also subject to these charges. Royal Mail is the only delivery network bound by a Universal Service Obligation to charge a uniform tariff across the UK. This, however, applies only to mail items and not larger packages which are dealt with by its Parcelforce division.
The Highlands lie to the north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which runs from Arran to Stonehaven. This part of Scotland is largely composed of ancient rocks from the Cambrian and Precambrian periods which were uplifted during the later Caledonian Orogeny. Smaller formations of Lewisian gneiss in the northwest are up to 3 billion years old. The overlying rocks of the Torridon Sandstone form mountains in the Torridon Hills such as Liathach and Beinn Eighe in Wester Ross.
These foundations are interspersed with many igneous intrusions of a more recent age, the remnants of which have formed mountain massifs such as the Cairngorms and the Cuillin of Skye. A significant exception to the above are the fossil-bearing beds of Old Red Sandstone found principally along the Moray Firth coast and partially down the Highland Boundary Fault. The Jurassic beds found in isolated locations on Skye and Applecross reflect the complex underlying geology. They are the original source of much North Sea oil. The Great Glen is formed along a transform fault which divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands.
The entire region was covered by ice sheets during the Pleistocene ice ages, save perhaps for a few nunataks. The complex geomorphology includes incised valleys and lochs carved by the action of mountain streams and ice, and a topography of irregularly distributed mountains whose summits have similar heights above sea-level, but whose bases depend upon the amount of denudation to which the plateau has been subjected in various places.
Climate
The region is much warmer than other areas at similar latitudes (such as Kamchatka in Russia, or Labrador in Canada) because of the Gulf Stream making it cool, damp and temperate. The Köppen climate classification is "Cfb" at low altitudes, then becoming "Cfc", "Dfc" and "ET" at higher altitudes.
Places of interest
An Teallach
Aonach Mòr (Nevis Range ski centre)
Arrochar Alps
Balmoral Castle
Balquhidder
Battlefield of Culloden
Beinn Alligin
Beinn Eighe
Ben Cruachan hydro-electric power station
Ben Lomond
Ben Macdui (second highest mountain in Scotland and UK)
Ben Nevis (highest mountain in Scotland and UK)
Cairngorms National Park
Cairngorm Ski centre near Aviemore
Cairngorm Mountains
Caledonian Canal
Cape Wrath
Carrick Castle
Castle Stalker
Castle Tioram
Chanonry Point
Conic Hill
Culloden Moor
Dunadd
Duart Castle
Durness
Eilean Donan
Fingal's Cave (Staffa)
Fort George
Glen Coe
Glen Etive
Glen Kinglas
Glen Lyon
Glen Orchy
Glenshee Ski Centre
Glen Shiel
Glen Spean
Glenfinnan (and its railway station and viaduct)
Grampian Mountains
Hebrides
Highland Folk Museum – The first open-air museum in the UK.
Highland Wildlife Park
Inveraray Castle
Inveraray Jail
Inverness Castle
Inverewe Garden
Iona Abbey
Isle of Staffa
Kilchurn Castle
Kilmartin Glen
Liathach
Lecht Ski Centre
Loch Alsh
Loch Ard
Loch Awe
Loch Assynt
Loch Earn
Loch Etive
Loch Fyne
Loch Goil
Loch Katrine
Loch Leven
Loch Linnhe
Loch Lochy
Loch Lomond
Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park
Loch Lubnaig
Loch Maree
Loch Morar
Loch Morlich
Loch Ness
Loch Nevis
Loch Rannoch
Loch Tay
Lochranza
Luss
Meall a' Bhuiridh (Glencoe Ski Centre)
Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary at Loch Creran
Rannoch Moor
Red Cuillin
Rest and Be Thankful stretch of A83
River Carron, Wester Ross
River Spey
River Tay
Ross and Cromarty
Smoo Cave
Stob Coire a' Chàirn
Stac Polly
Strathspey Railway
Sutherland
Tor Castle
Torridon Hills
Urquhart Castle
West Highland Line (scenic railway)
West Highland Way (Long-distance footpath)
Wester Ross
Nikon D800E & Nikon AF-S Zoom Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8G ED AF Lens photos of my HDR Hero's Journey Mythology LA Gallery photos taken with a Nikon D800E & Nikon AF-S Zoom Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8G ED AF Lens! If I keep this up I may create a black hole! See the full-seize photos here:
www.flickr.com/photos/herosjourneymythology45surf/sets/72...
dx4/dt=ic & 45SURF Hero's Journey Mythology Photography (31 photos)
From press release: "Theoretical Physicist hosts Hero's Journey Mythology Photography Gallery Show in Honor of Moving Dimensions Theory Physics Research." Ph.D physicist and photographer Dr. E signs all of his fine art with dx4/dt=ic -- the foundational equation for Moving Dimensions Theory, which stipulates that the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at the rate of c--the velocity of light. His Princeton advisor, the late J.A. Wheeler, wrote "More intellectual curiosity, versatility and yen for physics than Elliot McGucken's I have never seen in any senior or graduate student," and Dr. E's award-winning artificial retina dissertation, titled Multiple Unit Artificial Retina Chipset to Aid the Visually Impaired and Enhanced CMOS Phototransistors is now helping the blind see. Though seemingly disparate pursuits, all three endeavors--the photography, retinal prosthesis, and MDT are united in light. For MDT stipulates that photons surf the fourth expanding dimension on their way to exciting electrons in our our retinas or camera chips. The Hero's Journey Mythology motif derives from the heroic pursuit of truth and beauty, calling the viewer to adventure--to turn up Beethoven's Eroica and join the fellowship. When Dr. E's Princeton mentor J.A. Wheeler passed away, the National Post wrote, "At 96, he had been the last notable figure from the Heroic Age of Physics lingering among us. . . the student of Bohr, teacher of Feynman, and close colleague of Einstein. . . Wheeler was as much philosopher-poet as scientist, seizing on Einsteinian relativity early . . . He was ready to believe in the new world before most physicists. . ." And so it is that in honor of the noble Wheeler and all the heroes of yore, the Hero's Journey Mythology Photography seeks to remind us that the heroic age has not yet passed, that it is everywhere we look, should we only look towards the immutable ideals which mark both nature's sublime beauty and the imperishable soul. Words alone can do little to honor those who came before, but only action in the service of truth and beauty--serving those who come hence--can truly honor those heroic spirits of all ages. — in Malibu, CA.
Los Angeles Gallery Show! Dr. Elliot McGucken's Fine Art Photography! Dr. E's Legendary Malibu & Socal HDR Photography!
Some photos of my fine art photography hanging in the gallery for all my flickr fans! Thanks for the 120,000,000+ views y'all!
Setting up in a gallery was fun! It did not seem like work. :) I even got to drive to Home Depot & buy lumber (pine), hammers, nails, and a saw! I added a few dozen feet of new wooden strips to hang all the Hero's Journey Mythology photography--white strips and grey strips--cut them, nailed them up, and painted them so that we could fit all my fine art photography in the gallery! I told them I have even more on flickr if they want more photos--haha. :)
Some photographs are 13"x19" metallic prints on Kodak metallic paper mounted on 18"x24" matts in wood frames with 2.5" black, wood-grain borders, set behind anti-reflective, UV protective, museum glass! Awesome--everyone asks "why didn't you put these behind glass" because the anti-reflective museum glass is so clear! Other fine art photographs are 24" x 36" printed on canvas wraps, or 24" x 36" printed on canvas and front-mounted to plexiglass / acryllic (I love these! Great for HDR)! And the finest ones are 40" x 60" laser-printed on Fuji-crystal archival paper, front mounted to UV-protective acryllic / plexiglass, with a solid aluminum backing for durablity! Heavy, but nice! :) Also have a couple huge 40"x70" (the motorcycle in Venice and Corvette on the PCH) printed straight on a sheet of metal! Some were printed on Canon, some on Epson, and others on a laser printer so expensive it doesn't even have a name. :) I saw it in downtown LA--it was HUGE!
This is my first gallery show, and the funny thing is that while setting it up and adding all the carpentry/new wood strips, I shot more photography than usual, getting up every day at 5 AM to shoot the sunrise at around 6:30-6:45 AM. The Journey Never Ends! As Malibu faces South, the sun rises over the water this time of year, and sets over it too! So it keeps me busy as I hate missing the awesomely magical December cirrus cloud sunrises & sunsets, some of which you see hanging in the gallery, with many, many more to come!
Well, all the best on your epic hero's journey! The gallery is just below Bel Air Camera in Westwood, and if you ever want to meet up, drop me a line! :)
Happy Holidays & Best on Your Epic Hero's Journey!
P.S. (Some folks have asked me when I am going to have a goddess gallery show--soon! :)
Supreme Power
Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
April 14, 2010, 12:00pm – 1:00pm
To watch the event, click here: www.americanprogress.org//events/2010/04/supreme.html
Scholars are asking the same questions about the role of the Supreme Court today as they were back in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s time when he tried to expand the Supreme Court and stack it with his supporters: “Was it the judge’s role to essentially pass on the wisdom of economic legislation? Or was it the judges’ role to essentially … let Congress do what it felt needed to be done to advance the general welfare?” Author Jeff Shesol posed these questions at a CAP event last Wednesday about his new book Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court. Shesol was joined by Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate, on a panel moderated by John Halpin, Senior Fellow at CAP.
Halpin summarized the book as a three-act drama of the stability of democracy itself. “One is a decades-long ideological battle between competing world views about government, the economy, and the Constitution,” he said, “the second is how this ideological battle plays out politically in relation to the Court in the 1930s. And then there’s the third act that’s a little more implied, which is what’s the long-term legacy of this battle, both ideologically and politically for the New Deal and for…debates about the Court and jurisprudence throughout the 20th century,” Halpin explained.
The Supreme Court shot down each item on President Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda beginning in 1935. The impoverished social and economic situation meant that violent revolution was a real threat in the United States by late 1936 and early 1937. President Roosevelt was looking for a solution that was “constitutional, and that was quick and that would be effective,” Shesol said. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mandate the number of seats on the Supreme Court, so President Roosevelt decided to expand the Court to 15 judges and pack it with liberals. His plan failed, split the Democratic Party, and transformed the American constitutional landscape.
“When we think about the Court-packing plan we have an idea that the Court was way out of line. That it was striking down good, good laws,” Lithwick said. “No, these were well-intentioned laws, but…it’s not the case…they were horrified by the really very quick…one after another churning out legislation,” she explained.
But by 1936, “the Court has covered the constitutional landscape and has knocked down not only laws that were sloppily drafted, but laws that were exceedingly carefully drafted,” Shesol said. The Court decided with sweeping opinions to “pre-emptively overrule any such legislation in the future” so President Roosevelt came to believe that no matter how legislation was drafted, it was the justices themselves who would prevent the advance of anything he tried to do, Shesol added.
President Roosevelt thought the Constitution “was a very flexible instrument” and that the doctrines used to strike down the New Deal were obsolete, Shesol explained. Yet it’s evident in the conservative justices’ letters that they “believe [President] Roosevelt is centralizing power in his own hands” and both the Court and [President] Roosevelt viewed this constitutional argument as one about the survival of democracy and believed that a dictatorship would rise out of the ashes of failure, Shesol said.
The competing ideologies of constitutional formalism versus the notion of an elastic, living constitution have as much of an effect on legislative decisions today as they did in President Roosevelt’s day. Lithwick described the book as “manna from heaven” because of its timeliness in the current discussion of “jurisprudential theories and originalism” evolving around President Barack Obama’s decision to criticize the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in his State of the Union address. “Eighty percent of the public hated the Citizens United decision,” she said. Clearly, the Court is “way out of whack” with public opinion.
Even today’s linguistic framework for conversations about the Supreme Court and presidential powers have not evolved much from the 1930s. Organic law and theories of evolution are still used to defend the living Constitution argument, versus constitutional formalism’s “language about how the constitution is set in stone, how it’s sort of oracular, and how it’s divine and this notion that the constitution is the secular Ten Commandments, it’s immutable, it doesn’t change,” Lithwick said.
There is a “perfect alignment between one’s economic views and one’s constitutional views in this way,” Shesol added. “If you believed that reform was essential…you tended to see the necessity to have the constitution … evolve with our understanding of contemporary realities. If you were pretty comfortable with the established order…you tended to be drawn to a kind of jurisprudence…that really had no room for these wild social experiments,” he said.
The prevailing Court model right now is to be an umpire with “the language of constraint” and do as little as possible so that you don’t appear to support more presidential power, Lithwick lamented. “We happen to be in a sort of trough right now in history where to talk about the idea that the Constitution seeks to protect minorities or seeks to protect the underprivileged is to look reckless,” she said. It has also become somewhat taboo to challenge the finite nature of the Constitution and insist that it’s a living document that should fit the times.
Conservatives have dominated the conversation on the Constitution for the last couple of decades, and we need to hear progressives assert their points of view, Shesol said. “What [President] Roosevelt understood and what he constantly reiterated is that this argument between these two notions of the Constitution goes back to the nation’s founding…and so [President] Roosevelt made this argument with a sense of supreme self-confidence that he was true to the intentions of the founders,” Shesol continued, “And we have somehow—on the progressive side—allowed the conservatives…to get away with the argument that the founders were universally in favor of smaller, weaker government, and state’s rights and so forth…and [President] Roosevelt didn’t believe that. I don’t imagine President Obama believes it either but it would be useful thing to hear him say forcefully.”
The two moments in time are very similar, but the key difference is that now we don’t have “a full-fledged coherent” progressive view of the Constitution, Lithwick said. This is a much more “one-sided view of the Constitution…but this is a moment where the president has decided to take on the Court” with Citizens United, she explained. Yet his argument against the decision has been a pragmatic one—that this decision can open up our elections to foreign interests—rather than a constitutional argument, despite the fact that he’s a constitutional professor.
“[President] Roosevelt was defending a whole set of policies that saved the country, that saved capitalism, created a modern social welfare system and renewed the concept of equal opportunity,” Halpin said. “Perhaps part of the problem today is that the issues outside of, say, the health bill, don’t seem as pressing.”
Featured Speakers:
Jeff Shesol, author, Supreme Power
Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor, Slate
Moderated by:
John Halpin, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
PHOTO CREDIT:
Ralph Alswang
Photographer
202-487-5025
ralph@ralphphoto.com
Slayer
Alcatraz - Milano
19 Giugno 2013
Tom Araya
Kerry King
Jeff Hanneman
Dave Lombardo
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati. L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
From the opening squeals of the guitars of Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman and the punishing breakaway attack of Dave Lombardo's drums on "Flesh Storm" it's clear from the first thirty seconds the thrash metal titans have returned to pummel listeners with a raging onslaught of new music guaranteed to lay waste to MP3 players, car stereo speakers and whatever else gets in their way.
Christ Illusion marks the long-awaited return of the legendary Slayer. Its first record in five years and its first record in fifteen years with the original band line-up, Christ Illusion is a cacophony of brutality. A soundtrack for the post-Apocalypse. Steeped in scorching riffs and a litany of menacing tracks/tirades on religion and violence, Slayer forges ahead on its devastating path of aural destruction with ten new songs, each charged with the electric hostility for which Slayer is renowned.
Of the record Kerry King is ecstatic: "I love it. I really like God Hates Us All and I think that's the best record we've done in my opinion since Seasons In The Abyss, and I like this better than that one. I think it's a more complete record, I think sonically it better: all the performances are awesome. I think this one is more intense not because we're trying to do 'Reign In Blood: The Sequel,' it's just that's where our writing is taking us now."
Songs like the "Flesh Storm," "Eyes of the Insane," "Skeleton Christ," "Jihad" and the first single, "Cult" showcase the band at its most blazing intensity. The sonic excitement of speed, propelled by King, Hanneman and Lombardo and lead by the immutable roar of Tom Araya provoke the listener with Slayer's trademark fascination with terror, violence and religion.
For as long as Slayer has been making records it has been surrounded by controversy.
Since the band recorded its first album, "Show No Mercy," Slayer has been plagued with accusations of Satanism, fascism, racism and so on. Christ Illusion gives no quarter to critics who would mindlessly attack the band for, what the Germans call, "der Reiz des Unbekannten" (meaning "the attraction of the unknown"). A lyric fascination with violence and terror which guitarist King enthusiastically describes this way: "When I was I kid I would see a horror movie over a love story. Being shocked, being in an environment that's not reality might be frightening but is cool nonetheless. With a lot of our songs we put people in that place. It doesn't bother me because I enjoy it. It could easily be programming from all the fucking news channels."
Slayer is often assailed for its subject matter, though the band is unrepentant. " According to Araya, "Violence, darkness... So much of my inspiration comes from news articles or pictures and just start describing the images. Television- A&E, the History Channel, Court TV, Documentaries."
The singer continues, "With this record, as far as a theme: there is none. That's just our favorite subject matter. The common thread is death. I think that's just a common thread in general: we all share death, and we all share it at different times in different ways, but it's the one thing that we all have in common. We all die. It's how we live that makes us different."
Beyond being controversial Slayer is an exceptional force in music, highly praised for its trailblazing style of fast, heavy and aggressive music yet bristling with melody. The much-heralded return of Dave Lombardo to the drummer's throne will leave fans gasping for breath as he clobbers the listener on song after song.
Commenting on Lombardo's return to the fold, King notes, "Not to say the shine's worn off, but it's old news to us. I think the thing the kids are going to get into, besides just being the first Slayer album in five years, is that Dave's on it. When he came back he wasn't a member, he just came back to do a couple of tours and people started asking back then 'Is he gonna hang around?' And I would tell them that was up to Dave. But I could tell that Dave was having a killer time." King confided. "So it was just a matter of time before he said, 'Yeah, let's do it!' But it's great. And now that he's got a new Slayer album that he's played on, I think he's going to get some more enjoyment out of playing. He takes pride in everything he does and it's awesome to have him back with us."
Having the original members record their first album together in fifteen years is certainly newsworthy but the lasting might of the band and its continued popularity is an achievement few can boast. For each of the members, the band is resolute. There is no other band like Slayer.
