(further information and pictures are available by clicking on the link at the end of section and of page!)

Synagogue St. Pölten

Exterior of the former St. Pölten Synagogue

The St. Pölten Synagogue was up to the November pogroms in 1938 the main synagogue of the Jewish Community of St. Pölten. The In the years 1912 to 1913 by the architects Theodor Schreier and Viktor Postelberg built Art Nouveau synagogue is located in the Dr. Karl Renner Promenade in St. Pölten and is now the headquarters of the Institute for Jewish History in Austria.

History

The old synagogue, which was demolished in favor of the new one

The first prayer rooms of in 1863 founded Jewish Community of St. Pölten were located in the premises of the former Kattunmanufaktur (cotton manufactory), the later Gasser factory at school ring. A building of this factory was adapted between 1885 and 1890 as a synagogue. This adaptation was associated with considerable effort, which is why the members of the Jewish community already since 1888 endeavoured to get a new building, until 1903 but this was rejected by the township. At this time, a redesign of the promenade was planned, which was only possible by demolition of the in the street course standing synagogue. After lengthy preparations, a preparatory committee was elected in April 1907, which in addition to building site and plans the necessary financing should provide.

1911, a building committee was chosen and agreed with the community a real estate exchange. At the architectural competition, which was tendered in the same year, participated among others Jacob Modern, Jacob Gartner, Ignaz Reiser and Theodor Schreier. The latter was together with his partner Viktor Postelberg by the Committee commissioned another project for a temple with room for 220 men and 150 women to submitt, which was then realized. The conditions for the planning work developed Rudolf Frass. The necessary funds were raised through collections and appeals for donations throughout the country, so that could be started with the construction in June 1912. The gilding works were carried out by Ferdinand Andri. After little more than a year of construction and 141 390 crowns total investment, the synagoge on 17 August 1913 was solemnly consecrated.

Destruction

On the night of 9th to the 10th November 1938 invaded several SS and SA members the rooms of the synagogue, smashed windows and set fire. The that night caused damage was limited, as the fire could be extinguished relatively quickly. On the following morning 300 to 400 people gathered, some in civilian clothes, in front of the building. They moved with the singing of political songs in the sacred spaces and destroyed them completely. The windows were broken, Torah scrolls, Torah shrine, benches and images burned. Even water pipes and door posts were torn from the walls. The books of the extensive library were largely thrown on the road and burned. Some people climbed the dome and tore the Star of David of the roof .

Almost all of the movable property of the Jewish community was destroyed or stolen . A limited set of books were placed in the city archives, the City Museum there's still a donation box and a painting of Emperor Franz Josef, which hung in the entrance area. A single prayer book is since 1998 owned again by the Jewish Community.

In the following years the side rooms of the building of the SA were used as an office, the interior was used among other things as furniture warehouse. 1942, the synagogue became the property of the city of St. Pölten, which used it as a detention center for Russian forced laborers. In last fightings and bombings in 1945 the building was further damaged.

1945

The Red Army used the former synagogue as a grain storage until it was in 1947 returned to the city. The application of restitution was recognized in 1952 by the city council, which then returned the synagogue to the Jewish Community Vienna. In the following years, the former house of God continued to decay as after the Holocaust no Jewish community in St. Pölten could establish. The domed roof showed severe damage, individual components were threatening to collapse completely and through the boarded windows came rain and snow into the by dovecotes populated house.

In 1975, the Jewish Community Vienna (IKG - Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien) offered the city of St. Pölten to purchase the synagogue, which did not accept the offer due to lack of uses. Then the Jewish Community Vienna wanted to initiate the demolition, but this was prevented by the fact that the Federal Monuments Office the building put under monument protection. Then it was renovated from 1980 to 1984. Here, for example, many wall paintings were recovered, on the other hand, some structural changes were made (especially removal of water basins for the ritual washing of the hands), since it was clear from the beginning that the building would not be used as a synagogue, but as an event center.

Since 1988 in the premises of the former synagogue the Institute for Jewish History of Austria is located, further regular events are realized. The original function the synagoge never could fulfill again, as too few Jews returned after the Holocaust to St. Pölten.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the synagogue the City Museum in St. Pölten 2013/14 the building dedicates its own special exhibition. In doing so there is also shown a recently found photo of the interior before the destruction. It is also pointed out that the synagogue due to lack of funding already again is abandoned to a certain decay.

The St. Pölten rabbi

Interior of the synagogue with part of the dome ceiling, in the center of the former shrine

Name Period of office

Moritz Tintner 1863-1869

Adolf Kurrein 1873-1876

Samuel Marcus 1876-1878

Adolf Hahn 1878-1882

Jacob Reiss 1882-1889

Bernhard Zimmels 1889-1891

Leopold Weinsberg 1891-1897

Adolf Schächter 1897-1934

Arnold Frankfurt 1934-1936

Manfred Papo 1936-1938

Building description

Outside

The dominant element of the synagogue is the octagonal, completed by a large dome main building, to which the eastern and western side wings are attached. Connected to the synagogue is the former school building in Lederergasse 12.

Main tract

The main tract houses the former sanctuary. The facade is divided into a low ground floor, high upper floor and the dome. At the facade facing the street can be found in the two storeys each three windows, that are executed on the ground floor as low segmental arch windows with above running continuously cordon cornice. The windows on the upper floor, however, are high, rectangular windows, the space between them is divided by pilasters. The original stained glass windows were destroyed from 1938, today, clear glass can be found in the windows. Directly under the dome there is a large segment gable with representations of the Tablets of the Law, set in floral vines. Beneath it is written in Hebrew the text of Psalm 118, verse 19.

" פתחו לי שערי צדק אבא בם אודה יה "

"Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will enter and give thanks to God".

- Inscription under the law boards.

On the short, lateral oblique walls of the main building on the ground floor there are side entrances, in the transition to the dome there are embedded large oval windows.

Side wings

To the eastern side wing, which in comparison to the western tract is designed very narrowly, connects the former school building and was once home to the shrine. At the by segment gable and barrel roof completed tract can be found on the northern front in the upper floor a tall, rectangular window of the same type as that of the main wing. At the eastern side a round window is embedded, in the ground floor begins a connecting room to the school building.

The western side wing is identical to the east in the basic form, but it is significantly wider. In addition, in front of it there are entrance buildings. Both at the road side and on the opposite side between the main wing and the western annex are wide projecting semi-circular staircases, next to it can be found till half the height of the first upper floor each a buttress with two low windows. Road side, this buttress is preceded by a walk-in porch, which on three sides is open round-arched. The with triangular gable completed building ends in a concave enclosure, where a commemorative plaque is attached today. The west facade repeats the design of the main building, it can be found on the ground floor low segmental arch windows with above running continuously, jagged cordon cornice. On the first floor the windows are, however, significantly lower than in the main wing.

Former school building

The former school building has its main facade towards Lederergasse and there has the number 12. The road-side main facade of the two-storey building is divided into four axes. The window on the ground floor are round-arched disigned, the ones on the upper floor rectangularly. Between side wing of the synagogue and the main wing of the school building there is a tower-like, curved stairwell risalit up to the attic.

Gallery

Wall lamp

Wall ornament

Wall ornament

Wall ornament

de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synagoge_(St._P%C3%B6lten)

(further information is available by clicking on the link at the end of page!)

 

History of the City St. Pölten

In order to present concise history of the Lower Austrian capital is in the shop of the city museum a richly illustrated full version on CD-ROM.

Tip

On the occasion of the commemoration of the pogroms of November 1938, the Institute for Jewish History of Austria its virtual Memorbuch (Memory book) for the destroyed St. Pölten Jewish community since 10th November 2012 is putting online.