"The staying power behind Slayer is that we've stuck to our guns," Says Araya. "Integrity... that would be number one. A lot of it has to do with the fact that we've stuck to what we do best. And the fact that we've been together as a band for so long. Ten years with Dave; another ten without Dave; and now Dave's back. It has a lot to do with compromise, that's just the way it has to be. You have to be able to compromise and give and take and that has a lot to do with why we're still together and a force to be reckoned with. I've learned that without each other, Slayer wouldn't exist, and that the whole is greater than its parts."
Kerry King is far more succinct. "Slayer to me is the coolest band on the planet. There is a timeless quality to Slayer. It's cool, but I can't explain it. It's our life."
Slayer has created one mesmerizing record after the next, has influenced many of today's most successful bands, including Slipknot, Sepultura, Killswitch Engage, and continues to earn new generations of fans, while staying true to its ceaselessly devoted followers. Slayer's legacy is cemented in music forever and the band remains undaunted in its directive to make punishing, aggressive and exciting music. With Christ Illusion the band marks its territory. Slayer has exceeded itself far beyond thrash metal to become an unstoppable juggernaut without equal.
Tom Araya sums it up: "I think the best thing is the band's longevity and the fact that we haven't bowed to anyone. That we were able to make a record like Reign In Blood, which, to us, was just another record, but to others, was something very special, it's had such an impact. People will remember it for a long time, and it's all because we did things our way, we didn't bow down to anyone. We didn't compromise. We stuck to being who we are."
Supreme Power
Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
April 14, 2010, 12:00pm – 1:00pm
To watch the event, click here: www.americanprogress.org//events/2010/04/supreme.html
Scholars are asking the same questions about the role of the Supreme Court today as they were back in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s time when he tried to expand the Supreme Court and stack it with his supporters: “Was it the judge’s role to essentially pass on the wisdom of economic legislation? Or was it the judges’ role to essentially … let Congress do what it felt needed to be done to advance the general welfare?” Author Jeff Shesol posed these questions at a CAP event last Wednesday about his new book Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court. Shesol was joined by Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate, on a panel moderated by John Halpin, Senior Fellow at CAP.
Halpin summarized the book as a three-act drama of the stability of democracy itself. “One is a decades-long ideological battle between competing world views about government, the economy, and the Constitution,” he said, “the second is how this ideological battle plays out politically in relation to the Court in the 1930s. And then there’s the third act that’s a little more implied, which is what’s the long-term legacy of this battle, both ideologically and politically for the New Deal and for…debates about the Court and jurisprudence throughout the 20th century,” Halpin explained.
The Supreme Court shot down each item on President Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda beginning in 1935. The impoverished social and economic situation meant that violent revolution was a real threat in the United States by late 1936 and early 1937. President Roosevelt was looking for a solution that was “constitutional, and that was quick and that would be effective,” Shesol said. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mandate the number of seats on the Supreme Court, so President Roosevelt decided to expand the Court to 15 judges and pack it with liberals. His plan failed, split the Democratic Party, and transformed the American constitutional landscape.
“When we think about the Court-packing plan we have an idea that the Court was way out of line. That it was striking down good, good laws,” Lithwick said. “No, these were well-intentioned laws, but…it’s not the case…they were horrified by the really very quick…one after another churning out legislation,” she explained.
But by 1936, “the Court has covered the constitutional landscape and has knocked down not only laws that were sloppily drafted, but laws that were exceedingly carefully drafted,” Shesol said. The Court decided with sweeping opinions to “pre-emptively overrule any such legislation in the future” so President Roosevelt came to believe that no matter how legislation was drafted, it was the justices themselves who would prevent the advance of anything he tried to do, Shesol added.
President Roosevelt thought the Constitution “was a very flexible instrument” and that the doctrines used to strike down the New Deal were obsolete, Shesol explained. Yet it’s evident in the conservative justices’ letters that they “believe [President] Roosevelt is centralizing power in his own hands” and both the Court and [President] Roosevelt viewed this constitutional argument as one about the survival of democracy and believed that a dictatorship would rise out of the ashes of failure, Shesol said.
The competing ideologies of constitutional formalism versus the notion of an elastic, living constitution have as much of an effect on legislative decisions today as they did in President Roosevelt’s day. Lithwick described the book as “manna from heaven” because of its timeliness in the current discussion of “jurisprudential theories and originalism” evolving around President Barack Obama’s decision to criticize the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in his State of the Union address. “Eighty percent of the public hated the Citizens United decision,” she said. Clearly, the Court is “way out of whack” with public opinion.
Even today’s linguistic framework for conversations about the Supreme Court and presidential powers have not evolved much from the 1930s. Organic law and theories of evolution are still used to defend the living Constitution argument, versus constitutional formalism’s “language about how the constitution is set in stone, how it’s sort of oracular, and how it’s divine and this notion that the constitution is the secular Ten Commandments, it’s immutable, it doesn’t change,” Lithwick said.
There is a “perfect alignment between one’s economic views and one’s constitutional views in this way,” Shesol added. “If you believed that reform was essential…you tended to see the necessity to have the constitution … evolve with our understanding of contemporary realities. If you were pretty comfortable with the established order…you tended to be drawn to a kind of jurisprudence…that really had no room for these wild social experiments,” he said.
The prevailing Court model right now is to be an umpire with “the language of constraint” and do as little as possible so that you don’t appear to support more presidential power, Lithwick lamented. “We happen to be in a sort of trough right now in history where to talk about the idea that the Constitution seeks to protect minorities or seeks to protect the underprivileged is to look reckless,” she said. It has also become somewhat taboo to challenge the finite nature of the Constitution and insist that it’s a living document that should fit the times.
Conservatives have dominated the conversation on the Constitution for the last couple of decades, and we need to hear progressives assert their points of view, Shesol said. “What [President] Roosevelt understood and what he constantly reiterated is that this argument between these two notions of the Constitution goes back to the nation’s founding…and so [President] Roosevelt made this argument with a sense of supreme self-confidence that he was true to the intentions of the founders,” Shesol continued, “And we have somehow—on the progressive side—allowed the conservatives…to get away with the argument that the founders were universally in favor of smaller, weaker government, and state’s rights and so forth…and [President] Roosevelt didn’t believe that. I don’t imagine President Obama believes it either but it would be useful thing to hear him say forcefully.”
The two moments in time are very similar, but the key difference is that now we don’t have “a full-fledged coherent” progressive view of the Constitution, Lithwick said. This is a much more “one-sided view of the Constitution…but this is a moment where the president has decided to take on the Court” with Citizens United, she explained. Yet his argument against the decision has been a pragmatic one—that this decision can open up our elections to foreign interests—rather than a constitutional argument, despite the fact that he’s a constitutional professor.
“[President] Roosevelt was defending a whole set of policies that saved the country, that saved capitalism, created a modern social welfare system and renewed the concept of equal opportunity,” Halpin said. “Perhaps part of the problem today is that the issues outside of, say, the health bill, don’t seem as pressing.”
Featured Speakers:
Jeff Shesol, author, Supreme Power
Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor, Slate
Moderated by:
John Halpin, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
PHOTO CREDIT:
Ralph Alswang
Photographer
202-487-5025
ralph@ralphphoto.com
The mute swan (Cygnus olor) is a species of swan and a member of the waterfowl family Anatidae. It is native to much of Eurosiberia, and (as a rare winter visitor) the far north of Africa. It is an introduced species in North America, home to the largest populations outside of its native range, with additional smaller introductions in Australasia and southern Africa. The name "mute" derives from it being less vocal than other swan species. Measuring 125 to 160 cm (49 to 63 in) in length, this large swan is wholly white in plumage with an orange beak bordered with black. It is recognizable by its pronounced knob atop the beak, which is larger in males.
Taxonomy
The mute swan was first formally described by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin as Anas olor in 1789 and was transferred by Johann Matthäus Bechstein to the new genus Cygnus in 1803. Both cygnus and olor mean "swan" in Latin; cygnus is a variant form of cycnus, borrowing from Greek κύκνος kyknos, a word of the same meaning.
Despite its Eurasian origin, its closest relatives are the black swan of Australia and the black-necked swan of South America, not the other Northern Hemisphere swans of the genus Cygnus. The species is monotypic, with no living subspecies.
Evolution
Mute swan subfossils, 6,000 years old, have been found in post-glacial peat beds of East Anglia, Great Britain. They have been recorded from Ireland east to Portugal and Italy, and from France, 13,000 BP (Desbrosse and Mourer-Chauvire 1972–1973). Cygnus olor bergmanni, a paleosub species which differed only in size from the living bird, is known from fossils found in Azerbaijan. A related paleospecies recorded from fossils and subfossils is the Giant swan, Cygnus falconeri, a flightless species which lived on the islands of Malta and Sicily during the Middle Pleistocene.
Fossils of swan ancestors more distantly allied to the mute swan have been found in four U.S. states: California, Arizona, Idaho and Oregon. The timeline runs from the Miocene to the late Pleistocene or 10,000 BP. The latest find was in Anza Borrego Desert, a state park in California. Fossils from the Pleistocene include Cygnus paloregonus from Fossil Lake, Oregon, Froman's Ferry, Idaho, and Arizona, referred to by Howard in The Waterfowl of the World as "probably the mute type swan".
Description
Adults of this large swan typically range from 140 to 160 cm (55 to 63 in) long, although can range in extreme cases from 125 to 170 cm (49 to 67 in), with a 200 to 240 cm (79 to 94 in) wingspan. Males are larger than females and have a larger knob on their bill. On average, this is the second largest waterfowl species after the trumpeter swan, although male mute swans can easily match or even exceed a male trumpeter in mass. Among standard measurements of the mute swan, the wing chord measures 53–62.3 cm (20.9–24.5 in), the tarsus is 10–11.8 cm (3.9–4.6 in) and the bill is 6.9–9 cm (2.7–3.5 in). The plumage is white, while the legs are dark grey. The beak of the mute swan is bright orange, with black around the nostrils and a black nail.
The mute swan is one of the heaviest extant flying birds. In several studies from Great Britain, males (known as cobs) were found to average from about 10.6 to 11.87 kg (23.4 to 26.2 lb), with a weight range of 9.2–14.3 kg (20–32 lb) while the slightly smaller females (known as pens) averaged about 8.5 to 9.67 kg (18.7 to 21.3 lb), with a weight range of 7.6–10.6 kg (17–23 lb). While the top normal weight for a big cob is roughly 15 kg (33 lb), one unusually big Polish cob weighed almost 23 kg (51 lb) and this counts as the largest weight ever verified for a flying bird, although it has been questioned whether this heavyweight could still take flight.
Young birds, called cygnets, are not the bright white of mature adults, and their bill is dull greyish-black, not orange, for the first year. The down may range from pure white to grey to buff, with grey/buff the most common. The white cygnets have a leucistic gene. Cygnets grow quickly, reaching a size close to their adult size in approximately three months after hatching. Cygnets typically retain their grey feathers until they are at least one year old, with the down on their wings having been replaced by flight feathers earlier that year.
All mute swans are white at maturity, though the feathers (particularly on the head and neck) are often stained orange-brown by iron and tannins in the water.
Polish swan
The colour morph C. o. morpha immutabilis (immūtābilis is Latin for "immutable, unchangeable, unalterable"), also known as the "Polish swan", has pinkish (not dark grey) legs and dull white cygnets; as with white domestic geese, it is found only in populations with a history of domestication. Polish swans carry a copy of a gene responsible for leucism.
Behaviour
Mute swans nest on large mounds that they build with waterside vegetation in shallow water on islands in the middle or at the very edge of a lake. They are monogamous and often reuse the same nest each year, restoring or rebuilding it as needed. Male and female swans share the care of the nest, and once the cygnets are fledged it is not uncommon to see whole families looking for food. They feed on a wide range of vegetation, both submerged aquatic plants which they reach with their long necks, and by grazing on land. The food commonly includes agricultural crop plants such as oilseed rape and wheat, and feeding flocks in the winter may cause significant crop damage, often as much through trampling with their large webbed feet, as through direct consumption. It will also feed on small proportions of aquatic insects, fish and frogs.
Unlike black swans, mute swans are usually strongly territorial with just a single pair on smaller lakes, though in a few locations where a large area of suitable feeding habitat is found, they can be colonial. The largest colonies have over 100 pairs, such as at the colony at Abbotsbury Swannery in southern England, and at the southern tip of Öland Island, Ottenby Preserve, in the coastal waters of the Baltic Sea, and can have nests spaced as little as 2 m (7 ft) apart. Non-mated juveniles up to 3–4 years old commonly form larger flocks, which can total several hundred birds, often at regular traditional sites. A notable flock of non-breeding birds is found on the River Tweed estuary at Berwick-upon-Tweed in northeastern England, with a maximum count of 787 birds. A large population exists near the Swan Lifeline Station in Windsor and lives on the Thames in the shadow of Windsor Castle. Once the adults are mated they seek out their territories and often live close to ducks and gulls, which may take advantage of the swan's ability to reach deep water weeds, which tend to spread out on the water surface.
The mute swan is less vocal than the noisy whooper and Bewick's swans; they do, however, make a variety of sounds, often described as "grunting, hoarse whistling, and snorting noises." During a courtship display, mute swans utter a rhythmic song. The song helps synchronize the movements of their heads and necks. It could technically be employed to distinguish a bonded couple from two dating swans, as the rhythm of the song typically fails to match the pace of the head movements of two dating swans. Mute swans usually hiss at competitors or intruders trying to enter their territory.[30] The most familiar sound associated with mute swans is the vibrant throbbing of the wings in flight which is unique to the species and can be heard from a range of 1 to 2 km (0.6 to 1 mi), indicating its value as a contact sound between birds in flight. Cygnets are especially vocal and communicate through a variety of whistling and chirping sounds when content, as well as a harsh squawking noise when distressed or lost.
Nesting in spring, Cologne, Germany
Mute swans can be very aggressive in defence of their nests and are highly protective of their mate and offspring. Most defensive acts from a mute swan begin with a loud hiss and, if this is not sufficient to drive off the predator or intruder, are followed by a physical attack. Swans attack by striking at the threat with bony spurs in their wings, accompanied by biting with their large bill, while smaller waterbirds such as ducks are normally grabbed with the swan's bill and dragged or thrown clear of the swan and its offspring. Swans will kill intruders into their territory, both other swans, and geese and ducks, by drowning, climbing onto and pecking the back of the head and forcing the other bird underwater.
The wings of the swan are very powerful, though not strong enough to break an adult man's leg, as is commonly misquoted. Large waterfowl, such as Canada geese, (more likely out of competition than in response to potential predation) may be aggressively driven off, and mute swans regularly attack people who enter their territory.
The cob is responsible for defending the cygnets while on the water, and will sometimes attack small watercraft, such as canoes, that it feels are a threat to its young. The cob will additionally try to chase the predator out of his family territory and will keep animals such as foxes and raptors at bay. In New York (outside its native range), the most common predators of cygnets are common snapping turtles. Healthy adults are rarely preyed upon, though canids such as coyotes, felids such as lynx, and bears can pose a threat to infirm ones (healthy adults can usually swim away from danger and nest defence is usually successful.) and there are a few cases of healthy adults falling prey to the golden eagles. In England, there has been an increased rate of attacks on swans by out-of-control dogs, especially in parks where the birds are less territorial. This is considered criminal in British law, and the birds are placed under the highest protection due to their association with the monarch. Mute swans will readily attack dogs to protect themselves and their cygnets from an attack, and an adult swan is capable of overwhelming and drowning even large dog breeds.
The familiar pose with the neck curved back and wings half raised, known as busking, is a threat display. Both feet are paddled in unison during this display, resulting in more jerky movement. The swans may also use the busking posture for wind-assisted transportation over several hundred meters, so-called windsurfing.
Like other swans, mute swans are known for their ability to grieve for a lost or dead mate or cygnet. Swans will go through a mourning process, and in the case of the loss of their mate, may either stay where their counterpart lived or fly off to join a flock. Should one of the pair die while there are cygnets present, the remaining parent will take up their partner's duties in raising the clutch.
Breeding
Mute swans lay from 4 to 10 eggs. The female broods for around 36 days, with cygnets normally hatching between May and July. The young swans do not achieve the ability to fly before about 120 to 150 days old. This limits the distribution of the species at the northern edge of its range as the cygnets need to learn to fly before the ponds and lakes freeze over.
Distribution and habitat
The mute swan is found naturally mainly in temperate areas of Europe then across the Palearctic as far east as Primorsky Krai, near Sidemi.
It is partially migratory throughout northern latitudes in Europe and Asia, as far south as North Africa and the Mediterranean. It is known and recorded to have nested in Iceland and is a vagrant in that area as well as in Bermuda, according to the UN Environment Programme chart of international status chart of bird species, which places it in 70 countries, breeding in 49 countries, and vagrant in 16 countries.[citation needed] While most of the current population in Japan is introduced, mute swans are depicted on scrolls more than 1,000 years old, and wild birds from the mainland Asian population still occur rarely in winter. Natural migrants to Japan usually occur along with whooper and sometimes Bewick's swans.[citation needed]
The mute swan is protected in most of its range, but this has not prevented illegal hunting and poaching. It is often kept in captivity outside its natural range, as a decoration for parks and ponds, and escapes have happened. The descendants of such birds have become naturalised in the eastern United States and Great Lakes, much as the Canada goose has done in Europe.
World population
Mute swans with cygnets in Wolvercote, Oxfordshire
The total native population of mute swans is about 500,000 birds at the end of the breeding season (adults plus young), of which up to 350,000 are in Russia. The largest single breeding concentration is 11,000 pairs in the Volga Delta.
The population in the United Kingdom is about 22,000 birds as of the 2006–2007 winter, a slight decline from the peak of about 26,000–27,000 birds in 1990. This includes about 5,300 breeding pairs, the remainder being immatures. Other significant populations in Europe include 6,800–8,300 breeding pairs in Germany, 4,500 pairs in Denmark, 4,000–4,200 pairs in Poland, 3,000–4,000 pairs in the Netherlands, about 2,500 pairs in Ireland, and 1,200–1,700 pairs in Ukraine.
For many centuries, mute swans in Great Britain were domesticated for food, with individuals being marked by nicks on their webs (feet) or beaks to indicate ownership. These marks were registered with the Crown and a Royal Swanherd was appointed. Any birds not so marked became Crown property, hence the swan becoming known as the "Royal Bird". This domestication saved the mute swan from extirpation through overhunting in Great Britain.
Populations in Western Europe were largely exterminated by hunting pressure in the 13th–19th centuries, except for semi-domesticated birds maintained as poultry by large landowners. Better protection in the late 19th and early 20th centuries allowed the species to expand and return to most or all of their former range. More recently in the period from about 1960 up to the early 1980s, numbers declined significantly again in many areas in England, primarily due to lead poisoning from birds swallowing lead shots from shooting and discarded fishing weights made from lead. After lead weights and shots were mostly replaced by other less toxic alternatives, mute swan numbers increased again rapidly.
Introduced populations
Since being introduced into North America, the mute swan has increased greatly in number to the extent that it is considered an invasive species there. Populations introduced into other areas remain small, with around 200 in Japan, fewer than 200 in New Zealand and Australia, and about 120 in South Africa.
North America
The mute swan was introduced to North America in the late 19th century. Recently, it has been widely viewed as an invasive species because of its rapidly increasing numbers and its adverse effects on other waterfowl and native ecosystems. For example, a study of population sizes in the lower Great Lakes from 1971 to 2000 found that mute swan numbers were increasing at an average rate of at least 10% per year, doubling the population every seven to eight years. Several studies have concluded that mute swans severely reduce the densities of submerged vegetation where they occur.
In 2003, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to "minimize environmental damages attributed to Mute Swans" by reducing their numbers in the Atlantic Flyway to pre-1986 levels, a 67% reduction at the time. According to a report published in the Federal Register of 2003 the proposal was supported by all thirteen state wildlife agencies which submitted comments, as well as by 43 bird conservation, wildlife conservation and wildlife management organisations. Ten animal rights organisations and the vast majority of comments from individuals were opposed. At this time mute swans were protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act due to a court order, but in 2005 the United States Department of the Interior officially declared them a non-native, unprotected species. Mute swans are protected in some areas of the U.S. by local laws, for example, in Connecticut.
The status of the mute swan as an introduced species in North America is disputed by the interest group "Save the Mute Swans". They assert that mute swans are native to the region and therefore deserving of protection. They claim that mute swans had origins in Russia and cite historical sightings and fossil records. These claims have been rejected as specious by the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Oceania
The mute swan had absolute protection in New Zealand under the Wildlife Act 1953, but this was changed in June 2010 to a lower level of protection. It still has protection, but is now allowed to be killed or held in captivity at the discretion of the Minister of Conservation.
A small feral population exists in the vicinity of Perth, Australia; however, it is believed to number less than 100 individuals.
In popular culture
The mute swan has been the national bird of Denmark since 1984. Before that, the skylark was considered Denmark's national bird (since 1960).
The fairy tale "The Ugly Duckling" by Hans Christian Andersen tells the story of a cygnet ostracised by his fellow barnyard fowl because of his perceived unattractiveness. To his delight (and to the surprise of others), he matures into a graceful swan, the most beautiful bird of all.
Today, the British Monarch retains the right to ownership of all unmarked mute swans in open water, but King Charles III exercises his ownership only on certain stretches of the Thames and its surrounding tributaries. This ownership is shared with the Vintners' and Dyers' Companies, who were granted rights of ownership by the Crown in the 15th century.
The mute swans in the moat at the Bishops Palace at Wells Cathedral in Wells, England have for centuries been trained to ring bells via strings attached to them to beg for food. Two swans are still able to ring for lunch.
The pair of swans in the Boston Public Garden are named Romeo and Juliet after the Shakespearean couple; however, it was found that both of them are females
Commissioned to work with SALT Research collections, artist Refik Anadol employed machine learning algorithms to search and sort relations among 1,700,000 documents. Interactions of the multidimensional data found in the archives are, in turn, translated into an immersive media installation. Archive Dreaming, which is presented as part of The Uses of Art: Final Exhibition with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union, is user-driven; however, when idle, the installation "dreams" of unexpected correlations among documents. The resulting high-dimensional data and interactions are translated into an architectural immersive space.
Shortly after receiving the commission, Anadol was a resident artist for Google's Artists and Machine Intelligence Program where he closely collaborated with Mike Tyka and explored cutting-edge developments in the field of machine intelligence in an environment that brings together artists and engineers. Developed during this residency, his intervention Archive Dreaming transforms the gallery space on floor -1 at SALT Galata into an all-encompassing environment that intertwines history with the contemporary, and challenges immutable concepts of the archive, while destabilizing archive-related questions with machine learning algorithms.
In this project, a temporary immersive architectural space is created as a canvas with light and data applied as materials. This radical effort to deconstruct the framework of an illusory space will transgress the normal boundaries of the viewing experience of a library and the conventional flat cinema projection screen, into a three dimensional kinetic and architectonic space of an archive visualized with machine learning algorithms. By training a neural network with images of 1,700,000 documents at SALT Research the main idea is to create an immersive installation with architectural intelligence to reframe memory, history and culture in museum perception for 21st century through the lens of machine intelligence.
SALT is grateful to Google's Artists and Machine Intelligence program, and Doğuş Technology, ŠKODA, Volkswagen Doğuş Finansman for supporting Archive Dreaming.
Location : SALT Gatala, Istanbul, Turkey
Exhibition Dates : April 20 - June 11
6 Meters Wide Circular Architectural Installation
4 Channel Video, 8 Channel Audio
Custom Software, Media Server, Table for UI Interaction
For more information:
refikanadol.com/works/archive-dreaming/
Falls of Shin is a waterfall on the River Shin, in northern Scotland, near the villages of Bonar Bridge and Lairg.
Falls of Shin had a popular visitor centre, managed as part of Balnagown Estates, a company owned by former Harrods boss Mohamed Al-Fayed. This included a restaurant, a branch of Harrods, and a waxwork model of Al-Fayed. The visitor centre was destroyed by a fire in May 2013. Balnagown Estates have since been working with the Kyle of Sutherland Development Trust to develop a new visitor attraction. In May 2017, the new visitor centre opened following the successful construction carried out by William Gray Construction. The opening event was dubbed "Celebra-Shin". The cafe is currently operated by Mac & Wild- a company created by Andy Waugh and Calum MacKinnon with 2 restaurants in London and Falls of Shin being their third.
The Falls of Shin were dynamited to improve the salmon access.
Aside from the Salmon Viewing Platform, the site also comprises a Mini Golf Course, Woodland Walks and a large Children's Playpark.
The Highlands is a historical region of Scotland. Culturally, the Highlands and the Lowlands diverged from the Late Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots language replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands. The term is also used for the area north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, although the exact boundaries are not clearly defined, particularly to the east. The Great Glen divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands. The Scottish Gaelic name of A' Ghàidhealtachd literally means "the place of the Gaels" and traditionally, from a Gaelic-speaking point of view, includes both the Western Isles and the Highlands.
The area is very sparsely populated, with many mountain ranges dominating the region, and includes the highest mountain in the British Isles, Ben Nevis. During the 18th and early 19th centuries the population of the Highlands rose to around 300,000, but from c. 1841 and for the next 160 years, the natural increase in population was exceeded by emigration (mostly to Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and migration to the industrial cities of Scotland and England.) and passim The area is now one of the most sparsely populated in Europe. At 9.1/km2 (24/sq mi) in 2012, the population density in the Highlands and Islands is less than one seventh of Scotland's as a whole.
The Highland Council is the administrative body for much of the Highlands, with its administrative centre at Inverness. However, the Highlands also includes parts of the council areas of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Argyll and Bute, Moray, North Ayrshire, Perth and Kinross, Stirling and West Dunbartonshire.
The Scottish Highlands is the only area in the British Isles to have the taiga biome as it features concentrated populations of Scots pine forest: see Caledonian Forest. It is the most mountainous part of the United Kingdom.
Between the 15th century and the mid-20th century, the area differed from most of the Lowlands in terms of language. In Scottish Gaelic, the region is known as the Gàidhealtachd, because it was traditionally the Gaelic-speaking part of Scotland, although the language is now largely confined to The Hebrides. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably but have different meanings in their respective languages. Scottish English (in its Highland form) is the predominant language of the area today, though Highland English has been influenced by Gaelic speech to a significant extent. Historically, the "Highland line" distinguished the two Scottish cultures. While the Highland line broadly followed the geography of the Grampians in the south, it continued in the north, cutting off the north-eastern areas, that is Eastern Caithness, Orkney and Shetland, from the more Gaelic Highlands and Hebrides.
Historically, the major social unit of the Highlands was the clan. Scottish kings, particularly James VI, saw clans as a challenge to their authority; the Highlands was seen by many as a lawless region. The Scots of the Lowlands viewed the Highlanders as backward and more "Irish". The Highlands were seen as the overspill of Gaelic Ireland. They made this distinction by separating Germanic "Scots" English and the Gaelic by renaming it "Erse" a play on Eire. Following the Union of the Crowns, James VI had the military strength to back up any attempts to impose some control. The result was, in 1609, the Statutes of Iona which started the process of integrating clan leaders into Scottish society. The gradual changes continued into the 19th century, as clan chiefs thought of themselves less as patriarchal leaders of their people and more as commercial landlords. The first effect on the clansmen who were their tenants was the change to rents being payable in money rather than in kind. Later, rents were increased as Highland landowners sought to increase their income. This was followed, mostly in the period 1760–1850, by agricultural improvement that often (particularly in the Western Highlands) involved clearance of the population to make way for large scale sheep farms. Displaced tenants were set up in crofting communities in the process. The crofts were intended not to provide all the needs of their occupiers; they were expected to work in other industries such as kelping and fishing. Crofters came to rely substantially on seasonal migrant work, particularly in the Lowlands. This gave impetus to the learning of English, which was seen by many rural Gaelic speakers to be the essential "language of work".
Older historiography attributes the collapse of the clan system to the aftermath of the Jacobite risings. This is now thought less influential by historians. Following the Jacobite rising of 1745 the British government enacted a series of laws to try to suppress the clan system, including bans on the bearing of arms and the wearing of tartan, and limitations on the activities of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Most of this legislation was repealed by the end of the 18th century as the Jacobite threat subsided. There was soon a rehabilitation of Highland culture. Tartan was adopted for Highland regiments in the British Army, which poor Highlanders joined in large numbers in the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1790–1815). Tartan had largely been abandoned by the ordinary people of the region, but in the 1820s, tartan and the kilt were adopted by members of the social elite, not just in Scotland, but across Europe. The international craze for tartan, and for idealising a romanticised Highlands, was set off by the Ossian cycle, and further popularised by the works of Walter Scott. His "staging" of the visit of King George IV to Scotland in 1822 and the king's wearing of tartan resulted in a massive upsurge in demand for kilts and tartans that could not be met by the Scottish woollen industry. Individual clan tartans were largely designated in this period and they became a major symbol of Scottish identity. This "Highlandism", by which all of Scotland was identified with the culture of the Highlands, was cemented by Queen Victoria's interest in the country, her adoption of Balmoral as a major royal retreat, and her interest in "tartenry".
Recurrent famine affected the Highlands for much of its history, with significant instances as late as 1817 in the Eastern Highlands and the early 1850s in the West. Over the 18th century, the region had developed a trade of black cattle into Lowland markets, and this was balanced by imports of meal into the area. There was a critical reliance on this trade to provide sufficient food, and it is seen as an essential prerequisite for the population growth that started in the 18th century. Most of the Highlands, particularly in the North and West was short of the arable land that was essential for the mixed, run rig based, communal farming that existed before agricultural improvement was introduced into the region.[a] Between the 1760s and the 1830s there was a substantial trade in unlicensed whisky that had been distilled in the Highlands. Lowland distillers (who were not able to avoid the heavy taxation of this product) complained that Highland whisky made up more than half the market. The development of the cattle trade is taken as evidence that the pre-improvement Highlands was not an immutable system, but did exploit the economic opportunities that came its way. The illicit whisky trade demonstrates the entrepreneurial ability of the peasant classes.
Agricultural improvement reached the Highlands mostly over the period 1760 to 1850. Agricultural advisors, factors, land surveyors and others educated in the thinking of Adam Smith were keen to put into practice the new ideas taught in Scottish universities. Highland landowners, many of whom were burdened with chronic debts, were generally receptive to the advice they offered and keen to increase the income from their land. In the East and South the resulting change was similar to that in the Lowlands, with the creation of larger farms with single tenants, enclosure of the old run rig fields, introduction of new crops (such as turnips), land drainage and, as a consequence of all this, eviction, as part of the Highland clearances, of many tenants and cottars. Some of those cleared found employment on the new, larger farms, others moved to the accessible towns of the Lowlands.
In the West and North, evicted tenants were usually given tenancies in newly created crofting communities, while their former holdings were converted into large sheep farms. Sheep farmers could pay substantially higher rents than the run rig farmers and were much less prone to falling into arrears. Each croft was limited in size so that the tenants would have to find work elsewhere. The major alternatives were fishing and the kelp industry. Landlords took control of the kelp shores, deducting the wages earned by their tenants from the rent due and retaining the large profits that could be earned at the high prices paid for the processed product during the Napoleonic wars.
When the Napoleonic wars finished in 1815, the Highland industries were affected by the return to a peacetime economy. The price of black cattle fell, nearly halving between 1810 and the 1830s. Kelp prices had peaked in 1810, but reduced from £9 a ton in 1823 to £3 13s 4d a ton in 1828. Wool prices were also badly affected. This worsened the financial problems of debt-encumbered landlords. Then, in 1846, potato blight arrived in the Highlands, wiping out the essential subsistence crop for the overcrowded crofting communities. As the famine struck, the government made clear to landlords that it was their responsibility to provide famine relief for their tenants. The result of the economic downturn had been that a large proportion of Highland estates were sold in the first half of the 19th century. T M Devine points out that in the region most affected by the potato famine, by 1846, 70 per cent of the landowners were new purchasers who had not owned Highland property before 1800. More landlords were obliged to sell due to the cost of famine relief. Those who were protected from the worst of the crisis were those with extensive rental income from sheep farms. Government loans were made available for drainage works, road building and other improvements and many crofters became temporary migrants – taking work in the Lowlands. When the potato famine ceased in 1856, this established a pattern of more extensive working away from the Highlands.
The unequal concentration of land ownership remained an emotional and controversial subject, of enormous importance to the Highland economy, and eventually became a cornerstone of liberal radicalism. The poor crofters were politically powerless, and many of them turned to religion. They embraced the popularly oriented, fervently evangelical Presbyterian revival after 1800. Most joined the breakaway "Free Church" after 1843. This evangelical movement was led by lay preachers who themselves came from the lower strata, and whose preaching was implicitly critical of the established order. The religious change energised the crofters and separated them from the landlords; it helped prepare them for their successful and violent challenge to the landlords in the 1880s through the Highland Land League. Violence erupted, starting on the Isle of Skye, when Highland landlords cleared their lands for sheep and deer parks. It was quietened when the government stepped in, passing the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act, 1886 to reduce rents, guarantee fixity of tenure, and break up large estates to provide crofts for the homeless. This contrasted with the Irish Land War underway at the same time, where the Irish were intensely politicised through roots in Irish nationalism, while political dimensions were limited. In 1885 three Independent Crofter candidates were elected to Parliament, which listened to their pleas. The results included explicit security for the Scottish smallholders in the "crofting counties"; the legal right to bequeath tenancies to descendants; and the creation of a Crofting Commission. The Crofters as a political movement faded away by 1892, and the Liberal Party gained their votes.
Today, the Highlands are the largest of Scotland's whisky producing regions; the relevant area runs from Orkney to the Isle of Arran in the south and includes the northern isles and much of Inner and Outer Hebrides, Argyll, Stirlingshire, Arran, as well as sections of Perthshire and Aberdeenshire. (Other sources treat The Islands, except Islay, as a separate whisky producing region.) This massive area has over 30 distilleries, or 47 when the Islands sub-region is included in the count. According to one source, the top five are The Macallan, Glenfiddich, Aberlour, Glenfarclas and Balvenie. While Speyside is geographically within the Highlands, that region is specified as distinct in terms of whisky productions. Speyside single malt whiskies are produced by about 50 distilleries.
According to Visit Scotland, Highlands whisky is "fruity, sweet, spicy, malty". Another review states that Northern Highlands single malt is "sweet and full-bodied", the Eastern Highlands and Southern Highlands whiskies tend to be "lighter in texture" while the distilleries in the Western Highlands produce single malts with a "much peatier influence".
The Scottish Reformation achieved partial success in the Highlands. Roman Catholicism remained strong in some areas, owing to remote locations and the efforts of Franciscan missionaries from Ireland, who regularly came to celebrate Mass. There remain significant Catholic strongholds within the Highlands and Islands such as Moidart and Morar on the mainland and South Uist and Barra in the southern Outer Hebrides. The remoteness of the region and the lack of a Gaelic-speaking clergy undermined the missionary efforts of the established church. The later 18th century saw somewhat greater success, owing to the efforts of the SSPCK missionaries and to the disruption of traditional society after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. In the 19th century, the evangelical Free Churches, which were more accepting of Gaelic language and culture, grew rapidly, appealing much more strongly than did the established church.
For the most part, however, the Highlands are considered predominantly Protestant, belonging to the Church of Scotland. In contrast to the Catholic southern islands, the northern Outer Hebrides islands (Lewis, Harris and North Uist) have an exceptionally high proportion of their population belonging to the Protestant Free Church of Scotland or the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Outer Hebrides have been described as the last bastion of Calvinism in Britain and the Sabbath remains widely observed. Inverness and the surrounding area has a majority Protestant population, with most locals belonging to either The Kirk or the Free Church of Scotland. The church maintains a noticeable presence within the area, with church attendance notably higher than in other parts of Scotland. Religion continues to play an important role in Highland culture, with Sabbath observance still widely practised, particularly in the Hebrides.