Prehistory

The time from which there is no written record is named after the main materials used for tools and weapons: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. Using the latest technologies, archaeologists from archaeological finds and aerial photographs can trace a fairly detailed picture of life at that time. Especially for the time from the settling down of the People (New Stone Age), now practicing agriculture and animal husbandry, in the territory of St. Pölten lively settlement activity can be proved. In particular, cemeteries are important for the research, because the dead were laid in the grave everyday objects and jewelry, the forms of burial changing over time - which in turn gives the archeology valuable clues for the temporal determination. At the same time, prehistory of Sankt Pölten would not be half as good documented without the construction of the expressway S33 and other large buildings, where millions of cubic meters of earth were moved - under the watchful eyes of the Federal Monuments Office!

A final primeval chapter characterized the Celts, who settled about 450 BC our area and in addition to a new culture and religion also brought with them the potter's wheel. The kingdom of Noricum influenced till the penetration of the Romans the development in our area.

Roman period, migrations

The Romans conquered in 15 BC the Celtic Empire and established hereinafter the Roman province of Noricum. Borders were protected by military camp (forts), in the hinterland emerged civilian cities, almost all systematically laid out according to the same plan. The civil and commercial city Aelium Cetium, as St. Pölten was called (city law 121/122), consisted in the 4th Century already of heated stone houses, trade and craft originated thriving urban life, before the Romans in the first third of the 5th Century retreated to Italy.

The subsequent period went down as the Migration Period in official historiography, for which the settlement of the Sankt Pöltner downtown can not be proved. Cemeteries witness the residence of the Lombards in our area, later it was the Avars, extending their empire to the Enns.

The recent archaeological excavations on the Cathedral Square 2010/2011, in fact, the previous knowledge of St.Pölten colonization not have turned upside down but enriched by many details, whose full analysis and publication are expected in the near future.

Middle Ages

With the submission of the Avars by Charlemagne around 800 AD Christianity was gaining a foothold, the Bavarian Benedictine monastery of Tegernsee establishing a daughter house here - as founder are mentioned the brothers Adalbert and Ottokar - equipped with the relics of St. Hippolytus. The name St. Ypolit over the centuries should turn into Sankt Pölten. After the Hungarian wars and the resettlement of the monastery as Canons Regular of St. Augustine under the influence of Passau St. Pölten received mid-11th Century market rights.

In the second half of the 20th century historians stated that records in which the rights of citizens were held were to be qualified as Town Charters. Vienna is indeed already in 1137 as a city ("civitas") mentioned in a document, but the oldest Viennese city charter dates only from the year 1221, while the Bishop of Passau, Konrad, already in 1159 the St. Pöltnern secured:

A St. Pöltner citizen who has to answer to the court, has the right to make use of an "advocate".

He must not be forced to rid himself of the accusation by a judgment of God.

A St. Pöltner citizen may be convicted only by statements of fellow citizens, not by strangers.

From the 13th Century exercised a city judge appointed by the lord of the city the high and low jurisdiction as chairman of the council meetings and the Municipal Court, Inner and Outer Council supported him during the finding of justice. Venue for the public verdict was the in the 13th Century created new marketplace, the "Broad Market", now the town hall square. Originally square-shaped, it was only later to a rectangle reduced. Around it arose the market district, which together with the monastery district, the wood district and the Ledererviertel (quarter of the leather goods manufacturer) was protected by a double city wall.

The dependence of St. Pölten of the bishop of Passau is shown in the municipal coat of arms and the city seal. Based on the emblem of the heraldic animal of the Lord of the city, so the Bishop of Passau, it shows an upright standing wolf holding a crosier in its paw.

Modern Times

In the course of the armed conflict between the Emperor Frederick III . and King Matthias of Hungary pledged the Bishop of Passau the town on the Hungarian king. From 1485 stood Lower Austria as a whole under Hungarian rule. The most important document of this period is the awarding of the city coat of arms by King Matthias Corvinus in the year 1487. After the death of the opponents 1490 and 1493 could Frederick's son Maximilian reconquer Lower Austria. He considered St. Pölten as spoils of war and had no intention of returning it to the diocese of Passau. The city government has often been leased subsequently, for instance, to the family Wellenstein, and later to the families Trautson and Auersperg.

That St. Pölten now was a princely city, found its expression in the coat of arms letter of the King Ferdinand I. from 1538: From now on, the wolf had no crosier anymore, and the from the viewer's point of view left half showed the reverse Austrian shield, so silver-red-silver.

To the 16th Century also goes back the construction of St. Pöltner City Hall. The 1503 by judge and council acquired house was subsequently expanded, rebuilt, extended and provided with a tower.

A for the urban history research important picture, painted in 1623, has captured scenes of the peasant uprising of 1597, but also allows a view to the city and lets the viewer read some of the details of the then state of construction. The economic inconveniences of that time were only exacerbated by the Thirty Years War, at the end of which a fifth of the houses were uninhabited and the citizenry was impoverished.

Baroque

After the successful defense against the Turks in 1683, the economy started to recover and a significant building boom began. Lower Austria turned into the land of the baroque abbeys and monasteries, as it is familiar to us today.

In St. Pölten, the change of the cityscape is closely connected to the Baroque architect Jakob Prandtauer. In addition to the Baroquisation of the interior of the cathedral, a number of buildings in St. Pölten go to his account, so the reconstruction of the castle Ochsenburg, the erection of the Schwaighof and of the core building of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Englische Fräuleins - English Maidens) - from 1706 the seat of the first school order of St.Pölten - as well as of several bourgeois houses.

Joseph Munggenast, nephew and co-worker of Prandtauer, completed the Baroquisation of the cathedral, he baroquised the facade of the town hall (1727) and numerous bourgeois houses and designed a bridge over the Traisen which existed until 1907. In the decoration of the church buildings were throughout Tyroleans collaborating, which Jakob Prandtauer had brought along from his homeland (Tyrol) to St. Pölten, for example, Paul Troger and Peter Widerin.

Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II: Their reforms in the city of the 18th Century also left a significant mark. School foundings as a result of compulsory education, the dissolution of the monasteries and hereinafter - from 1785 - the new role of St. Pölten as a bishop's seat are consequences of their policies.

1785 was also the year of a fundamental alteration of the old Council Constitution: The city judge was replaced by one magistrate consisting of five persons, at the head was a mayor. For the first mayor the painter Josef Hackl was chosen.

The 19th century

Despite the Napoleonic Wars - St. Pölten in 1805 and 1809 was occupied by the French - and despite the state bankruptcy of 1811, increased the number of businesses constantly, although the economic importance of the city for the time being did not go beyond the near vicinity.

Against the background of monitoring by the state secret police, which prevented any political commitment between the Congress of Vienna and the 1848 revolution, the citizens withdrew into private life. Sense of family, fostering of domestic music, prominent salon societies in which even a Franz Schubert socialized, or the construction of the city theater were visible signs of this attitude.

The economic upswing of the city did not begin until after the revolution of the year 1848. A prerequisite for this was the construction of the Empress Elisabeth Western Railway, moving Vienna, Linz, soon Salzburg, too, in a reachable distance. The city walls were pulled down, St. Pölten could unfold. The convenient traffic situation favored factory start-ups, and so arose a lace factory, a revolver factory, a soap factory or, for example, as a precursor of a future large-scale enterprise, the braid, ribbon and Strickgarnerzeugung (knitting yarn production) of Matthias Salcher in Harland.

In other areas, too, the Gründerzeit (years of rapid industrial expansion in Germany - and Austria) in Sankt Pölten was honouring its name: The city got schools, a hospital, gas lanterns, canalization, hot springs and summer bath.