In traditional Scottish geography, the Highlands refers to that part of Scotland north-west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which crosses mainland Scotland in a near-straight line from Helensburgh to Stonehaven. However the flat coastal lands that occupy parts of the counties of Nairnshire, Morayshire, Banffshire and Aberdeenshire are often excluded as they do not share the distinctive geographical and cultural features of the rest of the Highlands. The north-east of Caithness, as well as Orkney and Shetland, are also often excluded from the Highlands, although the Hebrides are usually included. The Highland area, as so defined, differed from the Lowlands in language and tradition, having preserved Gaelic speech and customs centuries after the anglicisation of the latter; this led to a growing perception of a divide, with the cultural distinction between Highlander and Lowlander first noted towards the end of the 14th century. In Aberdeenshire, the boundary between the Highlands and the Lowlands is not well defined. There is a stone beside the A93 road near the village of Dinnet on Royal Deeside which states 'You are now in the Highlands', although there are areas of Highland character to the east of this point.
A much wider definition of the Highlands is that used by the Scotch whisky industry. Highland single malts are produced at distilleries north of an imaginary line between Dundee and Greenock, thus including all of Aberdeenshire and Angus.
Inverness is regarded as the Capital of the Highlands, although less so in the Highland parts of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Perthshire and Stirlingshire which look more to Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, and Stirling as their commercial centres.
The Highland Council area, created as one of the local government regions of Scotland, has been a unitary council area since 1996. The council area excludes a large area of the southern and eastern Highlands, and the Western Isles, but includes Caithness. Highlands is sometimes used, however, as a name for the council area, as in the former Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service. Northern is also used to refer to the area, as in the former Northern Constabulary. These former bodies both covered the Highland council area and the island council areas of Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles.
Much of the Highlands area overlaps the Highlands and Islands area. An electoral region called Highlands and Islands is used in elections to the Scottish Parliament: this area includes Orkney and Shetland, as well as the Highland Council local government area, the Western Isles and most of the Argyll and Bute and Moray local government areas. Highlands and Islands has, however, different meanings in different contexts. It means Highland (the local government area), Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles in Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service. Northern, as in Northern Constabulary, refers to the same area as that covered by the fire and rescue service.
There have been trackways from the Lowlands to the Highlands since prehistoric times. Many traverse the Mounth, a spur of mountainous land that extends from the higher inland range to the North Sea slightly north of Stonehaven. The most well-known and historically important trackways are the Causey Mounth, Elsick Mounth, Cryne Corse Mounth and Cairnamounth.
Although most of the Highlands is geographically on the British mainland, it is somewhat less accessible than the rest of Britain; thus most UK couriers categorise it separately, alongside Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and other offshore islands. They thus charge additional fees for delivery to the Highlands, or exclude the area entirely. While the physical remoteness from the largest population centres inevitably leads to higher transit cost, there is confusion and consternation over the scale of the fees charged and the effectiveness of their communication, and the use of the word Mainland in their justification. Since the charges are often based on postcode areas, many far less remote areas, including some which are traditionally considered part of the lowlands, are also subject to these charges. Royal Mail is the only delivery network bound by a Universal Service Obligation to charge a uniform tariff across the UK. This, however, applies only to mail items and not larger packages which are dealt with by its Parcelforce division.
The Highlands lie to the north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which runs from Arran to Stonehaven. This part of Scotland is largely composed of ancient rocks from the Cambrian and Precambrian periods which were uplifted during the later Caledonian Orogeny. Smaller formations of Lewisian gneiss in the northwest are up to 3 billion years old. The overlying rocks of the Torridon Sandstone form mountains in the Torridon Hills such as Liathach and Beinn Eighe in Wester Ross.
These foundations are interspersed with many igneous intrusions of a more recent age, the remnants of which have formed mountain massifs such as the Cairngorms and the Cuillin of Skye. A significant exception to the above are the fossil-bearing beds of Old Red Sandstone found principally along the Moray Firth coast and partially down the Highland Boundary Fault. The Jurassic beds found in isolated locations on Skye and Applecross reflect the complex underlying geology. They are the original source of much North Sea oil. The Great Glen is formed along a transform fault which divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands.
The entire region was covered by ice sheets during the Pleistocene ice ages, save perhaps for a few nunataks. The complex geomorphology includes incised valleys and lochs carved by the action of mountain streams and ice, and a topography of irregularly distributed mountains whose summits have similar heights above sea-level, but whose bases depend upon the amount of denudation to which the plateau has been subjected in various places.
Climate
The region is much warmer than other areas at similar latitudes (such as Kamchatka in Russia, or Labrador in Canada) because of the Gulf Stream making it cool, damp and temperate. The Köppen climate classification is "Cfb" at low altitudes, then becoming "Cfc", "Dfc" and "ET" at higher altitudes.
Places of interest
An Teallach
Aonach Mòr (Nevis Range ski centre)
Arrochar Alps
Balmoral Castle
Balquhidder
Battlefield of Culloden
Beinn Alligin
Beinn Eighe
Ben Cruachan hydro-electric power station
Ben Lomond
Ben Macdui (second highest mountain in Scotland and UK)
Ben Nevis (highest mountain in Scotland and UK)
Cairngorms National Park
Cairngorm Ski centre near Aviemore
Cairngorm Mountains
Caledonian Canal
Cape Wrath
Carrick Castle
Castle Stalker
Castle Tioram
Chanonry Point
Conic Hill
Culloden Moor
Dunadd
Duart Castle
Durness
Eilean Donan
Fingal's Cave (Staffa)
Fort George
Glen Coe
Glen Etive
Glen Kinglas
Glen Lyon
Glen Orchy
Glenshee Ski Centre
Glen Shiel
Glen Spean
Glenfinnan (and its railway station and viaduct)
Grampian Mountains
Hebrides
Highland Folk Museum – The first open-air museum in the UK.
Highland Wildlife Park
Inveraray Castle
Inveraray Jail
Inverness Castle
Inverewe Garden
Iona Abbey
Isle of Staffa
Kilchurn Castle
Kilmartin Glen
Liathach
Lecht Ski Centre
Loch Alsh
Loch Ard
Loch Awe
Loch Assynt
Loch Earn
Loch Etive
Loch Fyne
Loch Goil
Loch Katrine
Loch Leven
Loch Linnhe
Loch Lochy
Loch Lomond
Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park
Loch Lubnaig
Loch Maree
Loch Morar
Loch Morlich
Loch Ness
Loch Nevis
Loch Rannoch
Loch Tay
Lochranza
Luss
Meall a' Bhuiridh (Glencoe Ski Centre)
Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary at Loch Creran
Rannoch Moor
Red Cuillin
Rest and Be Thankful stretch of A83
River Carron, Wester Ross
River Spey
River Tay
Ross and Cromarty
Smoo Cave
Stob Coire a' Chàirn
Stac Polly
Strathspey Railway
Sutherland
Tor Castle
Torridon Hills
Urquhart Castle
West Highland Line (scenic railway)
West Highland Way (Long-distance footpath)
Wester Ross
Niki's Oasis Restaurant & Jazz Bar 138 Bree Street Newtown Cultural Precinct Johannesburg South Africa with Simnikiwe Sondlo and Bushy Dubazana Jazz Band with the Immutable Themba Fassie
" In fact, God is needed only when we cannot find a guru. "
-- Please see below Article GURU BHAKTI to establish context of this quote
"I had a finer and a grander sight, however, where I was. This was the mighty dome of the Jungfrau softly outlined against the sky and faintly silvered by the starlight. There was something subduing in the influence of that silent and solemn and awful presence; one seemed to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast. One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of the ages, upon a million vanished races of men, and judged them; and would judge a million more--and still be there, watching, unchanged and unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation." -- Mark Twain, "A Tramp Abroad" (seen from Interlaken Switzerland)
The River Tay is the longest river in Scotland and the seventh-longest in Great Britain. The Tay originates in western Scotland on the slopes of Ben Lui (Scottish Gaelic: Beinn Laoigh), then flows easterly across the Highlands, through Loch Dochart, Loch Iubhair and Loch Tay, then continues east through Strathtay (see Strath), in the centre of Scotland, then southeasterly through Perth, where it becomes tidal, to its mouth at the Firth of Tay, south of Dundee. It is the largest river in the United Kingdom by measured discharge. Its catchment is approximately 2,000 square miles (5,200 square kilometres), the Tweed's is 1,500 sq mi (3,900 km2) and the Spey's is 1,097 sq mi (2,840 km2).
The river has given its name to Perth's Tay Street, which runs along its western banks for 830 yards (760 metres).
Course
Catchment of the River Tay within Scotland.
Catchment of the River Tay.
Tributaries of the River Tay.
The Tay drains much of the lower region of the Highlands. It originates on the slopes of Ben Lui (Beinn Laoigh), around 25 mi (40 km) from the west coast town of Oban, in Argyll and Bute. In 2011, the Tay Western Catchments Partnership determined as its source (as based on its 'most dominant and longest' tributary) a small lochan on Allt Coire Laoigh south of the summit. The river has a variety of names in its upper catchment: for the first few miles it is known as the River Connonish; then the River Fillan; the name then changes to the River Dochart until it flows into Loch Tay at Killin.
The River Tay emerges from Loch Tay at Kenmore, and flows from there to Perth which, in historical times, was its lowest bridging point. Below Perth the river becomes tidal and enters the Firth of Tay. The largest city on the river, Dundee, lies on the north bank of the Firth. On reaching the North Sea, the River Tay has flowed 120 mi (190 km) from west to east across central Scotland.
The Tay is unusual amongst Scottish rivers in having several major tributaries, notably the Earn, the Isla, the River Tummel, the Almond and the Lyon.
A flow of 2,268 m3/s (80,100 cu ft/s) was recorded on 17 January 1993, when the river rose 6.48 m (21 ft 3 in) above its usual level at Perth, and caused extensive flooding in the city. Were it not for the hydro-electric schemes upstream which impounded runoff, the peak would have been considerably higher. The highest flood recorded at Perth occurred in 1814, when the river rose 7 m (23 ft) above its usual level, partly caused by a blockage of ice under Smeaton's Bridge.
Several places along the Tay take their names from it, or are believed to have done so:
Broughty - Bruach Tatha, Bank of the Tay
Taymouth - Near the mouth of Loch Tay.
Tayside - A former Scottish Government region
The river is of high biodiversity value and is both a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and a Special Area of Conservation. The SAC designation notes the river's importance for salmon (Salmo salar), otters (Lutra lutra), brook lampreys (Lampetra planeri), river lampreys (Lampetra fluviatilis), and sea lampreys (Petromyzon marinus). The Tay also maintains flagship population of freshwater pearl mussel (Margaritifera margaritifera). Freshwater pearl mussels are one of Scotland's most endangered species and the country hosts two-thirds of the world's remaining stock.
The Tay is internationally renowned for its salmon fishing and is one of the best salmon rivers in western Europe, attracting anglers from all over the world. The lowest ten miles (sixteen kilometres) of the Tay, including prestigious beats like Taymount or Islamouth, provides most of the cream of the Tay. The largest rod-caught salmon in Britain, caught on the Tay by Georgina Ballantine in 1922, weighing 64 pounds (29 kilograms), retains the British record. The river system has salmon fisheries on many of its tributaries including the Earn, Isla, Ericht, Tummel, Garry, Dochart, Lyon and Eden. Dwindling catches include a 50% reduction in 2009 so the Tay District Salmon Fisheries Board ordered a catch-and-release policy for females all season, and for males until May, beginning in the January 2010 fishing season. Research by the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organisation has shown that the number of salmon dying at sea has doubled or trebled over the past 20 years, possibly due to overfishing in the oceans where salmon spend two years before returning to freshwater to spawn. The widespread collapse in Atlantic salmon stocks suggests that this is not solely a local problem in the River Tay.
A section of the Tay surrounding the town of Dunkeld is designated as a national scenic area (NSA), one of 40 such areas in Scotland, which are defined so as to identify areas of exceptional scenery and to ensure its protection by restricting certain forms of development. The River Tay (Dunkeld) NSA covers 5,708 ha.
The first sustained and significant population Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) living wild in Scotland in over 400 years became established on the river Tay catchment in Scotland as early as 2001, and has spread widely in the catchment, numbering from 20 to 100 individuals in 2011. These beavers were likely to be either escapees from any of several nearby sites with captive beavers, or were illegally released, and were originally targeted for removal by Scottish Natural Heritage in late 2010. Proponents of the beavers argued that no reason exists to believe that they are of "wrong" genetic stock. In early December 2010, the first of the wild Tayside beavers was trapped by Scottish Natural Heritage on the River Ericht in Blairgowrie, Perthshire and was held in captivity in Edinburgh Zoo, dying within a few months. In March 2012 the Scottish Government reversed the decision to remove beavers from the Tay, pending the outcome of studies into the suitability of re-introduction.
As part of the study into re-introduction, a trial release project was undertaken in Knapdale, Argyll, alongside which the population of beavers along the Tay was monitored and assessed. Following the conclusion of the trial re-introduction, the Scottish Government announced in November 2016 that beavers could remain permanently, and would be given protected status as a native species within Scotland. Beavers will be allowed to extend their range naturally. To aid this process and improve the health and resilience of the population a further 28 beavers will be released in Knapdale between 2017 and 2020, however there are no plans at present to release further beavers into the Tay.
In the 19th century the Tay Rail Bridge was built across the firth at Dundee as part of the East Coast Main Line, which linked Aberdeen in the north with Edinburgh and London to the south. The bridge, designed by Sir Thomas Bouch, officially opened in May 1878. On 28 December 1879 the bridge collapsed as a train passed over. The entire train fell into the firth, with the loss of 75 passengers and train crew. The event was commemorated in a poem, The Tay Bridge Disaster (1880), written by William McGonagall, a notoriously unskilled Scottish poet. The critical response to his article was enhanced as he had previously written two poems celebrating the strength and certain immortality of the Tay Bridge. A second much more well received poem was published in the same year by the German writer Theodor Fontane. A. J. Cronin's first novel, Hatter's Castle (1931), includes a scene involving the Tay Bridge Disaster, and the 1942 filmed version of the book recreates the bridge's catastrophic collapse. The rail bridge was rebuilt, with the replacement bridge opening on 11 June 1887.
A passenger and vehicle ferry service operated across the River Tay between Craig Pier, Dundee and Newport-on-Tay in Fife. In Dundee, the ferries were known as "the Fifies". The service was discontinued on the opening of the Tay Road Bridge on 18 August 1966.
The last vessels to operate the service were PS B. L. Nairn and two more modern ferries equipped with Voith Schneider Propellers, MVs Abercraig and Scotscraig.
The Tay bridge is the subject of William McGonagall's poems "Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay" and "The Tay Bridge Disaster", and in the German poet Theodor Fontane's poem "Die Brück' am Tay". Both deal with the Tay bridge disaster of 1879, seeing the bridge's construction as a case of human hubris and expressing an uneasiness towards the fast technological development of mankind.
The river is mentioned in passing in the Steeleye Span song "The Royal Forester". Symphonic power metal band Gloryhammer mentioned the river in some of their songs as "silvery Tay" or "mighty river Tay". Many Rolls-Royce civil aero-engines are named after British rivers, one of which is the Rolls-Royce Tay.
The Highlands is a historical region of Scotland. Culturally, the Highlands and the Lowlands diverged from the Late Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots language replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands. The term is also used for the area north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, although the exact boundaries are not clearly defined, particularly to the east. The Great Glen divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands. The Scottish Gaelic name of A' Ghàidhealtachd literally means "the place of the Gaels" and traditionally, from a Gaelic-speaking point of view, includes both the Western Isles and the Highlands.
The area is very sparsely populated, with many mountain ranges dominating the region, and includes the highest mountain in the British Isles, Ben Nevis. During the 18th and early 19th centuries the population of the Highlands rose to around 300,000, but from c. 1841 and for the next 160 years, the natural increase in population was exceeded by emigration (mostly to Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and migration to the industrial cities of Scotland and England.) and passim The area is now one of the most sparsely populated in Europe. At 9.1/km2 (24/sq mi) in 2012, the population density in the Highlands and Islands is less than one seventh of Scotland's as a whole.
The Highland Council is the administrative body for much of the Highlands, with its administrative centre at Inverness. However, the Highlands also includes parts of the council areas of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Argyll and Bute, Moray, North Ayrshire, Perth and Kinross, Stirling and West Dunbartonshire.
The Scottish Highlands is the only area in the British Isles to have the taiga biome as it features concentrated populations of Scots pine forest: see Caledonian Forest. It is the most mountainous part of the United Kingdom.
Between the 15th century and the mid-20th century, the area differed from most of the Lowlands in terms of language. In Scottish Gaelic, the region is known as the Gàidhealtachd, because it was traditionally the Gaelic-speaking part of Scotland, although the language is now largely confined to The Hebrides. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably but have different meanings in their respective languages. Scottish English (in its Highland form) is the predominant language of the area today, though Highland English has been influenced by Gaelic speech to a significant extent. Historically, the "Highland line" distinguished the two Scottish cultures. While the Highland line broadly followed the geography of the Grampians in the south, it continued in the north, cutting off the north-eastern areas, that is Eastern Caithness, Orkney and Shetland, from the more Gaelic Highlands and Hebrides.
Historically, the major social unit of the Highlands was the clan. Scottish kings, particularly James VI, saw clans as a challenge to their authority; the Highlands was seen by many as a lawless region. The Scots of the Lowlands viewed the Highlanders as backward and more "Irish". The Highlands were seen as the overspill of Gaelic Ireland. They made this distinction by separating Germanic "Scots" English and the Gaelic by renaming it "Erse" a play on Eire. Following the Union of the Crowns, James VI had the military strength to back up any attempts to impose some control. The result was, in 1609, the Statutes of Iona which started the process of integrating clan leaders into Scottish society. The gradual changes continued into the 19th century, as clan chiefs thought of themselves less as patriarchal leaders of their people and more as commercial landlords. The first effect on the clansmen who were their tenants was the change to rents being payable in money rather than in kind. Later, rents were increased as Highland landowners sought to increase their income. This was followed, mostly in the period 1760–1850, by agricultural improvement that often (particularly in the Western Highlands) involved clearance of the population to make way for large scale sheep farms. Displaced tenants were set up in crofting communities in the process. The crofts were intended not to provide all the needs of their occupiers; they were expected to work in other industries such as kelping and fishing. Crofters came to rely substantially on seasonal migrant work, particularly in the Lowlands. This gave impetus to the learning of English, which was seen by many rural Gaelic speakers to be the essential "language of work".
Older historiography attributes the collapse of the clan system to the aftermath of the Jacobite risings. This is now thought less influential by historians. Following the Jacobite rising of 1745 the British government enacted a series of laws to try to suppress the clan system, including bans on the bearing of arms and the wearing of tartan, and limitations on the activities of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Most of this legislation was repealed by the end of the 18th century as the Jacobite threat subsided. There was soon a rehabilitation of Highland culture. Tartan was adopted for Highland regiments in the British Army, which poor Highlanders joined in large numbers in the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1790–1815). Tartan had largely been abandoned by the ordinary people of the region, but in the 1820s, tartan and the kilt were adopted by members of the social elite, not just in Scotland, but across Europe. The international craze for tartan, and for idealising a romanticised Highlands, was set off by the Ossian cycle, and further popularised by the works of Walter Scott. His "staging" of the visit of King George IV to Scotland in 1822 and the king's wearing of tartan resulted in a massive upsurge in demand for kilts and tartans that could not be met by the Scottish woollen industry. Individual clan tartans were largely designated in this period and they became a major symbol of Scottish identity. This "Highlandism", by which all of Scotland was identified with the culture of the Highlands, was cemented by Queen Victoria's interest in the country, her adoption of Balmoral as a major royal retreat, and her interest in "tartenry".
Recurrent famine affected the Highlands for much of its history, with significant instances as late as 1817 in the Eastern Highlands and the early 1850s in the West. Over the 18th century, the region had developed a trade of black cattle into Lowland markets, and this was balanced by imports of meal into the area. There was a critical reliance on this trade to provide sufficient food, and it is seen as an essential prerequisite for the population growth that started in the 18th century. Most of the Highlands, particularly in the North and West was short of the arable land that was essential for the mixed, run rig based, communal farming that existed before agricultural improvement was introduced into the region.[a] Between the 1760s and the 1830s there was a substantial trade in unlicensed whisky that had been distilled in the Highlands. Lowland distillers (who were not able to avoid the heavy taxation of this product) complained that Highland whisky made up more than half the market. The development of the cattle trade is taken as evidence that the pre-improvement Highlands was not an immutable system, but did exploit the economic opportunities that came its way. The illicit whisky trade demonstrates the entrepreneurial ability of the peasant classes.
Agricultural improvement reached the Highlands mostly over the period 1760 to 1850. Agricultural advisors, factors, land surveyors and others educated in the thinking of Adam Smith were keen to put into practice the new ideas taught in Scottish universities. Highland landowners, many of whom were burdened with chronic debts, were generally receptive to the advice they offered and keen to increase the income from their land. In the East and South the resulting change was similar to that in the Lowlands, with the creation of larger farms with single tenants, enclosure of the old run rig fields, introduction of new crops (such as turnips), land drainage and, as a consequence of all this, eviction, as part of the Highland clearances, of many tenants and cottars. Some of those cleared found employment on the new, larger farms, others moved to the accessible towns of the Lowlands.
In the West and North, evicted tenants were usually given tenancies in newly created crofting communities, while their former holdings were converted into large sheep farms. Sheep farmers could pay substantially higher rents than the run rig farmers and were much less prone to falling into arrears. Each croft was limited in size so that the tenants would have to find work elsewhere. The major alternatives were fishing and the kelp industry. Landlords took control of the kelp shores, deducting the wages earned by their tenants from the rent due and retaining the large profits that could be earned at the high prices paid for the processed product during the Napoleonic wars.
When the Napoleonic wars finished in 1815, the Highland industries were affected by the return to a peacetime economy. The price of black cattle fell, nearly halving between 1810 and the 1830s. Kelp prices had peaked in 1810, but reduced from £9 a ton in 1823 to £3 13s 4d a ton in 1828. Wool prices were also badly affected. This worsened the financial problems of debt-encumbered landlords. Then, in 1846, potato blight arrived in the Highlands, wiping out the essential subsistence crop for the overcrowded crofting communities. As the famine struck, the government made clear to landlords that it was their responsibility to provide famine relief for their tenants. The result of the economic downturn had been that a large proportion of Highland estates were sold in the first half of the 19th century. T M Devine points out that in the region most affected by the potato famine, by 1846, 70 per cent of the landowners were new purchasers who had not owned Highland property before 1800. More landlords were obliged to sell due to the cost of famine relief. Those who were protected from the worst of the crisis were those with extensive rental income from sheep farms. Government loans were made available for drainage works, road building and other improvements and many crofters became temporary migrants – taking work in the Lowlands. When the potato famine ceased in 1856, this established a pattern of more extensive working away from the Highlands.
The unequal concentration of land ownership remained an emotional and controversial subject, of enormous importance to the Highland economy, and eventually became a cornerstone of liberal radicalism. The poor crofters were politically powerless, and many of them turned to religion. They embraced the popularly oriented, fervently evangelical Presbyterian revival after 1800. Most joined the breakaway "Free Church" after 1843. This evangelical movement was led by lay preachers who themselves came from the lower strata, and whose preaching was implicitly critical of the established order. The religious change energised the crofters and separated them from the landlords; it helped prepare them for their successful and violent challenge to the landlords in the 1880s through the Highland Land League. Violence erupted, starting on the Isle of Skye, when Highland landlords cleared their lands for sheep and deer parks. It was quietened when the government stepped in, passing the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act, 1886 to reduce rents, guarantee fixity of tenure, and break up large estates to provide crofts for the homeless. This contrasted with the Irish Land War underway at the same time, where the Irish were intensely politicised through roots in Irish nationalism, while political dimensions were limited. In 1885 three Independent Crofter candidates were elected to Parliament, which listened to their pleas. The results included explicit security for the Scottish smallholders in the "crofting counties"; the legal right to bequeath tenancies to descendants; and the creation of a Crofting Commission. The Crofters as a political movement faded away by 1892, and the Liberal Party gained their votes.
Today, the Highlands are the largest of Scotland's whisky producing regions; the relevant area runs from Orkney to the Isle of Arran in the south and includes the northern isles and much of Inner and Outer Hebrides, Argyll, Stirlingshire, Arran, as well as sections of Perthshire and Aberdeenshire. (Other sources treat The Islands, except Islay, as a separate whisky producing region.) This massive area has over 30 distilleries, or 47 when the Islands sub-region is included in the count. According to one source, the top five are The Macallan, Glenfiddich, Aberlour, Glenfarclas and Balvenie. While Speyside is geographically within the Highlands, that region is specified as distinct in terms of whisky productions. Speyside single malt whiskies are produced by about 50 distilleries.
According to Visit Scotland, Highlands whisky is "fruity, sweet, spicy, malty". Another review states that Northern Highlands single malt is "sweet and full-bodied", the Eastern Highlands and Southern Highlands whiskies tend to be "lighter in texture" while the distilleries in the Western Highlands produce single malts with a "much peatier influence".
The Scottish Reformation achieved partial success in the Highlands. Roman Catholicism remained strong in some areas, owing to remote locations and the efforts of Franciscan missionaries from Ireland, who regularly came to celebrate Mass. There remain significant Catholic strongholds within the Highlands and Islands such as Moidart and Morar on the mainland and South Uist and Barra in the southern Outer Hebrides. The remoteness of the region and the lack of a Gaelic-speaking clergy undermined the missionary efforts of the established church. The later 18th century saw somewhat greater success, owing to the efforts of the SSPCK missionaries and to the disruption of traditional society after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. In the 19th century, the evangelical Free Churches, which were more accepting of Gaelic language and culture, grew rapidly, appealing much more strongly than did the established church.
For the most part, however, the Highlands are considered predominantly Protestant, belonging to the Church of Scotland. In contrast to the Catholic southern islands, the northern Outer Hebrides islands (Lewis, Harris and North Uist) have an exceptionally high proportion of their population belonging to the Protestant Free Church of Scotland or the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Outer Hebrides have been described as the last bastion of Calvinism in Britain and the Sabbath remains widely observed. Inverness and the surrounding area has a majority Protestant population, with most locals belonging to either The Kirk or the Free Church of Scotland. The church maintains a noticeable presence within the area, with church attendance notably higher than in other parts of Scotland. Religion continues to play an important role in Highland culture, with Sabbath observance still widely practised, particularly in the Hebrides.
In traditional Scottish geography, the Highlands refers to that part of Scotland north-west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which crosses mainland Scotland in a near-straight line from Helensburgh to Stonehaven. However the flat coastal lands that occupy parts of the counties of Nairnshire, Morayshire, Banffshire and Aberdeenshire are often excluded as they do not share the distinctive geographical and cultural features of the rest of the Highlands. The north-east of Caithness, as well as Orkney and Shetland, are also often excluded from the Highlands, although the Hebrides are usually included. The Highland area, as so defined, differed from the Lowlands in language and tradition, having preserved Gaelic speech and customs centuries after the anglicisation of the latter; this led to a growing perception of a divide, with the cultural distinction between Highlander and Lowlander first noted towards the end of the 14th century. In Aberdeenshire, the boundary between the Highlands and the Lowlands is not well defined. There is a stone beside the A93 road near the village of Dinnet on Royal Deeside which states 'You are now in the Highlands', although there are areas of Highland character to the east of this point.
A much wider definition of the Highlands is that used by the Scotch whisky industry. Highland single malts are produced at distilleries north of an imaginary line between Dundee and Greenock, thus including all of Aberdeenshire and Angus.
Inverness is regarded as the Capital of the Highlands, although less so in the Highland parts of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Perthshire and Stirlingshire which look more to Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, and Stirling as their commercial centres.
The Highland Council area, created as one of the local government regions of Scotland, has been a unitary council area since 1996. The council area excludes a large area of the southern and eastern Highlands, and the Western Isles, but includes Caithness. Highlands is sometimes used, however, as a name for the council area, as in the former Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service. Northern is also used to refer to the area, as in the former Northern Constabulary. These former bodies both covered the Highland council area and the island council areas of Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles.
Much of the Highlands area overlaps the Highlands and Islands area. An electoral region called Highlands and Islands is used in elections to the Scottish Parliament: this area includes Orkney and Shetland, as well as the Highland Council local government area, the Western Isles and most of the Argyll and Bute and Moray local government areas. Highlands and Islands has, however, different meanings in different contexts. It means Highland (the local government area), Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles in Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service. Northern, as in Northern Constabulary, refers to the same area as that covered by the fire and rescue service.
There have been trackways from the Lowlands to the Highlands since prehistoric times. Many traverse the Mounth, a spur of mountainous land that extends from the higher inland range to the North Sea slightly north of Stonehaven. The most well-known and historically important trackways are the Causey Mounth, Elsick Mounth, Cryne Corse Mounth and Cairnamounth.
Although most of the Highlands is geographically on the British mainland, it is somewhat less accessible than the rest of Britain; thus most UK couriers categorise it separately, alongside Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and other offshore islands. They thus charge additional fees for delivery to the Highlands, or exclude the area entirely. While the physical remoteness from the largest population centres inevitably leads to higher transit cost, there is confusion and consternation over the scale of the fees charged and the effectiveness of their communication, and the use of the word Mainland in their justification. Since the charges are often based on postcode areas, many far less remote areas, including some which are traditionally considered part of the lowlands, are also subject to these charges. Royal Mail is the only delivery network bound by a Universal Service Obligation to charge a uniform tariff across the UK. This, however, applies only to mail items and not larger packages which are dealt with by its Parcelforce division.
The Highlands lie to the north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which runs from Arran to Stonehaven. This part of Scotland is largely composed of ancient rocks from the Cambrian and Precambrian periods which were uplifted during the later Caledonian Orogeny. Smaller formations of Lewisian gneiss in the northwest are up to 3 billion years old. The overlying rocks of the Torridon Sandstone form mountains in the Torridon Hills such as Liathach and Beinn Eighe in Wester Ross.
These foundations are interspersed with many igneous intrusions of a more recent age, the remnants of which have formed mountain massifs such as the Cairngorms and the Cuillin of Skye. A significant exception to the above are the fossil-bearing beds of Old Red Sandstone found principally along the Moray Firth coast and partially down the Highland Boundary Fault. The Jurassic beds found in isolated locations on Skye and Applecross reflect the complex underlying geology. They are the original source of much North Sea oil. The Great Glen is formed along a transform fault which divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands.
The entire region was covered by ice sheets during the Pleistocene ice ages, save perhaps for a few nunataks. The complex geomorphology includes incised valleys and lochs carved by the action of mountain streams and ice, and a topography of irregularly distributed mountains whose summits have similar heights above sea-level, but whose bases depend upon the amount of denudation to which the plateau has been subjected in various places.
Climate
The region is much warmer than other areas at similar latitudes (such as Kamchatka in Russia, or Labrador in Canada) because of the Gulf Stream making it cool, damp and temperate. The Köppen climate classification is "Cfb" at low altitudes, then becoming "Cfc", "Dfc" and "ET" at higher altitudes.
Places of interest
An Teallach
Aonach Mòr (Nevis Range ski centre)
Arrochar Alps
Balmoral Castle
Balquhidder
Battlefield of Culloden
Beinn Alligin
Beinn Eighe
Ben Cruachan hydro-electric power station
Ben Lomond
Ben Macdui (second highest mountain in Scotland and UK)
Ben Nevis (highest mountain in Scotland and UK)
Cairngorms National Park
Cairngorm Ski centre near Aviemore
Cairngorm Mountains
Caledonian Canal
Cape Wrath
Carrick Castle
Castle Stalker
Castle Tioram
Chanonry Point
Conic Hill
Culloden Moor
Dunadd
Duart Castle
Durness
Eilean Donan
Fingal's Cave (Staffa)
Fort George
Glen Coe
Glen Etive
Glen Kinglas
Glen Lyon
Glen Orchy
Glenshee Ski Centre
Glen Shiel
Glen Spean
Glenfinnan (and its railway station and viaduct)
Grampian Mountains
Hebrides
Highland Folk Museum – The first open-air museum in the UK.
Highland Wildlife Park
Inveraray Castle
Inveraray Jail
Inverness Castle
Inverewe Garden
Iona Abbey
Isle of Staffa
Kilchurn Castle
Kilmartin Glen
Liathach
Lecht Ski Centre
Loch Alsh
Loch Ard
Loch Awe
Loch Assynt
Loch Earn
Loch Etive
Loch Fyne
Loch Goil
Loch Katrine
Loch Leven
Loch Linnhe
Loch Lochy
Loch Lomond
Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park
Loch Lubnaig
Loch Maree
Loch Morar
Loch Morlich
Loch Ness
Loch Nevis
Loch Rannoch
Loch Tay
Lochranza
Luss
Meall a' Bhuiridh (Glencoe Ski Centre)
Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary at Loch Creran
Rannoch Moor
Red Cuillin
Rest and Be Thankful stretch of A83
River Carron, Wester Ross
River Spey
River Tay
Ross and Cromarty
Smoo Cave
Stob Coire a' Chàirn
Stac Polly
Strathspey Railway
Sutherland
Tor Castle
Torridon Hills
Urquhart Castle
West Highland Line (scenic railway)
West Highland Way (Long-distance footpath)
Wester Ross
God created the world out of nothing; this is the teaching of the Semitic theologies, and by it they answer the following difficulty: if God had made the world out of a preexisting substance, that substance must be either itself created, or else Divine. The creation is not God, it cannot therefore emanate from Him; there is an unbridgeable hiatus between God and the world, neither can become the other; the orders of magnitude or of reality, or of perfection, are incommensurable.
The main concern of this reasoning is not a disinterested perception of the nature of things, but the safeguarding of a simple and unalterable notion of God, while making allowance for a mentality that is more active than contemplative. The aim is therefore to provide, not a metaphysical statement that does not engage the will or does not appear to do so, but a key notion calculated to win over souls rooted in willing and acting rather than in knowing and contemplating; the metaphysical limitation is here a consequence of the priority accorded to what is effective for the governing and saving of souls. That being so, one is justified in saying that Semitic religious thought is by force of circumstances a kind of dynamic thought with moral overtones, and not a static thought in the style of the Greek or Hindu wisdom.
From the point of view of the latter, the idea of emanation, in place of creatio ex nihilo, in no way compromises either the transcendence or the immutability of God; between the world and God there is at once discontinuity and continuity, depending on whether our conception of the Universe is based on a scheme of concentric circles or on one of radii extending outward from the center to the periphery: according to the first mode of vision, which proceeds from the created to the Uncreated, there is no common measure between the contingent and the Absolute; according to the second mode of vision, which proceeds from the Principle to its manifestation, there is but one Real, which includes everything and excludes only nothingness, precisely because the latter has no reality whatsoever. The world is either a production drawn from the void and totally other than God, or else it is a manifestation "freely necessary" and "necessarily free" of Divinity or of Its Infinitude, liberty as well as necessity being Divine perfections.
As tor the contention that the creationist concept is superior to the so-called emanationist or pantheistic concepts because it is Biblical and Christ-given, and that the Platonic doctrine cannot be right because Plato cannot be superior either to Christ or the Bible, this has the fault of leaving on one side the real fundamentals of the problem.
First, what is rightly or wrongly called "emanationism" is not an invention of Plato, it can be found in the most diverse sacred texts; second, Christ, while being traditionally at one with the creationist thesis, nevertheless did not teach it explicitly and did not deny the apparently opposed thesis. The message of Christ, like that of the Bible, is not a priori a teaching of metaphysical science; it is above all a message of salvation, but one that necessarily contains, in an indirect way and under cover of an appropriate symbolism, metaphysics in its entirety. The opposition between the Divine Bible and human philosophy, or between Christ and Plato, therefore has no meaning so far as the metaphysical truths in question are concerned; that the Platonic perspective should go farther than the Biblical perspective brings no discredit on the Bible, which teaches what is useful or indispensable from the point of view of the moral or spiritual good of a particular humanity, nor does it confer any human superiority on the Platonists, who may be mere thinkers just as they may be saints, according to how much they assimilate of the Truth they proclaim.