The 20th century

At the beginning of the 20th Century the city experienced another burst of development, initiated by the construction of the power station in 1903, because electricity was the prerequisite for the settlement of large companies. In particular, the companies Voith and Glanzstoff and the main workshop of the Federal Railways attracted many workers. New Traisen bridge, tram, Mariazell Railway and other infrastructure buildings were erected; St. Pölten obtained a synagogue. The Art Nouveau made it repeatedly into the urban architecture - just think of the Olbrich House - and inspired also the painting, as exponents worth to be mentioned are Ernst Stöhr or Ferdinand Andri.

What the outbreak of the First World War in broad outlines meant for the monarchy, on a smaller scale also St. Pölten has felt. The city was heavily impacted by the deployment of army units, a POW camp, a military hospital and a sick bay. Industrial enterprises were partly converted into war production, partly closed. Unemployment, housing emergency and food shortages long after the war still were felt painfully.

The 1919 to mayor elected Social Democrat Hubert Schnofl after the war tried to raise the standard of living of the people by improving the social welfare and health care. The founding of a housing cooperative (Wohnungsgenossenschaft), the construction of the water line and the establishment of new factories were further attempts to stimulate the stiffening economy whose descent could not be stopped until 1932.

After the National Socialist regime had stirred false hopes and plunged the world into war, St. Pölten was no longer the city as it has been before. Not only the ten devastating bombings of the last year of the war had left its marks, also the restrictive persecution of Jews and political dissidents had torn holes in the structure of the population. Ten years of Russian occupation subsequently did the rest to traumatize the population, but at this time arose from the ruins a more modern St. Pölten, with the new Traisen bridge, district heating, schools.

This trend continued, an era of recovery and modernization made the economic miracle palpable. Already in 1972 was - even if largely as a result of incorporations - exceeded the 50.000-inhabitant-limit.

Elevation to capital status (capital of Lower Austria), 10 July 1986: No other event in this dimension could have become the booster detonation of an up to now ongoing development thrust. Since then in a big way new residential and commercial areas were opened up, built infrastructure constructions, schools and universities brought into being to enrich the educational landscape. East of the Old Town arose the governmental and cultural district, and the list of architects wears sonorous names such as Ernst Hoffmann (NÖ (Lower Austria) Landhaus; Klangturm), Klaus Kada (Festspielhaus), Hans Hollein (Shedhalle and Lower Austrian Provincial Museum), Karin Bily, Paul Katzberger and Michael Loudon ( NÖ State Library and NÖ State Archive).

European Diploma, European flag, badge of honor, Europe Price: Between 1996 and 2001, received St. Pölten numerous appreciations of its EU commitment - as a sort of recognition of the Council of Europe for the dissemination of the EU-idea through international town twinnings, a major Europe exhibition or, for example, the establishment and chair of the "Network of European medium-sized cities".

On the way into the 21st century

Just now happened and already history: What the St. Pöltnern as just experienced sticks in their minds, travelers and newcomers within a short time should be told. The theater and the hospital handing over to the province of Lower Austria, a new mayor always on the go, who was able to earn since 2004 already numerous laurels (Tags: polytechnic, downtown enhancement, building lease scheme, bus concept) - all the recent changes are just now condensed into spoken and written language in order to make, from now on, the history of the young provincial capital in the 3rd millennium nachlesbar (checkable).

www.st-poelten.gv.at/Content.Node/freizeit-kultur/kultur/...

A personal consequence of BREXIT?

Haus Lange in Krefeld is an address of pilgrimage for architectural studies and those people interested in Ludwig Mies von der Rohe’s style setting early work. Splendid and ageless architecture and garden environment.

Most recently this building became a new home for BREXIT refugee family that felt no longer welcome in England. Has it really become ‘a home’? If you watch the series of photos I took you might feel shocked as I was when I first lingered thru the stylish rooms. The car was still packed. The door was open… I entered as invited, saw valuable furniture, most goods still in boxes, piles of books. The pantechnicon obviously just left. Also very obvious: The landlady, mother and wife also left and will stay absent: ‘You will never see me again’ written on the mirror. That wasn’t a good sign. I felt sorry.

Then to my utmost horror I found the host floating dead in the pool… A husband, a father: dead! And nobody seems to care!

Even more desperate the boy hiding in the dining room – his distressed body language seems to ask: Can this my home? Where is my mother? Who is my mother? Where are my roots?

You may form your own opinion on this photo story – but being uprooted is the worst prerequisite for a new and positive start. Reasons are manifold. But if it comes to politics as a cause: Think before you vote, choose well whom you elect. It might affect your families’ life, too.

 

The artists Michael Elgreen and Ingar Dragset make us think with their fictive story and installation of an unhappy start in Haus Lange, Krefeld.

I as a photographer tried to transfer this mood and the atmosphre into 17 picture series ‘Die Zugezogenen’.

 

Krefeld, February 2017

Thomas Kopf

 

The Mount Elliott Mining Complex is an aggregation of the remnants of copper mining and smelting operations from the early 20th century and the associated former mining township of Selwyn. The earliest copper mining at Mount Elliott was in 1906 with smelting operations commencing shortly after. Significant upgrades to the mining and smelting operations occurred under the management of W.R. Corbould during 1909 - 1910. Following these upgrades and increases in production, the Selwyn Township grew quickly and had 1500 residents by 1918. The Mount Elliott Company took over other companies on the Cloncurry field in the 1920s, including the Mount Cuthbert and Kuridala smelters. Mount Elliott operations were taken over by Mount Isa Mines in 1943 to ensure the supply of copper during World War Two. The Mount Elliott Company was eventually liquidated in 1953.

 

The Mount Elliott Smelter:

 

The existence of copper in the Leichhardt River area of north western Queensland had been known since Ernest Henry discovered the Great Australia Mine in 1867 at Cloncurry. In 1899 James Elliott discovered copper on the conical hill that became Mount Elliott, but having no capital to develop the mine, he sold an interest to James Morphett, a pastoralist of Fort Constantine station near Cloncurry. Morphett, being drought stricken, in turn sold out to John Moffat of Irvinebank, the most successful mining promoter in Queensland at the time.

 

Plentiful capital and cheap transport were prerequisites for developing the Cloncurry field, which had stagnated for forty years. Without capital it was impossible to explore and prove ore-bodies; without proof of large reserves of wealth it was futile to build a railway; and without a railway it was hazardous to invest capital in finding large reserves of ore. The mining investor or the railway builder had to break the impasse.

 

In 1906 - 1907 copper averaged £87 a ton on the London market, the highest price for thirty years, and the Cloncurry field grew. The railway was extended west of Richmond in 1905 - 1906 by the Government and mines were floated on the Melbourne Stock Exchange. At Mount Elliott a prospecting shaft had been sunk and on the 1st of August 1906 a Cornish boiler and winding plant were installed on the site.

 

Mount Elliott Limited was floated in Melbourne on the 13th of July 1906. In 1907 it was taken over by British and French interests and restructured. Combining with its competitor, Hampden Cloncurry Copper Mines Limited, Mount Elliott formed a special company to finance and construct the railway from Cloncurry to Malbon, Kuridala (then Friezeland) and Mount Elliott (later Selwyn). This new company then entered into an agreement with the Queensland Railways Department in July 1908.

 

The railway, which was known as the 'Syndicate Railway', aroused opposition in 1908 from the trade unions and Labor movement generally, who contended that railways should be State-owned. However, the Hampden-Mount Elliott Railway Bill was passed by the Queensland Parliament and assented to on the 21st of April 1908; construction finished in December 1910. The railway terminated at the Mount Elliott smelter.

 

By 1907 the main underlie shaft had been sunk and construction of the smelters was underway using a second-hand water-jacket blast furnace and converters. At this time, W.H. Corbould was appointed general manager of Mount Elliott Limited.