For the Platonists it is perfectly logical that the world should be the necessary manifestation of God and that it should be without origin; if the monotheistic Semites believe in a creation out of nothing and in time, it is evidently not, as some have suggested, because they think that they have the right or the privilege of accepting a "supralogical" thesis that is humanly absurd; for the idea of creation appears to them on the contrary as being the only one that is reasonable and therefore the only one that is capable oflogical demonstration, as is proved precisely by tlfe method of argumentation used in theology.
Starting from the axiom that God created the worldout of nothing, the Semites reason thus, grosso modo: since God alone has Being, the world could not share it with Him; there had there fore to be a time when the world did not exist; it is God alone who could give it existence. On the religious plane, which so far as cosmology is concerned demands no more than the minimum necessary or useful for salvation, this idea of creation is fully sufficient, and the logical considerations which support it are perfectly plausible within the framework of their limitation; for they at least convey a key truth that allows a fuller understanding of the nature of God, as it is pleased to reveal itself in the monotheistic religions.
More than once we have had occasion to mention the following erroneous argument: if God creates the world in response to an inward necessity, as is affirmed by the Platonists, this must mean that He is obliged to create it, and that therefore He is not free; since this is impossible, the creation can only be a gratuitous act. One might as well say that if God is One, or if He is a Trinity, or if He is all-powerful, or if He is good, He must be obliged to be so, and His nature is thus the result of a constraint, quod absit.
It is always a case of the same incapacity to conceive of antinomic realities, and to understand that if liberty, the absence of constraint, is a perfection, necessity, the absence of arbitrariness, is another.
If, in opposition to the Pythagorean-Platonic perspective, the concept is put forward of an Absolute which is threefold in its very essence, therefore devoid of the degrees of reality that alone can explain the hypostatic polarizations - an Absolute which creates without metaphysical necessity and which in addition acts without cause or motive - and if at the same time the right is claimed to a sacred illogicality in the name of an exclusive "Christian supernaturalism'', then an explanation is due of what logic is and what human reason is; for if our intelligence, in its very structure, is foreign or even opposed to Divine Truth, what then is it, and why did God give it to
us? Or to put it the other way round, what sort of Divine message is it that is opposed to the laws of an intelligence to which it is essentially addressed, and what does it signify that man was created "in the image of God"?
[According to Genesis "God created man in his own image" and "male and female created He them." Now according to one Father of the Church, the sexes are not made in the image of God; only the features that are identical in the two sexes resemble God, for the simple reason that God is neither man nor woman. This reasoning is fallacious because, although it is evident that God is not in Himself a duality, He necessarily comprises the principia! Duality in His Unity, exactly as He comprises the Trinity or the Quaternity; and how can one refuse to admit that the Holy Virgin has a prototype in God not only as regards her humanity but also as regards her femininity?]
And what motive could induce us to accept a message that was contrary, not to our earthly materialism or to our passion, but to the very substance of our spirit? For the "wisdom according to the flesh" of Saint Paul does not embrace every form of metaphysics that does not know the Gospels, nor is it logic as such, for the Apostle was logical; what it denotes is the reasonings whereby worldly men seek to prop up their passions and their pride, such as Sophism and Epicureanism and, in our days, the current philosophy of the world. "Wisdom according to the flesh" is also the gratuitous philosophy that does not lead us inwards and which contains no door opening on to spiritual realization; it is philosophy of the type of"art for art's sake” which commits one to nothing and is vain and pernicious for that very reason.
The incomprehension by theologians of Platonic and Oriental emanationism arises from the fact that monotheism puts in parenthesis the notion, essential metaphysically, of Divine Relativity or Maya; 3 it is this parenthesis, or in practice this ignorance, which inhibits an understanding of the fact that there is no incompatability whatever between the "absolute Absolute", Beyond-Being, and the "relative Absolute", creative Being, and that this distinction is even crucial.
The Divine Maya, Relativity, is the necessary consequence of the very Infinitude of the Principle: it is because God is infinite that He comprises the dimension of relativity, and it is because He comprises that dimension that He manifests the world. To which it should be added: it is because the world is manifestation and not Principle that relativity, which at first was only determination, limitation and manifestation, gives rise to that particular modality constituting "evil". It is neither in the existence of evil things that evil lies nor in their existential properties nor in their faculties of sensation and of action, if it be a question of animate beings, nor even in the act insofar as it is the manifestation of a power; evil resides only in whatever is privative or negative with respect to good, and its function is to manifest in the world its aspect of separation from the Principle, and to play its part in an equilibrium and a rhythm necessitated by the economy of the created Universe.
In this way evil, wholly evil though it be when looked at in isolation, attaches itself to a good and is dissolved qua evil when one looks at it in its cosmic context and in its universal function.
Platonists feel no need whatever to try to fill the gap which might seem to exist between the pure Absolute and the determination and creative Absolute; it is precisely because they are aware of relativity in divinis and of the Divine cause of that relativity that they are emanationists.
In other words, the Hellenists, if they did not have a word to express it, nevertheless possessed in their own way the concept of Maya, and it is their doctrine of emanation that proves it ...
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Frithjof Schuon: Evidence and Mystery (from Logic and Transcendence)
Finally received my new Tokina AT-X 116 Pro, and after being stunned by its sharpness I came across this photo with significant difference in sharpness between the top left and top right corners.
This one was shot at ISO 100, f/7,1, 1/320s. It's not a perfect example (just a quick testing snap), I'll have to take more picture during the weekend.
See the next photo for a 1:1 detail of both corners. I'm afraid my copy suffers from a centering defect. :(
Niki's Oasis Restaurant & Jazz Bar 138 Bree Street Newtown Cultural Precinct Johannesburg South Africa with Moses Siso Tonic and Bushy Dubazana Jazz Band with the Immutable Themba Fassie
Great Food and Music Highly Recommended
Το κάστρο της Μονεμβασιάς
Το 375 μ.Χ. μία σεισμική δόνηση απέκοψε τη χερσόνησο δημιουργώντας ένα βράχο που έμελλε να μείνει στη θάλασσα αγέρωχος και αναλλοίωτος στην αιωνιότητα, φυσικό φρούριο, προστάτης ψυχών, διακηρυγμένος πόθος των μεγαλύτερων αυτοκρατοριών που γνώρισε ο πλανήτης. Αυτός ο βράχος, κάποτε μονοπάτι του Μυκηναϊκού και του Μινωικού πολιτισμού, χάρη στη μία και μοναδική πρόσβαση (μόνη έμβαση) που τον ενώνει με την Πελοπόννησο ονομάστηκε Μονεμβάσια.
The castle of Monemvasia
In 375 AD an earthquake cut off the peninsula, creating a rock that was to remain at sea cocky and immutable in eternity, a natural fortress, professed desire of the largest empires the world has known. This rock, sometimes the path of the Mycenaean and Minoan culture, through a single access who joins the Peloponnesus, called Monemvasia.
Tarbat Ness (Scottish Gaelic: Rubha Thairbeirt) is headland that lies at the end of the Tarbat peninsula in Easter Ross, Scotland. The name is from the Gaelic tairbeart meaning "isthmus" and the Old Norse ness, meaning "headland". It lies at the south of the entrance to the Dornoch Firth.
The Upper Old Red Sandstone Devonian period bedrock contains fish fossils. There are examples of a range of pitting, saltspray and honeycomb erosion and "some of the best examples of differential erosion processes on tilted sandstone strata in Scotland".
The height of the headland reaches 17m above sea level in the south and east and 10m in the north and west. The raised beaches provide evidence of the post-glacial changes in sea level. Water depths offshore reach 10m at 300m offshore and 20m at circa 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) offshore.
According to the Orkneyinga Saga the Norse Earl of Orkney, Torf-Einarr "was the first man to dig peat for fuel, firewood being very scarce on the islands, at Tarbat Ness" (Torfness in the original). This is said to explain his nickname, torf meaning "peat", but it is clearly an absurd assertion.
At the Battle of Tarbat Ness in the 11th century, Thorfinn the Mighty defeated "Karl Hundason", possibly a Viking name for Macbeth.
Further down the peninsula near the village of Portmahomack, in the 1480s the Clan Ross slaughtered a raiding party from the Clan Mackay by locking them in the Tarbat Old Church and setting fire to it. This event is known as the Battle of Tarbat.
On 14 October 1941 a Saro Lerwick flying boat assigned to No. 4 OTU L7268 crashed into the sea near Tarbat Ness following failure of the port engine. The aircraft could not maintain altitude on single engine. Six of the crew were killed, three recovered alive.
The Tarbat Ness Lighthouse is located at the north west tip of the peninsula. It was built in 1830 by Robert Stevenson and has an elevation of 53 metres (174 ft) and 203 steps to the top of the tower.
The restored Ballone Castle lies at the south east end of the peninsula north of the village of Rockfield.
The Highlands is a historical region of Scotland. Culturally, the Highlands and the Lowlands diverged from the Late Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots language replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands. The term is also used for the area north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, although the exact boundaries are not clearly defined, particularly to the east. The Great Glen divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands. The Scottish Gaelic name of A' Ghàidhealtachd literally means "the place of the Gaels" and traditionally, from a Gaelic-speaking point of view, includes both the Western Isles and the Highlands.
The area is very sparsely populated, with many mountain ranges dominating the region, and includes the highest mountain in the British Isles, Ben Nevis. During the 18th and early 19th centuries the population of the Highlands rose to around 300,000, but from c. 1841 and for the next 160 years, the natural increase in population was exceeded by emigration (mostly to Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and migration to the industrial cities of Scotland and England.) and passim The area is now one of the most sparsely populated in Europe. At 9.1/km2 (24/sq mi) in 2012, the population density in the Highlands and Islands is less than one seventh of Scotland's as a whole.
The Highland Council is the administrative body for much of the Highlands, with its administrative centre at Inverness. However, the Highlands also includes parts of the council areas of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Argyll and Bute, Moray, North Ayrshire, Perth and Kinross, Stirling and West Dunbartonshire.
The Scottish Highlands is the only area in the British Isles to have the taiga biome as it features concentrated populations of Scots pine forest: see Caledonian Forest. It is the most mountainous part of the United Kingdom.
Between the 15th century and the mid-20th century, the area differed from most of the Lowlands in terms of language. In Scottish Gaelic, the region is known as the Gàidhealtachd, because it was traditionally the Gaelic-speaking part of Scotland, although the language is now largely confined to The Hebrides. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably but have different meanings in their respective languages. Scottish English (in its Highland form) is the predominant language of the area today, though Highland English has been influenced by Gaelic speech to a significant extent. Historically, the "Highland line" distinguished the two Scottish cultures. While the Highland line broadly followed the geography of the Grampians in the south, it continued in the north, cutting off the north-eastern areas, that is Eastern Caithness, Orkney and Shetland, from the more Gaelic Highlands and Hebrides.
Historically, the major social unit of the Highlands was the clan. Scottish kings, particularly James VI, saw clans as a challenge to their authority; the Highlands was seen by many as a lawless region. The Scots of the Lowlands viewed the Highlanders as backward and more "Irish". The Highlands were seen as the overspill of Gaelic Ireland. They made this distinction by separating Germanic "Scots" English and the Gaelic by renaming it "Erse" a play on Eire. Following the Union of the Crowns, James VI had the military strength to back up any attempts to impose some control. The result was, in 1609, the Statutes of Iona which started the process of integrating clan leaders into Scottish society. The gradual changes continued into the 19th century, as clan chiefs thought of themselves less as patriarchal leaders of their people and more as commercial landlords. The first effect on the clansmen who were their tenants was the change to rents being payable in money rather than in kind. Later, rents were increased as Highland landowners sought to increase their income. This was followed, mostly in the period 1760–1850, by agricultural improvement that often (particularly in the Western Highlands) involved clearance of the population to make way for large scale sheep farms. Displaced tenants were set up in crofting communities in the process. The crofts were intended not to provide all the needs of their occupiers; they were expected to work in other industries such as kelping and fishing. Crofters came to rely substantially on seasonal migrant work, particularly in the Lowlands. This gave impetus to the learning of English, which was seen by many rural Gaelic speakers to be the essential "language of work".
Older historiography attributes the collapse of the clan system to the aftermath of the Jacobite risings. This is now thought less influential by historians. Following the Jacobite rising of 1745 the British government enacted a series of laws to try to suppress the clan system, including bans on the bearing of arms and the wearing of tartan, and limitations on the activities of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Most of this legislation was repealed by the end of the 18th century as the Jacobite threat subsided. There was soon a rehabilitation of Highland culture. Tartan was adopted for Highland regiments in the British Army, which poor Highlanders joined in large numbers in the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1790–1815). Tartan had largely been abandoned by the ordinary people of the region, but in the 1820s, tartan and the kilt were adopted by members of the social elite, not just in Scotland, but across Europe. The international craze for tartan, and for idealising a romanticised Highlands, was set off by the Ossian cycle, and further popularised by the works of Walter Scott. His "staging" of the visit of King George IV to Scotland in 1822 and the king's wearing of tartan resulted in a massive upsurge in demand for kilts and tartans that could not be met by the Scottish woollen industry. Individual clan tartans were largely designated in this period and they became a major symbol of Scottish identity. This "Highlandism", by which all of Scotland was identified with the culture of the Highlands, was cemented by Queen Victoria's interest in the country, her adoption of Balmoral as a major royal retreat, and her interest in "tartenry".
Recurrent famine affected the Highlands for much of its history, with significant instances as late as 1817 in the Eastern Highlands and the early 1850s in the West. Over the 18th century, the region had developed a trade of black cattle into Lowland markets, and this was balanced by imports of meal into the area. There was a critical reliance on this trade to provide sufficient food, and it is seen as an essential prerequisite for the population growth that started in the 18th century. Most of the Highlands, particularly in the North and West was short of the arable land that was essential for the mixed, run rig based, communal farming that existed before agricultural improvement was introduced into the region.[a] Between the 1760s and the 1830s there was a substantial trade in unlicensed whisky that had been distilled in the Highlands. Lowland distillers (who were not able to avoid the heavy taxation of this product) complained that Highland whisky made up more than half the market. The development of the cattle trade is taken as evidence that the pre-improvement Highlands was not an immutable system, but did exploit the economic opportunities that came its way. The illicit whisky trade demonstrates the entrepreneurial ability of the peasant classes.
Agricultural improvement reached the Highlands mostly over the period 1760 to 1850. Agricultural advisors, factors, land surveyors and others educated in the thinking of Adam Smith were keen to put into practice the new ideas taught in Scottish universities. Highland landowners, many of whom were burdened with chronic debts, were generally receptive to the advice they offered and keen to increase the income from their land. In the East and South the resulting change was similar to that in the Lowlands, with the creation of larger farms with single tenants, enclosure of the old run rig fields, introduction of new crops (such as turnips), land drainage and, as a consequence of all this, eviction, as part of the Highland clearances, of many tenants and cottars. Some of those cleared found employment on the new, larger farms, others moved to the accessible towns of the Lowlands.
In the West and North, evicted tenants were usually given tenancies in newly created crofting communities, while their former holdings were converted into large sheep farms. Sheep farmers could pay substantially higher rents than the run rig farmers and were much less prone to falling into arrears. Each croft was limited in size so that the tenants would have to find work elsewhere. The major alternatives were fishing and the kelp industry. Landlords took control of the kelp shores, deducting the wages earned by their tenants from the rent due and retaining the large profits that could be earned at the high prices paid for the processed product during the Napoleonic wars.
When the Napoleonic wars finished in 1815, the Highland industries were affected by the return to a peacetime economy. The price of black cattle fell, nearly halving between 1810 and the 1830s. Kelp prices had peaked in 1810, but reduced from £9 a ton in 1823 to £3 13s 4d a ton in 1828. Wool prices were also badly affected. This worsened the financial problems of debt-encumbered landlords. Then, in 1846, potato blight arrived in the Highlands, wiping out the essential subsistence crop for the overcrowded crofting communities. As the famine struck, the government made clear to landlords that it was their responsibility to provide famine relief for their tenants. The result of the economic downturn had been that a large proportion of Highland estates were sold in the first half of the 19th century. T M Devine points out that in the region most affected by the potato famine, by 1846, 70 per cent of the landowners were new purchasers who had not owned Highland property before 1800. More landlords were obliged to sell due to the cost of famine relief. Those who were protected from the worst of the crisis were those with extensive rental income from sheep farms. Government loans were made available for drainage works, road building and other improvements and many crofters became temporary migrants – taking work in the Lowlands. When the potato famine ceased in 1856, this established a pattern of more extensive working away from the Highlands.
The unequal concentration of land ownership remained an emotional and controversial subject, of enormous importance to the Highland economy, and eventually became a cornerstone of liberal radicalism. The poor crofters were politically powerless, and many of them turned to religion. They embraced the popularly oriented, fervently evangelical Presbyterian revival after 1800. Most joined the breakaway "Free Church" after 1843. This evangelical movement was led by lay preachers who themselves came from the lower strata, and whose preaching was implicitly critical of the established order. The religious change energised the crofters and separated them from the landlords; it helped prepare them for their successful and violent challenge to the landlords in the 1880s through the Highland Land League. Violence erupted, starting on the Isle of Skye, when Highland landlords cleared their lands for sheep and deer parks. It was quietened when the government stepped in, passing the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act, 1886 to reduce rents, guarantee fixity of tenure, and break up large estates to provide crofts for the homeless. This contrasted with the Irish Land War underway at the same time, where the Irish were intensely politicised through roots in Irish nationalism, while political dimensions were limited. In 1885 three Independent Crofter candidates were elected to Parliament, which listened to their pleas. The results included explicit security for the Scottish smallholders in the "crofting counties"; the legal right to bequeath tenancies to descendants; and the creation of a Crofting Commission. The Crofters as a political movement faded away by 1892, and the Liberal Party gained their votes.