 

The second-hand blast furnace and converters were commissioned or 'blown in' in May 1909, but were problematic causing hold-ups. Corbould referred to the equipment in use as being the 'worst collection of worn-out junk he had ever come across'. Corbould soon convinced his directors to scrap the plant and let him design new works.

 

Corbould was a metallurgist and geologist as well as mine/smelter manager. He foresaw a need to obtain control and thereby ensure a reliable supply of ore from a cross-section of mines in the region. He also saw a need to implement an effective strategy to manage the economies of smelting low-grade ore. Smelting operations in the region were made difficult by the technical and economic problems posed by the deterioration in the grade of ore. Corbould resolved the issue by a process of blending ores with different chemical properties, increasing the throughput capacity of the smelter and by championing the unification of smelting operations in the region. In 1912, Corbould acquired Hampden Consols Mine at Kuridala for Mount Elliott Limited, followed with the purchases of other small mines in the district.

 

Walkers Limited of Maryborough was commissioned to manufacture a new 200 ton water jacket furnace for the smelters. An air compressor and blower for the smelters were constructed in the powerhouse and an electric motor and dynamo provided power for the crane and lighting for the smelter and mine.

 

The new smelter was blown in September 1910, a month after the first train arrived, and it ran well, producing 2040 tons of blister copper by the end of the year. The new smelting plant made it possible to cope with low-grade sulphide ores at Mount Elliott. The use of 1000 tons of low-grade sulphide ores bought from the Hampden Consols Mine in 1911 made it clear that if a supply of higher sulphur ore could be obtained and blended, performance, and economy would improve. Accordingly, the company bought a number of smaller mines in the district in 1912.

 

Corbould mined with cut and fill stoping but a young Mines Inspector condemned the system, ordered it dismantled and replaced with square set timbering. In 1911, after gradual movement in stopes on the No. 3 level, the smelter was closed for two months. Nevertheless, 5447 tons of blister copper was produced in 1911, rising to 6690 tons in 1912 - the company's best year. Many of the surviving structures at the site were built at this time.

 

Troubles for Mount Elliott started in 1913. In February, a fire at the Consols Mine closed it for months. In June, a thirteen week strike closed the whole operation, severely depleting the workforce. The year 1913 was also bad for industrial accidents in the area, possibly due to inexperienced people replacing the strikers. Nevertheless, the company paid generous dividends that year.

 

At the end of 1914 smelting ceased for more than a year due to shortage of ore. Although 3200 tons of blister copper was produced in 1913, production fell to 1840 tons in 1914 and the workforce dwindled to only 40 men. For the second half of 1915 and early 1916 the smelter treated ore railed south from Mount Cuthbert. At the end of July 1916 the smelting plant at Selwyn was dismantled except for the flue chambers and stacks. A new furnace with a capacity of 500 tons per day was built, a large amount of second-hand equipment was obtained and the converters were increased in size.

 

After the enlarged furnace was commissioned in June 1917, continuing industrial unrest retarded production which amounted to only 1000 tons of copper that year. The point of contention was the efficiency of the new smelter which processed twice as much ore while employing fewer men. The company decided to close down the smelter in October and reduce the size of the furnace, the largest in Australia, from 6.5m to 5.5m. In the meantime the price of copper had almost doubled from 1916 due to wartime consumption of munitions.

 

The new furnace commenced on the 16th of January 1918 and 77,482 tons of ore were smelted yielding 3580 tons of blister copper which were sent to the Bowen refinery before export to Britain. Local coal and coke supply was a problem and materials were being sourced from the distant Bowen Colliery. The smelter had a good run for almost a year except for a strike in July and another in December, which caused Corbould to close down the plant until New Year. In 1919, following relaxation of wartime controls by the British Metal Corporation, the copper price plunged from about £110 per ton at the start of the year to £75 per ton in April, dashing the company's optimism regarding treatment of low grade ores. The smelter finally closed after two months operation and most employees were laid off.

 

For much of the period 1919 to 1922, Corbould was in England trying to raise capital to reorganise the company's operations but he failed and resigned from the company in 1922. The Mount Elliott Company took over the assets of the other companies on the Cloncurry field in the 1920s - Mount Cuthbert in 1925 and Kuridala in 1926. Mount Isa Mines bought the Mount Elliott plant and machinery, including the three smelters, in 1943 for £2,300, enabling them to start copper production in the middle of the Second World War. The Mount Elliott Company was finally liquidated in 1953.

 

In 1950 A.E. Powell took up the Mount Elliott Reward Claim at Selwyn and worked close to the old smelter buildings. An open cut mine commenced at Starra, south of Mount Elliott and Selwyn, in 1988 and is Australia's third largest copper producer producing copper-gold concentrates from flotation and gold bullion from carbon-in-leach processing.

 

Profitable copper-gold ore bodies were recently proved at depth beneath the Mount Elliott smelter and old underground workings by Cyprus Gold Australia Pty Ltd. These deposits were subsequently acquired by Arimco Mining Pty Ltd for underground development which commenced in July 1993. A decline tunnel portal, ore and overburden dumps now occupy a large area of the Maggie Creek valley south-west of the smelter which was formerly the site of early miner's camps.

 

The Old Selwyn Township:

 

In 1907, the first hotel, run by H. Williams, was opened at the site. The township was surveyed later, around 1910, by the Mines Department. The town was to be situated north of the mine and smelter operations adjacent the railway, about 1.5km distant. It took its name from the nearby Selwyn Ranges which were named, during Burke's expedition, after the Victorian Government Geologist, A.R. Selwyn. The town has also been known by the name of Mount Elliott, after the nearby mines and smelter.

 

Many of the residents either worked at the Mount Elliott Mine and Smelter or worked in the service industries which grew around the mining and smelting operations. Little documentation exists about the everyday life of the town's residents. Surrounding sheep and cattle stations, however, meant that meat was available cheaply and vegetables grown in the area were delivered to the township by horse and cart. Imported commodities were, however, expensive.

 

By 1910 the town had four hotels. There was also an aerated water manufacturer, three stores, four fruiterers, a butcher, baker, saddler, garage, police, hospital, banks, post office (officially from 1906 to 1928, then unofficially until 1975) and a railway station. There was even an orchestra of ten players in 1912. The population of Selwyn rose from 1000 in 1911 to 1500 in 1918, before gradually declining.

 

Source: Queensland Heritage Register.

The Mount Elliott Mining Complex is an aggregation of the remnants of copper mining and smelting operations from the early 20th century and the associated former mining township of Selwyn. The earliest copper mining at Mount Elliott was in 1906 with smelting operations commencing shortly after. Significant upgrades to the mining and smelting operations occurred under the management of W.R. Corbould during 1909 - 1910. Following these upgrades and increases in production, the Selwyn Township grew quickly and had 1500 residents by 1918. The Mount Elliott Company took over other companies on the Cloncurry field in the 1920s, including the Mount Cuthbert and Kuridala smelters. Mount Elliott operations were taken over by Mount Isa Mines in 1943 to ensure the supply of copper during World War Two. The Mount Elliott Company was eventually liquidated in 1953.

 

The Mount Elliott Smelter:

 

The existence of copper in the Leichhardt River area of north western Queensland had been known since Ernest Henry discovered the Great Australia Mine in 1867 at Cloncurry. In 1899 James Elliott discovered copper on the conical hill that became Mount Elliott, but having no capital to develop the mine, he sold an interest to James Morphett, a pastoralist of Fort Constantine station near Cloncurry. Morphett, being drought stricken, in turn sold out to John Moffat of Irvinebank, the most successful mining promoter in Queensland at the time.

 

Plentiful capital and cheap transport were prerequisites for developing the Cloncurry field, which had stagnated for forty years. Without capital it was impossible to explore and prove ore-bodies; without proof of large reserves of wealth it was futile to build a railway; and without a railway it was hazardous to invest capital in finding large reserves of ore. The mining investor or the railway builder had to break the impasse.

 

In 1906 - 1907 copper averaged £87 a ton on the London market, the highest price for thirty years, and the Cloncurry field grew. The railway was extended west of Richmond in 1905 - 1906 by the Government and mines were floated on the Melbourne Stock Exchange. At Mount Elliott a prospecting shaft had been sunk and on the 1st of August 1906 a Cornish boiler and winding plant were installed on the site.

 

Mount Elliott Limited was floated in Melbourne on the 13th of July 1906. In 1907 it was taken over by British and French interests and restructured. Combining with its competitor, Hampden Cloncurry Copper Mines Limited, Mount Elliott formed a special company to finance and construct the railway from Cloncurry to Malbon, Kuridala (then Friezeland) and Mount Elliott (later Selwyn). This new company then entered into an agreement with the Queensland Railways Department in July 1908.

 

The railway, which was known as the 'Syndicate Railway', aroused opposition in 1908 from the trade unions and Labor movement generally, who contended that railways should be State-owned. However, the Hampden-Mount Elliott Railway Bill was passed by the Queensland Parliament and assented to on the 21st of April 1908; construction finished in December 1910. The railway terminated at the Mount Elliott smelter.

 

By 1907 the main underlie shaft had been sunk and construction of the smelters was underway using a second-hand water-jacket blast furnace and converters. At this time, W.H. Corbould was appointed general manager of Mount Elliott Limited.

 

The second-hand blast furnace and converters were commissioned or 'blown in' in May 1909, but were problematic causing hold-ups. Corbould referred to the equipment in use as being the 'worst collection of worn-out junk he had ever come across'. Corbould soon convinced his directors to scrap the plant and let him design new works.

 

Corbould was a metallurgist and geologist as well as mine/smelter manager. He foresaw a need to obtain control and thereby ensure a reliable supply of ore from a cross-section of mines in the region. He also saw a need to implement an effective strategy to manage the economies of smelting low-grade ore. Smelting operations in the region were made difficult by the technical and economic problems posed by the deterioration in the grade of ore. Corbould resolved the issue by a process of blending ores with different chemical properties, increasing the throughput capacity of the smelter and by championing the unification of smelting operations in the region. In 1912, Corbould acquired Hampden Consols Mine at Kuridala for Mount Elliott Limited, followed with the purchases of other small mines in the district.

 

Walkers Limited of Maryborough was commissioned to manufacture a new 200 ton water jacket furnace for the smelters. An air compressor and blower for the smelters were constructed in the powerhouse and an electric motor and dynamo provided power for the crane and lighting for the smelter and mine.

 

The new smelter was blown in September 1910, a month after the first train arrived, and it ran well, producing 2040 tons of blister copper by the end of the year. The new smelting plant made it possible to cope with low-grade sulphide ores at Mount Elliott. The use of 1000 tons of low-grade sulphide ores bought from the Hampden Consols Mine in 1911 made it clear that if a supply of higher sulphur ore could be obtained and blended, performance, and economy would improve. Accordingly, the company bought a number of smaller mines in the district in 1912.

 

Corbould mined with cut and fill stoping but a young Mines Inspector condemned the system, ordered it dismantled and replaced with square set timbering. In 1911, after gradual movement in stopes on the No. 3 level, the smelter was closed for two months. Nevertheless, 5447 tons of blister copper was produced in 1911, rising to 6690 tons in 1912 - the company's best year. Many of the surviving structures at the site were built at this time.

 

Troubles for Mount Elliott started in 1913. In February, a fire at the Consols Mine closed it for months. In June, a thirteen week strike closed the whole operation, severely depleting the workforce. The year 1913 was also bad for industrial accidents in the area, possibly due to inexperienced people replacing the strikers. Nevertheless, the company paid generous dividends that year.

 

At the end of 1914 smelting ceased for more than a year due to shortage of ore. Although 3200 tons of blister copper was produced in 1913, production fell to 1840 tons in 1914 and the workforce dwindled to only 40 men. For the second half of 1915 and early 1916 the smelter treated ore railed south from Mount Cuthbert. At the end of July 1916 the smelting plant at Selwyn was dismantled except for the flue chambers and stacks. A new furnace with a capacity of 500 tons per day was built, a large amount of second-hand equipment was obtained and the converters were increased in size.

 

After the enlarged furnace was commissioned in June 1917, continuing industrial unrest retarded production which amounted to only 1000 tons of copper that year. The point of contention was the efficiency of the new smelter which processed twice as much ore while employing fewer men. The company decided to close down the smelter in October and reduce the size of the furnace, the largest in Australia, from 6.5m to 5.5m. In the meantime the price of copper had almost doubled from 1916 due to wartime consumption of munitions.

 

The new furnace commenced on the 16th of January 1918 and 77,482 tons of ore were smelted yielding 3580 tons of blister copper which were sent to the Bowen refinery before export to Britain. Local coal and coke supply was a problem and materials were being sourced from the distant Bowen Colliery. The smelter had a good run for almost a year except for a strike in July and another in December, which caused Corbould to close down the plant until New Year. In 1919, following relaxation of wartime controls by the British Metal Corporation, the copper price plunged from about £110 per ton at the start of the year to £75 per ton in April, dashing the company's optimism regarding treatment of low grade ores. The smelter finally closed after two months operation and most employees were laid off.

 

For much of the period 1919 to 1922, Corbould was in England trying to raise capital to reorganise the company's operations but he failed and resigned from the company in 1922. The Mount Elliott Company took over the assets of the other companies on the Cloncurry field in the 1920s - Mount Cuthbert in 1925 and Kuridala in 1926. Mount Isa Mines bought the Mount Elliott plant and machinery, including the three smelters, in 1943 for £2,300, enabling them to start copper production in the middle of the Second World War. The Mount Elliott Company was finally liquidated in 1953.

 

In 1950 A.E. Powell took up the Mount Elliott Reward Claim at Selwyn and worked close to the old smelter buildings. An open cut mine commenced at Starra, south of Mount Elliott and Selwyn, in 1988 and is Australia's third largest copper producer producing copper-gold concentrates from flotation and gold bullion from carbon-in-leach processing.

 

Profitable copper-gold ore bodies were recently proved at depth beneath the Mount Elliott smelter and old underground workings by Cyprus Gold Australia Pty Ltd. These deposits were subsequently acquired by Arimco Mining Pty Ltd for underground development which commenced in July 1993. A decline tunnel portal, ore and overburden dumps now occupy a large area of the Maggie Creek valley south-west of the smelter which was formerly the site of early miner's camps.

 

The Old Selwyn Township:

 

In 1907, the first hotel, run by H. Williams, was opened at the site. The township was surveyed later, around 1910, by the Mines Department. The town was to be situated north of the mine and smelter operations adjacent the railway, about 1.5km distant. It took its name from the nearby Selwyn Ranges which were named, during Burke's expedition, after the Victorian Government Geologist, A.R. Selwyn. The town has also been known by the name of Mount Elliott, after the nearby mines and smelter.

 

Many of the residents either worked at the Mount Elliott Mine and Smelter or worked in the service industries which grew around the mining and smelting operations. Little documentation exists about the everyday life of the town's residents. Surrounding sheep and cattle stations, however, meant that meat was available cheaply and vegetables grown in the area were delivered to the township by horse and cart. Imported commodities were, however, expensive.

 

By 1910 the town had four hotels. There was also an aerated water manufacturer, three stores, four fruiterers, a butcher, baker, saddler, garage, police, hospital, banks, post office (officially from 1906 to 1928, then unofficially until 1975) and a railway station. There was even an orchestra of ten players in 1912. The population of Selwyn rose from 1000 in 1911 to 1500 in 1918, before gradually declining.