Today, the Highlands are the largest of Scotland's whisky producing regions; the relevant area runs from Orkney to the Isle of Arran in the south and includes the northern isles and much of Inner and Outer Hebrides, Argyll, Stirlingshire, Arran, as well as sections of Perthshire and Aberdeenshire. (Other sources treat The Islands, except Islay, as a separate whisky producing region.) This massive area has over 30 distilleries, or 47 when the Islands sub-region is included in the count. According to one source, the top five are The Macallan, Glenfiddich, Aberlour, Glenfarclas and Balvenie. While Speyside is geographically within the Highlands, that region is specified as distinct in terms of whisky productions. Speyside single malt whiskies are produced by about 50 distilleries.
According to Visit Scotland, Highlands whisky is "fruity, sweet, spicy, malty". Another review states that Northern Highlands single malt is "sweet and full-bodied", the Eastern Highlands and Southern Highlands whiskies tend to be "lighter in texture" while the distilleries in the Western Highlands produce single malts with a "much peatier influence".
The Scottish Reformation achieved partial success in the Highlands. Roman Catholicism remained strong in some areas, owing to remote locations and the efforts of Franciscan missionaries from Ireland, who regularly came to celebrate Mass. There remain significant Catholic strongholds within the Highlands and Islands such as Moidart and Morar on the mainland and South Uist and Barra in the southern Outer Hebrides. The remoteness of the region and the lack of a Gaelic-speaking clergy undermined the missionary efforts of the established church. The later 18th century saw somewhat greater success, owing to the efforts of the SSPCK missionaries and to the disruption of traditional society after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. In the 19th century, the evangelical Free Churches, which were more accepting of Gaelic language and culture, grew rapidly, appealing much more strongly than did the established church.
For the most part, however, the Highlands are considered predominantly Protestant, belonging to the Church of Scotland. In contrast to the Catholic southern islands, the northern Outer Hebrides islands (Lewis, Harris and North Uist) have an exceptionally high proportion of their population belonging to the Protestant Free Church of Scotland or the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Outer Hebrides have been described as the last bastion of Calvinism in Britain and the Sabbath remains widely observed. Inverness and the surrounding area has a majority Protestant population, with most locals belonging to either The Kirk or the Free Church of Scotland. The church maintains a noticeable presence within the area, with church attendance notably higher than in other parts of Scotland. Religion continues to play an important role in Highland culture, with Sabbath observance still widely practised, particularly in the Hebrides.
In traditional Scottish geography, the Highlands refers to that part of Scotland north-west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which crosses mainland Scotland in a near-straight line from Helensburgh to Stonehaven. However the flat coastal lands that occupy parts of the counties of Nairnshire, Morayshire, Banffshire and Aberdeenshire are often excluded as they do not share the distinctive geographical and cultural features of the rest of the Highlands. The north-east of Caithness, as well as Orkney and Shetland, are also often excluded from the Highlands, although the Hebrides are usually included. The Highland area, as so defined, differed from the Lowlands in language and tradition, having preserved Gaelic speech and customs centuries after the anglicisation of the latter; this led to a growing perception of a divide, with the cultural distinction between Highlander and Lowlander first noted towards the end of the 14th century. In Aberdeenshire, the boundary between the Highlands and the Lowlands is not well defined. There is a stone beside the A93 road near the village of Dinnet on Royal Deeside which states 'You are now in the Highlands', although there are areas of Highland character to the east of this point.
A much wider definition of the Highlands is that used by the Scotch whisky industry. Highland single malts are produced at distilleries north of an imaginary line between Dundee and Greenock, thus including all of Aberdeenshire and Angus.
Inverness is regarded as the Capital of the Highlands, although less so in the Highland parts of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Perthshire and Stirlingshire which look more to Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, and Stirling as their commercial centres.
The Highland Council area, created as one of the local government regions of Scotland, has been a unitary council area since 1996. The council area excludes a large area of the southern and eastern Highlands, and the Western Isles, but includes Caithness. Highlands is sometimes used, however, as a name for the council area, as in the former Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service. Northern is also used to refer to the area, as in the former Northern Constabulary. These former bodies both covered the Highland council area and the island council areas of Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles.
Much of the Highlands area overlaps the Highlands and Islands area. An electoral region called Highlands and Islands is used in elections to the Scottish Parliament: this area includes Orkney and Shetland, as well as the Highland Council local government area, the Western Isles and most of the Argyll and Bute and Moray local government areas. Highlands and Islands has, however, different meanings in different contexts. It means Highland (the local government area), Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles in Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service. Northern, as in Northern Constabulary, refers to the same area as that covered by the fire and rescue service.
There have been trackways from the Lowlands to the Highlands since prehistoric times. Many traverse the Mounth, a spur of mountainous land that extends from the higher inland range to the North Sea slightly north of Stonehaven. The most well-known and historically important trackways are the Causey Mounth, Elsick Mounth, Cryne Corse Mounth and Cairnamounth.
Although most of the Highlands is geographically on the British mainland, it is somewhat less accessible than the rest of Britain; thus most UK couriers categorise it separately, alongside Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and other offshore islands. They thus charge additional fees for delivery to the Highlands, or exclude the area entirely. While the physical remoteness from the largest population centres inevitably leads to higher transit cost, there is confusion and consternation over the scale of the fees charged and the effectiveness of their communication, and the use of the word Mainland in their justification. Since the charges are often based on postcode areas, many far less remote areas, including some which are traditionally considered part of the lowlands, are also subject to these charges. Royal Mail is the only delivery network bound by a Universal Service Obligation to charge a uniform tariff across the UK. This, however, applies only to mail items and not larger packages which are dealt with by its Parcelforce division.
The Highlands lie to the north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which runs from Arran to Stonehaven. This part of Scotland is largely composed of ancient rocks from the Cambrian and Precambrian periods which were uplifted during the later Caledonian Orogeny. Smaller formations of Lewisian gneiss in the northwest are up to 3 billion years old. The overlying rocks of the Torridon Sandstone form mountains in the Torridon Hills such as Liathach and Beinn Eighe in Wester Ross.
These foundations are interspersed with many igneous intrusions of a more recent age, the remnants of which have formed mountain massifs such as the Cairngorms and the Cuillin of Skye. A significant exception to the above are the fossil-bearing beds of Old Red Sandstone found principally along the Moray Firth coast and partially down the Highland Boundary Fault. The Jurassic beds found in isolated locations on Skye and Applecross reflect the complex underlying geology. They are the original source of much North Sea oil. The Great Glen is formed along a transform fault which divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands.
The entire region was covered by ice sheets during the Pleistocene ice ages, save perhaps for a few nunataks. The complex geomorphology includes incised valleys and lochs carved by the action of mountain streams and ice, and a topography of irregularly distributed mountains whose summits have similar heights above sea-level, but whose bases depend upon the amount of denudation to which the plateau has been subjected in various places.
Climate
The region is much warmer than other areas at similar latitudes (such as Kamchatka in Russia, or Labrador in Canada) because of the Gulf Stream making it cool, damp and temperate. The Köppen climate classification is "Cfb" at low altitudes, then becoming "Cfc", "Dfc" and "ET" at higher altitudes.
Places of interest
An Teallach
Aonach Mòr (Nevis Range ski centre)
Arrochar Alps
Balmoral Castle
Balquhidder
Battlefield of Culloden
Beinn Alligin
Beinn Eighe
Ben Cruachan hydro-electric power station
Ben Lomond
Ben Macdui (second highest mountain in Scotland and UK)
Ben Nevis (highest mountain in Scotland and UK)
Cairngorms National Park
Cairngorm Ski centre near Aviemore
Cairngorm Mountains
Caledonian Canal
Cape Wrath
Carrick Castle
Castle Stalker
Castle Tioram
Chanonry Point
Conic Hill
Culloden Moor
Dunadd
Duart Castle
Durness
Eilean Donan
Fingal's Cave (Staffa)
Fort George
Glen Coe
Glen Etive
Glen Kinglas
Glen Lyon
Glen Orchy
Glenshee Ski Centre
Glen Shiel
Glen Spean
Glenfinnan (and its railway station and viaduct)
Grampian Mountains
Hebrides
Highland Folk Museum – The first open-air museum in the UK.
Highland Wildlife Park
Inveraray Castle
Inveraray Jail
Inverness Castle
Inverewe Garden
Iona Abbey
Isle of Staffa
Kilchurn Castle
Kilmartin Glen
Liathach
Lecht Ski Centre
Loch Alsh
Loch Ard
Loch Awe
Loch Assynt
Loch Earn
Loch Etive
Loch Fyne
Loch Goil
Loch Katrine
Loch Leven
Loch Linnhe
Loch Lochy
Loch Lomond
Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park
Loch Lubnaig
Loch Maree
Loch Morar
Loch Morlich
Loch Ness
Loch Nevis
Loch Rannoch
Loch Tay
Lochranza
Luss
Meall a' Bhuiridh (Glencoe Ski Centre)
Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary at Loch Creran
Rannoch Moor
Red Cuillin
Rest and Be Thankful stretch of A83
River Carron, Wester Ross
River Spey
River Tay
Ross and Cromarty
Smoo Cave
Stob Coire a' Chàirn
Stac Polly
Strathspey Railway
Sutherland
Tor Castle
Torridon Hills
Urquhart Castle
West Highland Line (scenic railway)
West Highland Way (Long-distance footpath)
Wester Ross
Commissioned to work with SALT Research collections, artist Refik Anadol employed machine learning algorithms to search and sort relations among 1,700,000 documents. Interactions of the multidimensional data found in the archives are, in turn, translated into an immersive media installation. Archive Dreaming, which is presented as part of The Uses of Art: Final Exhibition with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union, is user-driven; however, when idle, the installation "dreams" of unexpected correlations among documents. The resulting high-dimensional data and interactions are translated into an architectural immersive space.
Shortly after receiving the commission, Anadol was a resident artist for Google's Artists and Machine Intelligence Program where he closely collaborated with Mike Tyka and explored cutting-edge developments in the field of machine intelligence in an environment that brings together artists and engineers. Developed during this residency, his intervention Archive Dreaming transforms the gallery space on floor -1 at SALT Galata into an all-encompassing environment that intertwines history with the contemporary, and challenges immutable concepts of the archive, while destabilizing archive-related questions with machine learning algorithms.
In this project, a temporary immersive architectural space is created as a canvas with light and data applied as materials. This radical effort to deconstruct the framework of an illusory space will transgress the normal boundaries of the viewing experience of a library and the conventional flat cinema projection screen, into a three dimensional kinetic and architectonic space of an archive visualized with machine learning algorithms. By training a neural network with images of 1,700,000 documents at SALT Research the main idea is to create an immersive installation with architectural intelligence to reframe memory, history and culture in museum perception for 21st century through the lens of machine intelligence.
SALT is grateful to Google's Artists and Machine Intelligence program, and Doğuş Technology, ŠKODA, Volkswagen Doğuş Finansman for supporting Archive Dreaming.
Location : SALT Gatala, Istanbul, Turkey
Exhibition Dates : April 20 - June 11
6 Meters Wide Circular Architectural Installation
4 Channel Video, 8 Channel Audio
Custom Software, Media Server, Table for UI Interaction
For more information:
refikanadol.com/works/archive-dreaming/
La tradizione orientale verte verso l'armonia, la razionalità, l'immutabilità; la bellezza delle forme trasformarsi in origami. Una cultura ricca d'arte, dove le relazioni emotive sono dense di affettività. In particolare verrebbero privilegiati i rapporti verticali: tra giovane e anziano, tra novizio e esperto, tra subordinato e superiore, dove il primo offre la sua dedizione fedeltà, il secondo comprensione e paterna protezione. La mentalità giapponese si muove lungo strade, agli occhi degli stranieri, irrazionali, inspiegabili e incomprensibili.
The Eastern tradition relates to harmony, rationality, the immutability; the beauty of the shapes turn into origami . A culture rich in art, where emotional relations are full of affection. In particular would be privileged vertical relationships: between young and old , novice and expert , subordinate and superior , where the first offers his dedication loyalty, the second understanding and paternal protection . The Japanese mentality moves along streets, in the eyes of foreigners, irrational, inexplicable and incomprehensible .
Model: Maya Murofushi
Styling: Giulia Grincia
Make Up: Rosy Alai
© Guido Fuà / Eikona - all rights reserved
Commissioned to work with SALT Research collections, artist Refik Anadol employed machine learning algorithms to search and sort relations among 1,700,000 documents. Interactions of the multidimensional data found in the archives are, in turn, translated into an immersive media installation. Archive Dreaming, which is presented as part of The Uses of Art: Final Exhibition with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union, is user-driven; however, when idle, the installation "dreams" of unexpected correlations among documents. The resulting high-dimensional data and interactions are translated into an architectural immersive space.
Shortly after receiving the commission, Anadol was a resident artist for Google's Artists and Machine Intelligence Program where he closely collaborated with Mike Tyka and explored cutting-edge developments in the field of machine intelligence in an environment that brings together artists and engineers. Developed during this residency, his intervention Archive Dreaming transforms the gallery space on floor -1 at SALT Galata into an all-encompassing environment that intertwines history with the contemporary, and challenges immutable concepts of the archive, while destabilizing archive-related questions with machine learning algorithms.
In this project, a temporary immersive architectural space is created as a canvas with light and data applied as materials. This radical effort to deconstruct the framework of an illusory space will transgress the normal boundaries of the viewing experience of a library and the conventional flat cinema projection screen, into a three dimensional kinetic and architectonic space of an archive visualized with machine learning algorithms. By training a neural network with images of 1,700,000 documents at SALT Research the main idea is to create an immersive installation with architectural intelligence to reframe memory, history and culture in museum perception for 21st century through the lens of machine intelligence.
SALT is grateful to Google's Artists and Machine Intelligence program, and Doğuş Technology, ŠKODA, Volkswagen Doğuş Finansman for supporting Archive Dreaming.
Location : SALT Gatala, Istanbul, Turkey
Exhibition Dates : April 20 - June 11
6 Meters Wide Circular Architectural Installation
4 Channel Video, 8 Channel Audio
Custom Software, Media Server, Table for UI Interaction
For more information:
refikanadol.com/works/archive-dreaming/
Commissioned to work with SALT Research collections, artist Refik Anadol employed machine learning algorithms to search and sort relations among 1,700,000 documents. Interactions of the multidimensional data found in the archives are, in turn, translated into an immersive media installation. Archive Dreaming, which is presented as part of The Uses of Art: Final Exhibition with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union, is user-driven; however, when idle, the installation "dreams" of unexpected correlations among documents. The resulting high-dimensional data and interactions are translated into an architectural immersive space.
Shortly after receiving the commission, Anadol was a resident artist for Google's Artists and Machine Intelligence Program where he closely collaborated with Mike Tyka and explored cutting-edge developments in the field of machine intelligence in an environment that brings together artists and engineers. Developed during this residency, his intervention Archive Dreaming transforms the gallery space on floor -1 at SALT Galata into an all-encompassing environment that intertwines history with the contemporary, and challenges immutable concepts of the archive, while destabilizing archive-related questions with machine learning algorithms.
In this project, a temporary immersive architectural space is created as a canvas with light and data applied as materials. This radical effort to deconstruct the framework of an illusory space will transgress the normal boundaries of the viewing experience of a library and the conventional flat cinema projection screen, into a three dimensional kinetic and architectonic space of an archive visualized with machine learning algorithms. By training a neural network with images of 1,700,000 documents at SALT Research the main idea is to create an immersive installation with architectural intelligence to reframe memory, history and culture in museum perception for 21st century through the lens of machine intelligence.
SALT is grateful to Google's Artists and Machine Intelligence program, and Doğuş Technology, ŠKODA, Volkswagen Doğuş Finansman for supporting Archive Dreaming.
Location : SALT Gatala, Istanbul, Turkey
Exhibition Dates : April 20 - June 11
6 Meters Wide Circular Architectural Installation
4 Channel Video, 8 Channel Audio
Custom Software, Media Server, Table for UI Interaction
For more information:
refikanadol.com/works/archive-dreaming/
My Wrap Up at the end of an extraordinary day "7 months of work by our 4 organizers, brought to fruition a day that was profound, provocative, riveting, exhilarating and empowering.This is what I planned to say at the end of the day, but I think I spoke from my heart with the same message but different words!
I heard Joan Chittester, a Benedictine nun, speak about 4 years ago, saying that our generation is done, we have created the world as it is and we do not even know the answers to the problems that we have created. Those answers will come from the next generation, who are our inheritors. And our job is to solely nurture and protect that next generation, so they have the capability to develop the answers to what we are leaving them.I thought that it was enough to be a good woman and raise good children and for the last 30 years, I was oblivious to what was happening to our Mother Earth and to us and our fellow beings. I am a 6th generation Californian, my great great grandfather gave Spanish names to many of these local towns; my great grandfather was the first native born Doctor in California and my grandfather was Chief of Staff of the hospital I was born in -St Mary’s in San Francisco; my mother, sister and I went to college here in Berkeley, we know our heritage here in this place, and so many family stories, which includes the killing of Native Americans, gain and loss of land and money, intense striving for material and social success in a raw land, and a privileged life in the world’s most beautiful city.But I want my legacy to be a caring and loving world for my children and grandchildren. This is why EcoBirth’s philosophy is so important to me- it represents a holistic view of all the systems that are immutable in our lives- the Mother Earth who feeds us, the mother who births us and the present generation who inherits our culture, land and woundedness. Deep Womb Ecology, as Diana calls it-the mother’s womb is the babies first environment. They are all interdependent and interconnected and show the care or lack of care with which we live our lives. How we birth our children is an indicator of how we treat our Mother Earth and our own daughters. I want my daughter and daughter in law to be intuitive, strong life-givers, of happy, intelligent, independent, healthy children. I owe them and all our young, to take the responsibility for what I have allowed to happen to their world and to work to heal it as much as possible before I hand it over to them.Thank you so much for participating in our dreams and our hopes today, we were just 4 mothers who wanted a better world, we collaborated over the last 7 months with consensus and respect and tenderness for each other. We are so glad that our dream was realized today and that you were a part of it. All our goodwill goes to you and to our beloved world. "
Supreme Power
Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
April 14, 2010, 12:00pm – 1:00pm
To watch the event, click here: www.americanprogress.org//events/2010/04/supreme.html
Scholars are asking the same questions about the role of the Supreme Court today as they were back in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s time when he tried to expand the Supreme Court and stack it with his supporters: “Was it the judge’s role to essentially pass on the wisdom of economic legislation? Or was it the judges’ role to essentially … let Congress do what it felt needed to be done to advance the general welfare?” Author Jeff Shesol posed these questions at a CAP event last Wednesday about his new book Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court. Shesol was joined by Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate, on a panel moderated by John Halpin, Senior Fellow at CAP.