 

Source: Queensland Heritage Register.

The River Helmsdale is one of the major east-flowing rivers of Sutherland in the Highlands of Scotland. It flows broadly southeastwards from Loch Badanloch down the Strath of Kildonan (otherwise known as Strath Ullie), gathering the waters of the Bannock Burn on its left and the Abhainn na Frithe on its right before discharging into the Moray Firth on the North Sea at the town of Helmsdale. Other significant tributaries of the Helmsdale include the left-bank Suisgill Burn and the right-bank Craggie Water. Loch Achnamoine which is just over 1 km in length, lies on the line of the river 1 mi / 1.5 km downstream of Loch Badanloch. Loch Badanloch is one of a complex of three interconnecting lochs - the other two being Loch nan Clàr and Loch Rimsdale which gather waters from the moors on the southern edge of the Flow Country via the Allt an Lòin Tharsuinn, Allt Lòn a' Chùil and Rimsdale Burn

 

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

The sparrow project is an attempt to improve my bird story telling along with honing eye hand/AF coordination skills using a common subject readily available. The subjects must be in motion as a prerequisite since shooting ducks in a barrel is just no sport at all.

 

I was spurred into the project due to my complete dissatisfaction of prior attempts while on a trip to Tanzania. Learning the delicate balance between shutter speed, proper long lens techniques, iso settings and AF modes is a challenge for something just slightly slower than a speeding bullet.

 

This will be ongoing to support my next African adventure later this year.

Loch Leven is a sea loch located on the west coast of Scotland. It is spelled Loch Lyon in Timothy Pont's map of the area and is pronounced Li' un. The local Gaelic pronunciation is Lee' oon

 

Loch Leven extends 8+3⁄4 miles (14.1 km), varying in width between 220 yards (200 m) and just over 1 mile (1.6 km). It opens onto Camus a' Chois at North Ballachulish, part of Loch Linnhe at its western end. There are nine small islands, some rocky and covered with heather and some just smooth green grass, near the western end of the loch.

 

The village of Glencoe (Scottish Gaelic: A' Chàrnaich) lies on its southern shore. The burial place of the MacDonald clan of Glencoe lies on an island - Eilean Munde, St.Munda's or St Munn's or Saint Fintan Munnu's Island, opposite the village. The island burial place was also shared by the Camerons of Callart, on the north shore of the loch, the Stewarts of Ballachulish and Appin and other local families.

 

The village of Kinlochleven at the head of the loch was established when the aluminium smelter was built there during the first decade of the twentieth century. It was originally the hamlets of Kinlochmore (Inverness-shire) and Kinlochbeg (Argyll) either side of the River Leven. A road connecting the village to Glencoe and the south was not constructed until 1922: until this date the village could only be reached from the south by boat or on foot. The road on the north of the loch continues on to Fort William (Scottish Gaelic: An Gearasdan Inbhir Lochaidh), and was built in 1927.

 

For many years the Ballachulish Ferry plied the route across the mouth of the loch, providing a key link on the A82 between Glasgow and Fort William. In 1975 the Ballachulish Bridge replaced the ferry. Under the bridge lie the narrows of Caolas Mhic Phàdraig. The settlements either side of this point are North and South Ballachulish - Baile a' Chaolais (the settlement on the narrows). There is a fast tidal stream through the narrows, running at up to seven knots at springs; it is wise, therefore, to time and match any passage through the narrows with the tides. Further up the loch, there are several other narrows - principally Caolas na Con - with significant, but diminishing tidal streams. The Caolas na Con represented a considerable barrier to shipping, restricting the size of vessels that could reach Kinlochleven, however in 1907 the channel was dredged and the silt-bearing Allt Gleann a' Chaolais diverted to allow ships bringing bauxite alumina to reach the smelter at Kinlochleven.

 

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

In the new Lahore lies buried Shah Husain and with him lies buried the myth of Lal Husain. Still, at least once a year we can hear the defused echoes of the myth. As the lights glimmer on the walls of Shalamar, the unsophisticated rhythms of swinging bodies and exulting voices curiously insist on being associated with Husain. This instance apparently defies explanation. But one is aware that an undertone of mockery pervades the air - released feet mocking the ancient sods of Shalamar and released voices mocking its ancient walls. Husain too, the myth tells us, danced a dance of mockery in the ancient streets of Lahore. Grandson of a convert weaver, he embarrassed every one by aspiring to the privilege of learning what he revered guardians of traditional knowledge claimed to teach.

 

Then again, fairly late in life, he embarrassed every one by refusing to believe in the knowledge he had received from others, and decided to know for himself. He plucked the forbidden fruit anew.

 

The myth of Lal Husain has lived a defused, half-conscious life in the annual Fare of Lights. The poetry of shah Husain which was born out of common songs of the people of the Punjab has kept itself alive by becoming a part of those very songs. In recent past, the myth of Madhu Lal Husain and the poetry of Husain have come to be connected. But the time for the myth to become really alive in our community is still to come.

 

Husain s poetry consists entirely of short poems known as "Kafis." A typical Husain Kafi contains a refrain and some rhymed lines. The number of rhymed lines is usually from four to ten. Only occasionally a more complete form is adopted. To the eye of a reader, the structure of a "Kafi" appears simple. But the "Kafis" of Husain are not intended for the eye. They are designed as musical compositions to be interpreted by the singing voice. The rhythm in the refrain and in the lines are so balanced and counterpointed as to bring about a varying, evolving musical pattern.

 

It may be asserted that poetry is often written to be sung. And all poetry carries, through manipulation of sound effects, some suggestion of music. Where then lies the point in noticing the music in the "Kafis" of Shah Husain? Precisely in this: Husain s music is deliberate - not in the sense that it is induced by verbal trickery but in the sense that it is the central factor in the poet s meaning.

 

The music that we have here is not the vague suggestion of melodiousness one commonly associates with the adjective "lyrical : it is the symbolic utterance of a living social tradition. The "Kafis" draw for their musical pattern on the Punjabi folk songs. The Punjabi folk songs embody and recall the emotional experience of the community. They record the reactions to the cycle of birth, blossoming, decay and death. They observe the play of human desire against the backdrop of this cycle, symbolizing through their rhythms the rhythms of despair and exultation, nostalgia and hope, questioning and faith. These songs comprehend the three dimensions of time - looking back into past and ahead into future and relating the present to both. Also, these songs record the individual s awareness of the various social institutions and affiliations and clinging to them at the same time - asserting his own separate identity and also seeking harmony with what is socially established.

 

Through this deliberate rhythmic design, Shah Husain evokes the symbolic music of the Punjabi folk songs. His "Kafis" live within this symbolic background and use it for evolving their own meaning.

 

By calling into life the voice of the folk-singer, Husain involves his listeners into the age-old tension which individual emotions have borne it its conflicts with the unchanging realities of Time and Society. But then, suddenly one is aware of a change. One hears another different voice also. It is the voice of Husain himself, apparently humanized with the voice of the folk-singer, and yet transcending it. The voice of the folk-singer has for ages protested against the bondage of the actual, but its fleeting sallies into the freedom of the possible have always been a torturing illusion. The voice of the folk-singer is dragged back to its bondage almost willingly, because it is aware of the illusory nature of its freedom and is reluctant run after a shade, fearing the complete loss of its identity. The voice of Shah Husain is transcending folk-singer s voice brings into being the dimension of freedom - rendering actual what had for long remained only possible:

 

Ni Mai menoon Kherian di gal naa aakh

Ranjhan mera, main Ranjhan di, Kherian noon koori jhak

Lok janey Heer kamli hoi, Heeray da wer chak

 

Do not talk of the Kheras to me,

O mother, do not.

I belong to Ranjha and he belongs to me.

And the Kheras dream idle dreams.

Let the people say, "Heer is crazy; she has given her-self to the cowherd." He alone knows what it all means.

O mother, he alone knows.

Please mother, do not talk to me of Kheras.

 

At first , the little "Kafi" deftly suggests the underlying folk-song patter. The usual figures in the marriage song - the girls, the mother, the perspective husband and the perspective in-laws are all there. And the refrain calls the plaintive marriage-song address of the girl to he mother on the eve of her departure from the parents house.

 

But the folk-song pattern remains at the level of an underlying suggestion. The mother and the daughter in the folk-song were both helpless votaries of an accepted convention, bowing before the acknowledged power of an unchanging order. Here in the "Kafi" the daughter assumes the power of choice and rejection. She stands outsides the cycles of time and society. The mother continues to represent the social order and the accepted attitudes according to her convictions, the Kheras offer the best possible future for her daughter because they assure mundane security and prestige, within a decaying order. But the daughter I snow determined to go beyond this order and seek further inner development. To her the Kheras, her unacceptable in-laws, represent the tyranny of the actual forced on the individual. To her, Ranjha, the socially condemned cowherd, represents the consummation of her revolt, promising a union which is the real inner fulfillment. The accepted attitudes are based on a superficial vision,

 

which takes appearance to be the only reality. Ranjha, who always hides his real self behind the shabby garb of a jogi or a cowherd can never be understood and can never be preferred to the wealthy Kheras. His real identity is a mystery that can be realized only in Heer s individual emotions. And for such a realization, a conscious break with the order of appearances is a prerequisite. Husain s triumph is achieved, not by evading the bondage s of the actual but by suffering them and finally transforming them. The mother remains a part of the daughter s consciousness - in addressing her she addresses herself. But this part of her consciousness is now subjected to more vital individual self. In the refrain:

 

Ni Mai menon Kherian di gal naa aakh

  

there is a tone of confidence - a mixture of earnest protestation and assured abandon.

 

Here is a "Kafi" presenting a different emotion:

 

Sujjen bin raatan hoiyan wadyan

Ranjha jogi, main jogiani, kamli kar kar sadian

Mass jhurey jhur pinjer hoyya, karken lagiyan hadyan

Main ayani niyoonh ki janan, birhoon tannawan gadiyan

Kahe Husain faqeer sain da, larr tairay main lagiyaan

 

Nights swell and merge into each other as I stand a wait for him.

Since the day Ranjha became jogi, I have scarcely been my old self and people every where call me crazy. My young flesh crept into creases leaving my young bones a creaking skeleton. I was too young to know the ways of love; and now as the nights swell and merge into each other, I play host to that unkind guest - separation.

 

The slower tempo of the refrain sets the mood of the "Kafi." The voice of the singer stretches in an ecstasy of suffering along the lengthening vowel sounds. The vowel sounds initiated by the refrain are taken up by rhythms and several other words.

 

The Heer-Ranjha motif is used here in a different emotional background. The intense loneliness here contrasts sharply with the confidence of fulfillment shown in the earlier "Kafi." Here people s preoccupation with appearances is not treated with indifference;

 

Ranjha jogi, main jogiani, kamli kar kar sadian

 

instead it adds to the plain. But in the notes of suffering, there is a strange quality of single-mindedness. One is not aware of any fidgety second thoughts. The plain does not evince any desperation: in fact there is an air of contemplative pose, born out of the awesome finality of commitment.

 

In another "Kafi" using the Heer-Ranjha motif, we are taken back to a still earlier stage of the poet s emotional Odyssey:

 

Main wi janan dhok Ranjhan di, naal mare koi challey

Pairan paindi, mintan kardi, janaan tan peya ukkaley

Neen wi dhoonghi, tilla purana, sheehan ney pattan malley

Ranjhan yaar tabeeb sadhendha, main tan dard awalley

Kahe Husain faqeer namana, sain senhurray ghalley

  

Travelers, I too have to go; I have to go to the solitary hut of Ranjha. Is there any one who will go with me? I have begged many to accompany me and now I set out alone. Travelers, is there no one who could go with me?

 

The River is deep and the shaky bridge creaks as people step on it. And the ferry is a known haunt of tigers. Will no one go with me to the lonely hut of Ranjha?

 

During long nights I have been tortured by my raw wounds. I have heard he in his lonely hut knows the sure remedy. Will no one come with me, travelers? <

 

The folk-song locale is present here in the shape of a river, a ferry and a batch of travelers. The travelers gather to set off to remote places for business, duty and other reasons. And there is the self conscious girl who comes daily to hear some chance gossip drop a word about her friend. The river for centuries has flowed between desire and fulfillment. No one knows where it goes; it has no beginning and no end. The river is ancient and unfathomable - holding mysterious dangers. It causes both life and death but shows a fascinating indifference that compels awed men and women to kneel and worship the river. There is another reason for this homage. The river bounds the village. It limits and defines the known and tried capacities of humanity. The girl s father has no possessions beyond the river. What she was born with lies placidly marked this side of the river. What is beyond, is vaguely threatening. But this hazardous unknown fascinates the girl and seeks to lure her out of the complacent peace she was born with.

 

But the girl in the "Kafi" differs from the girl in the folk-song in one vital respect. The girl in the folk-song has for ages, waited on this side of the river. She visits the ferry and moves among the travelers with questioning looks. But in her words and looks there lurks the knowledge of perpetual impossibility, the acknowledge that desire is never more than a wish is often less than it. The girl in the "Kafi" is prepared to bridge the gap between desire and attainment. She too is aware of the hazards of her ways but for her he imperative need to set out has become the supreme fact.

 

The image of a patient, desperately looking for a last remedy contains subtle implications. When Heer fakes illness in the house of her in-laws, Ranjha the fake jogi was approached for some magic cure. Heer was cured in a way the people did not foresee and her illness turned out to be of an unexpected nature. Those believing in appearances as the only reality were given a dramatic lesson. Here in the "Kafi", the metaphorical background is recreated. The girl earnestly wishes to align herself with ordinary motives and measures. But the uncommon purpose of her journey and the uncommon destination still stand out among the group of travelers. Her request for some one to accompany her only throws into stranger relief her unique loneliness.

 

The ecstatic rhythm brings to the refrain a tone of finality, a finality comparable to that of death. The journey across the river is a transition as radical as death. The two worlds of experience are as different from each other as the familiar life and the unknown beyond. (1959)

The excavated town offers a snapshot of Roman life in the 1st century, frozen at the moment it was buried on 24 August 79. The Forum, the baths, many houses, and some out-of-town villas like the Villa of the Mysteries remain surprisingly well preserved.

 

Pompeii was a lively place, and evidence abounds of literally the smallest details of everyday life. For example, on the floor of one of the houses (Sirico's), a famous inscription Salve, lucru (Welcome, money), perhaps humorously intended, shows us a trading company owned by two partners, Sirico and Nummianus (but this could be a nickname, since nummus means coin, money). In other houses, details abound concerning professions and categories, such as for the "laundry" workers (Fullones). Wine jars have been found bearing what is apparently the world's earliest known marketing pun, Vesuvinum (combining Vesuvius and the Latin for wine, vinum). Graffiti carved on the walls shows us real street Latin (Vulgar Latin, a different dialect than the literary or classical Latin). In 89 BC, after the final occupation of the city by Roman General Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Pompeii was finally annexed to the Roman Republic. During this period, Pompeii underwent a vast process of infrastructural development, most of which was built during the Augustan period. Worth noting are an amphitheatre, a Palaestra with a central natatorium or swimming pool, and an aqueduct that provided water for more than 25 street fountains, at least four public baths, and a large number of private houses (domus) and businesses. The amphitheatre has been cited by modern scholars as a model of sophisticated design particularly in the area of crowd control.[4] The aqueduct branched out through three main pipes from the Castellum Aquae, where the waters were collected before being distributed to the city; although it did much more than distribute the waters, it did so with the prerequisite that in the case of extreme drought, the water supply would first fail to reach the public baths (the least vital service), then private houses and businesses, and when there would be no water flow at all, the system would then at last fail to supply the public fountains (the most vital service) in the streets of Pompeii.