Halpin summarized the book as a three-act drama of the stability of democracy itself. “One is a decades-long ideological battle between competing world views about government, the economy, and the Constitution,” he said, “the second is how this ideological battle plays out politically in relation to the Court in the 1930s. And then there’s the third act that’s a little more implied, which is what’s the long-term legacy of this battle, both ideologically and politically for the New Deal and for…debates about the Court and jurisprudence throughout the 20th century,” Halpin explained.
The Supreme Court shot down each item on President Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda beginning in 1935. The impoverished social and economic situation meant that violent revolution was a real threat in the United States by late 1936 and early 1937. President Roosevelt was looking for a solution that was “constitutional, and that was quick and that would be effective,” Shesol said. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mandate the number of seats on the Supreme Court, so President Roosevelt decided to expand the Court to 15 judges and pack it with liberals. His plan failed, split the Democratic Party, and transformed the American constitutional landscape.
“When we think about the Court-packing plan we have an idea that the Court was way out of line. That it was striking down good, good laws,” Lithwick said. “No, these were well-intentioned laws, but…it’s not the case…they were horrified by the really very quick…one after another churning out legislation,” she explained.
But by 1936, “the Court has covered the constitutional landscape and has knocked down not only laws that were sloppily drafted, but laws that were exceedingly carefully drafted,” Shesol said. The Court decided with sweeping opinions to “pre-emptively overrule any such legislation in the future” so President Roosevelt came to believe that no matter how legislation was drafted, it was the justices themselves who would prevent the advance of anything he tried to do, Shesol added.
President Roosevelt thought the Constitution “was a very flexible instrument” and that the doctrines used to strike down the New Deal were obsolete, Shesol explained. Yet it’s evident in the conservative justices’ letters that they “believe [President] Roosevelt is centralizing power in his own hands” and both the Court and [President] Roosevelt viewed this constitutional argument as one about the survival of democracy and believed that a dictatorship would rise out of the ashes of failure, Shesol said.
The competing ideologies of constitutional formalism versus the notion of an elastic, living constitution have as much of an effect on legislative decisions today as they did in President Roosevelt’s day. Lithwick described the book as “manna from heaven” because of its timeliness in the current discussion of “jurisprudential theories and originalism” evolving around President Barack Obama’s decision to criticize the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in his State of the Union address. “Eighty percent of the public hated the Citizens United decision,” she said. Clearly, the Court is “way out of whack” with public opinion.
Even today’s linguistic framework for conversations about the Supreme Court and presidential powers have not evolved much from the 1930s. Organic law and theories of evolution are still used to defend the living Constitution argument, versus constitutional formalism’s “language about how the constitution is set in stone, how it’s sort of oracular, and how it’s divine and this notion that the constitution is the secular Ten Commandments, it’s immutable, it doesn’t change,” Lithwick said.
There is a “perfect alignment between one’s economic views and one’s constitutional views in this way,” Shesol added. “If you believed that reform was essential…you tended to see the necessity to have the constitution … evolve with our understanding of contemporary realities. If you were pretty comfortable with the established order…you tended to be drawn to a kind of jurisprudence…that really had no room for these wild social experiments,” he said.
The prevailing Court model right now is to be an umpire with “the language of constraint” and do as little as possible so that you don’t appear to support more presidential power, Lithwick lamented. “We happen to be in a sort of trough right now in history where to talk about the idea that the Constitution seeks to protect minorities or seeks to protect the underprivileged is to look reckless,” she said. It has also become somewhat taboo to challenge the finite nature of the Constitution and insist that it’s a living document that should fit the times.
Conservatives have dominated the conversation on the Constitution for the last couple of decades, and we need to hear progressives assert their points of view, Shesol said. “What [President] Roosevelt understood and what he constantly reiterated is that this argument between these two notions of the Constitution goes back to the nation’s founding…and so [President] Roosevelt made this argument with a sense of supreme self-confidence that he was true to the intentions of the founders,” Shesol continued, “And we have somehow—on the progressive side—allowed the conservatives…to get away with the argument that the founders were universally in favor of smaller, weaker government, and state’s rights and so forth…and [President] Roosevelt didn’t believe that. I don’t imagine President Obama believes it either but it would be useful thing to hear him say forcefully.”
The two moments in time are very similar, but the key difference is that now we don’t have “a full-fledged coherent” progressive view of the Constitution, Lithwick said. This is a much more “one-sided view of the Constitution…but this is a moment where the president has decided to take on the Court” with Citizens United, she explained. Yet his argument against the decision has been a pragmatic one—that this decision can open up our elections to foreign interests—rather than a constitutional argument, despite the fact that he’s a constitutional professor.
“[President] Roosevelt was defending a whole set of policies that saved the country, that saved capitalism, created a modern social welfare system and renewed the concept of equal opportunity,” Halpin said. “Perhaps part of the problem today is that the issues outside of, say, the health bill, don’t seem as pressing.”
Featured Speakers:
Jeff Shesol, author, Supreme Power
Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor, Slate
Moderated by:
John Halpin, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
PHOTO CREDIT:
Ralph Alswang
Photographer
202-487-5025
ralph@ralphphoto.com
A Place Of Broad Rivers And Streams
"The glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams." Isaiah 33:21
Broad rivers and streams produce fertility, and abundance in the land. Places near broad rivers are remarkable for the variety of their plants and their plentiful harvests. God is all this to his Church. Having God she has abundance. What can she ask for that he will not give her? What want can she mention which he will not supply? “In this mountain shall the Lord of Hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things.” (Isaiah 25:6) Do you want the bread of life? It drops like manna from the sky. Do you want refreshing streams? The rock follows you, and that Rock is Christ. If you suffer any want, it is your own fault; if you are straitened you are not straitened in him, but in your own bowels. (2 Corinthians 6:12) Broad rivers and streams also point to commerce. Our glorious Lord is to us a place of heavenly merchandise. Through our Redeemer we have commerce with the past; the wealth of Calvary, the treasures of the covenant, the riches of the ancient days of election, the stores of eternity, all come to us down the broad stream of our gracious Lord. We have commerce, too, with the future. What galleys, laden to the water’s edge, come to us from the millennium! What visions we have of the days of heaven upon earth! Through our glorious Lord we have commerce with angels; communion with the bright spirits washed in blood, who sing before the throne; and even better yet, we have fellowship with the Infinite One. Broad rivers and streams are specially intended to set forth the idea of security. Rivers used to be a means of defence. Oh! beloved, what a defence is God to his Church! The devil cannot cross this broad river of God. How he wishes he could turn the current, but fear not, for God abides immutably the same. Satan may worry, but he cannot destroy us; no galley with oars shall invade our river, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby. (Isaiah 33:21)
_____
Morning&Evening - C.H. Spurgeon
Bring it on.
Bring on the breathless TV weather drones. Bring on the frantic milk-and-toilet-paper shoppers. Bring on the desperate homeowners fighting for the last snow shovel, stick of firewood or bag of ice melt at the hardware store. Bring on the school-closing second-guessing. Bring on the endless chorus that "no one" in Washington knows how to drive.
Bring it on.
Bring on the snow.
Silence, if only briefly, the honking and the squealing and the rubber-on-asphalt moan that is our daily soundtrack. Force us to hear the hush of falling snowflakes, an almost imperceptible sound, like two hands being rubbed together.
Throw a thick white blanket over all our human imperfections: our cracked sidewalks, our crooked shingles, our dented cars, our stinky dumpsters, our towering billboards, our trash-strewed riverbanks, our ugly strip malls, our mute and unblinking bollards.
Whiten all our window ledges.
Frost our gardens and our hedges.
Obscure all the city's edges
With your powder so sublime.
Inspire in us a primal longing for food and shelter. Engender in some long-suppressed strand of our DNA a nervousness that drives us to the market to hunt and gather. Convince us that a few talismans -- a gallon of milk, a bag of Bugles, a roll of toilet paper -- will appease the spirits, will help us survive the storm.
Let us succumb to our primitive urges.
Gather our shamans -- Toppershutt, Bobryan, Suepalka -- and make them chant and fall into a trance and summon forth the magic SuperDoppler.
There! On the flickering screen! It's a bird's-eye view of our village, etched with lines of barometric pressure and wind chill temperatures, the squiggly portents of our future, as reliable as the goat intestines our augurs once spilled.
Remind us of Nature.
Remind us that Nature isn't our creation; we're Nature's, subject to its immutable rules, occasional victims of its nonchalant shrug. Remind us that Nature doesn't care if we're inconvenienced by winter, any more than a tree cares when we cut ourselves shaving or a stone that we sat on our cellphone.
Slow us down. Make us decide what's really important -- what trip, what task, what so-called necessity. Challenge us to find new ways to reach the nearest store, ways that don't involve driving the paltry three-quarters of a mile.
Compel us to pull on socks and lace up boots, to bundle up and sally forth. Make us lean into the wind and hike, our footprints leaving temporary traces of our passage (for are they not a metaphor for our very lives?).
Encourage us to see the world anew, to notice how the fresh white mantle both blurs and transforms all that it covers: parked cars turned into lumpy hillocks, curbs turned into mere suggestions of the granite underneath.
Force us into close proximity with our families (without wringing one another's necks).
When the power goes out, challenge us to somehow entertain ourselves (without wringing one another's necks).
Shush the whiners who can't recognize that a snowstorm is a gift. Quiet those who would have us power through the day as if it were like any other. Shut the traps of people who believe a day off school for a kid is the end of the world. Silence those who are ticked that they're "essential personnel" -- or that they're not.
Allow us just a few hours of communion: with the huddled masses in the checkout line, with all the people shoveling off their stoops, with Nature itself.
So bring it on.
Bring on the snow.
Ice, however, we could do without. And sleet. We don't want any of that. Ditto freezing rain.
Slayer
Alcatraz - Milano
19 Giugno 2013
Tom Araya
Kerry King
Jeff Hanneman
Dave Lombardo
© Mairo Cinquetti
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From the opening squeals of the guitars of Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman and the punishing breakaway attack of Dave Lombardo's drums on "Flesh Storm" it's clear from the first thirty seconds the thrash metal titans have returned to pummel listeners with a raging onslaught of new music guaranteed to lay waste to MP3 players, car stereo speakers and whatever else gets in their way.
Christ Illusion marks the long-awaited return of the legendary Slayer. Its first record in five years and its first record in fifteen years with the original band line-up, Christ Illusion is a cacophony of brutality. A soundtrack for the post-Apocalypse. Steeped in scorching riffs and a litany of menacing tracks/tirades on religion and violence, Slayer forges ahead on its devastating path of aural destruction with ten new songs, each charged with the electric hostility for which Slayer is renowned.
Of the record Kerry King is ecstatic: "I love it. I really like God Hates Us All and I think that's the best record we've done in my opinion since Seasons In The Abyss, and I like this better than that one. I think it's a more complete record, I think sonically it better: all the performances are awesome. I think this one is more intense not because we're trying to do 'Reign In Blood: The Sequel,' it's just that's where our writing is taking us now."
Songs like the "Flesh Storm," "Eyes of the Insane," "Skeleton Christ," "Jihad" and the first single, "Cult" showcase the band at its most blazing intensity. The sonic excitement of speed, propelled by King, Hanneman and Lombardo and lead by the immutable roar of Tom Araya provoke the listener with Slayer's trademark fascination with terror, violence and religion.
For as long as Slayer has been making records it has been surrounded by controversy.
Since the band recorded its first album, "Show No Mercy," Slayer has been plagued with accusations of Satanism, fascism, racism and so on. Christ Illusion gives no quarter to critics who would mindlessly attack the band for, what the Germans call, "der Reiz des Unbekannten" (meaning "the attraction of the unknown"). A lyric fascination with violence and terror which guitarist King enthusiastically describes this way: "When I was I kid I would see a horror movie over a love story. Being shocked, being in an environment that's not reality might be frightening but is cool nonetheless. With a lot of our songs we put people in that place. It doesn't bother me because I enjoy it. It could easily be programming from all the fucking news channels."
Slayer is often assailed for its subject matter, though the band is unrepentant. " According to Araya, "Violence, darkness... So much of my inspiration comes from news articles or pictures and just start describing the images. Television- A&E, the History Channel, Court TV, Documentaries."
The singer continues, "With this record, as far as a theme: there is none. That's just our favorite subject matter. The common thread is death. I think that's just a common thread in general: we all share death, and we all share it at different times in different ways, but it's the one thing that we all have in common. We all die. It's how we live that makes us different."
Beyond being controversial Slayer is an exceptional force in music, highly praised for its trailblazing style of fast, heavy and aggressive music yet bristling with melody. The much-heralded return of Dave Lombardo to the drummer's throne will leave fans gasping for breath as he clobbers the listener on song after song.
Commenting on Lombardo's return to the fold, King notes, "Not to say the shine's worn off, but it's old news to us. I think the thing the kids are going to get into, besides just being the first Slayer album in five years, is that Dave's on it. When he came back he wasn't a member, he just came back to do a couple of tours and people started asking back then 'Is he gonna hang around?' And I would tell them that was up to Dave. But I could tell that Dave was having a killer time." King confided. "So it was just a matter of time before he said, 'Yeah, let's do it!' But it's great. And now that he's got a new Slayer album that he's played on, I think he's going to get some more enjoyment out of playing. He takes pride in everything he does and it's awesome to have him back with us."
Having the original members record their first album together in fifteen years is certainly newsworthy but the lasting might of the band and its continued popularity is an achievement few can boast. For each of the members, the band is resolute. There is no other band like Slayer.
"The staying power behind Slayer is that we've stuck to our guns," Says Araya. "Integrity... that would be number one. A lot of it has to do with the fact that we've stuck to what we do best. And the fact that we've been together as a band for so long. Ten years with Dave; another ten without Dave; and now Dave's back. It has a lot to do with compromise, that's just the way it has to be. You have to be able to compromise and give and take and that has a lot to do with why we're still together and a force to be reckoned with. I've learned that without each other, Slayer wouldn't exist, and that the whole is greater than its parts."
Kerry King is far more succinct. "Slayer to me is the coolest band on the planet. There is a timeless quality to Slayer. It's cool, but I can't explain it. It's our life."
Slayer has created one mesmerizing record after the next, has influenced many of today's most successful bands, including Slipknot, Sepultura, Killswitch Engage, and continues to earn new generations of fans, while staying true to its ceaselessly devoted followers. Slayer's legacy is cemented in music forever and the band remains undaunted in its directive to make punishing, aggressive and exciting music. With Christ Illusion the band marks its territory. Slayer has exceeded itself far beyond thrash metal to become an unstoppable juggernaut without equal.
Tom Araya sums it up: "I think the best thing is the band's longevity and the fact that we haven't bowed to anyone. That we were able to make a record like Reign In Blood, which, to us, was just another record, but to others, was something very special, it's had such an impact. People will remember it for a long time, and it's all because we did things our way, we didn't bow down to anyone. We didn't compromise. We stuck to being who we are."
Profiles in patiotism: Keun Park
By Jane Lee
jane.k.lee@korea.army.mil
YONGSAN GARRISON - Fighting communism. Serving five times as an Ambassador for the Republic of Korea, Keun Park summed up the very reason for dedicating his life to diplomacy, with those two simple words.
Park said it was fate for him to become a diplomat in a career that spanned the emerging democracy’s first five presidencies.
“In my dorm there were North Korean students who escaped from Soviet occupation and the communists … who came down, fled to South Korea and entered prep school at Seoul National University,” he said. “They were upstairs. One night I heard a beer bottle cracking and shattering while we were sleeping.
“We were scared. In the morning, we ran up and saw. I could not recognize them. Their faces were so swollen they could not open their eyes. They were so disfigured, you could not distinguish one from the other.”
Shocked by the violence, Park spurned law school or politics in lieu of trying to find an answer to communism.
“Because of my experience with Japanese rule … I had suffered enough from oppression and dictatorship,” he said. “Fate brought me to every important event, every confrontation with communism.
“The threat to Korea was not from North Korea alone. The Soviet Union shot down a civilian airliner - Korean Air flight 007. Beyond that, the Soviet Union, their goal was world domination and Korea was one of their stepping stones or obstacles to achieving that because of our geopolitical location.”
Throughout his 30 years of government service, Park remained a steadfast champion of the ROK-US Alliance; even amidst deep, divisive anti-American sentiment following the accidental killing of two young school girls during a U.S. Military training exercise and the mad cow beef scare.
“The very fact that the United States symbolizes freedom – this immutable human historical value - is why it is the strongest country in the world today,” he said. “And because of freedom, it is the most innovative, technologically advanced, morally, materially and politically superior country. And allying with that country is a miracle.
Park credits Syngman Rhee, Korea’s first president, for having the vision to accomplish the impossible. Overcoming the overbearing communist-friendly zeitgeist during the founding of the republic, Rhee made sure the United States and South Korea were tied together through a formal alliance.
“I think God blessed us. That is why Korea is ahead of all other developing countries today - because we were founded on democracy, capitalism and non-communist ideologies.”
Regarding anti-American demonstrators today: “We can put them in jail, put them down, oppress them … but that’s not strength, that’s weakness. It’s a freedom we have to value.”
“When I was young, I believed in freedom, democracy and individualism. I think if you believe in these values, you remain eternally young. I want young people to hold onto these values."