 

www.pompeiturismo.it

Castle Sinclair Girnigoe is located about 3 miles north of Wick on the east coast of Caithness, Scotland. It is considered to be one of the earliest seats of Clan Sinclair. It comprises the ruins of two castles: the 15th-century Castle Girnigoe; and the early 17th-century Castle Sinclair. They are designated as a scheduled monument.

 

The earlier Castle Girnigoe was built by William Sinclair, 2nd Earl of Caithness, probably sometime between 1476 and 1496, but certainly before his death at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. There is some evidence to suggest that the castle was built on the foundations of an earlier fortalice.

 

In 1577, George Sinclair, 4th Earl of Caithness, imprisoned his own son John Sinclair, Master of Caithness, in Castle Girnigoe, on suspicion of rebelling against his rule. He was held there for seven years, after which his father fed him a diet of salted beef, with nothing to drink, so that he eventually died insane from thirst. The rebel Earl of Bothwell was at Girnigoe in December 1594.

 

Expansion occurred in 1606 when Castle Sinclair was built, comprising a gatehouse and other buildings, along with a curtain wall. These were connected to the earlier castle by a drawbridge over a ravine. The same year George Sinclair, 5th Earl of Caithness, requested the Scottish Parliament to change the name to Castle Sinclair, but because the names Castle Sinclair and Castle Girnigoe were both written down in 1700, both names have been in use since.

 

Robert Sinclair describes Girnigoe as "an adapted 5-storey L-plan crow-stepped gabled tower house, which sat upon a rocky promontory jutting out into Sinclair Bay. Of interest is the secret chamber in the vaulted ceiling of the kitchen."

 

In 1672, George Sinclair, 6th Earl of Caithness, was in heavy debt to his fourth cousin, John Campbell of Glenorchy, and transferred the castle to Campbell as payment. When Sinclair died four years later with no heir, Campbell claimed the title Earl of Caithness and married Sinclair's widow. However, Sinclair's first cousin, George Sinclair of Keiss, challenged Campbell's title. This resulted in the Battle of Altimarlach in which Campbell defeated Sinclair in 1680. Glenorchy and some of his troops remained in Caithness for some time and levied rents and taxes on the people, subjecting them to the most grievous oppression. He sent the remainder home immediately after the battle. However, George Sinclair of Keiss continued his opposition and laid siege, with firearms and artillery, to Castle Sinclair Girnigoe which he took after feeble resistance from the garrison. As a result, he and his three friends who had assisted him, Sinclair of Broynach, Sinclair of Thura and Mackay of Strathnaver were declared rebels. The political current having turned in favor of Sinclair of Keiss however, this was quashed. Having failed to regain his inheritance by force, Sinclair of Keiss then turned to the law.[9] Through the influence of the Duke of York and afterwards James II, he took his place as 7th Earl of Caithness on 15 July 1681, and his lands were restored on 23 September. Campbell of Glenorchy was made Earl of Breadalbane by way of compensation.

 

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

The sparrow project is an attempt to improve my bird story telling along with honing eye hand/AF coordination skills using a common subject readily available. The subjects must be in motion as a prerequisite since shooting ducks in a barrel is just no sport at all.

 

I was spurred into the project due to my complete dissatisfaction of prior attempts while on a trip to Tanzania. Learning the delicate balance between shutter speed, proper long lens techniques, iso settings and AF modes is a challenge for something just slightly slower than a speeding bullet.

 

This will be ongoing to support my next African adventure later this year.

 

See me also at instagram.com/charlesgyoung/

Crosskirk Broch was a fortification near the present day hamlet of Crosskirk near Thurso, Caithness, Scotland. After thorough archaeological exploration it was destroyed in 1972 since the site had become unsafe due to sea erosion. The site was unusual in having a broch, a large circular fortification, built within an older promontory fortification with a ring wall and blockhouse.

 

Crosskirk was occupied at the end of the Bronze Age. From the early Iron Age that followed there is carinated pottery that appears to be locally made but is similar to pottery of the same period in southern and eastern England. A few samples are black-burnished. Uncorrected radiocarbon dates for this pottery are in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. There seems to be a discontinuity in the middle Iron Age when the buildings were reconstructed and new types of pottery and artifacts were introduced, although variants of some of the older styles continued. This may be interpreted as being due to the influx of some influential new population.

 

Further use of local pottery continued into the period of Roman occupation of the south of Scotland in 80-180 AD. There were also remains of Roman pottery and glassware that may have been Roman in origin. A body was buried in a sitting position in the middle of an approximately circular building around the time that the site was abandoned. No grave goods were found.

 

There are traces of two long cist burials in the debris of the broch from some time around 600 AD. There used to be a stone with a runic inscription at Crosskirk, now lost, dating from the period of the Norse raiders in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries. St Mary's Chapel (Crosskirk), built around the 13th century and now ruined, is about 30 yards (27 m) south of the site. Some of the land south of the broch was levelled when St Mary's was built. In recent times, some of the stones from the broch mound were removed, perhaps for building field dykes.

 

The promontory fort predated the broch, which was built inside the older structure. The earlier structure was an outwork that began at the edge of the promontory in the east, a 15 feet (4.6 m) thick wall or rampart of rock with an earth core. A gateway that widened towards the outside provided access through the wall. To the west of the gateway the rampart included a structure like a cell, and then there was a recess in the inner face of the wall. The outwork continued west, ending in a fence made of flagstones that reached to the cliff edge at Chapel Geo.

 

Based on radiocarbon dates, the broch was built around 200 BC, and was still in use in the second century AD. The broch would have given an impression of great strength, rising above the existing defensive wall. It included a guard cell, an intramural chamber and a stair entrance at ground level. Although the wall of the broch was relatively thick, it was poorly built, with a core of earth, rubble and boulders. This may be interpreted as being an early, experimental broch design. The roundhouse was not built strongly enough to support a tower more than 4.5 metres (15 ft), half the height of later towers.

 

There were external buildings around the tower that are thought to have been a village, an arrangement found only in northern Scotland.[8] These houses were occupied from about the same time as the broch was completed. During the next two centuries there were a series of changes and repairs to the broch, but they could not overcome its underlying weakness of design, and by the end of that period it would have been in poor shape. During the same period, house enclosures of the settlement outside the broch but within the rampart were steadily added and improved. A final phase of occupation and construction took place in the 2nd century AD, when the broch was rehabilitated before being finally abandoned. During this last period it seems that there was no defensive concern

 

The main crop was barley. Samples found at Crosskirk and Bu also include the seeds of other plants such as fat hen, sorrel and chick weed. This mix was probably deliberate, since the other seeds have medical and nutritional value. Cattle and some sheep were raised, and were supported through the winters. The people ate shellfish, particularly limpets, winkles and whelks, and ate seabirds. At nearby locations there is evidence of deep sea fishing for plaice and cod, and of consumption of venison. The evidence shows that the community had an ample and varied diet, and was largely self-sufficient.

 

An 1871 description of the broch said it

has an internal diameter of approximately 30 to 32ft and a wall 14 to 15ft thick. It has been broken into from the S, where there appears to have been an entrance to the left of which the sides of a chamber are visible in the wall. At the edge of the cliff, some 20ft of wall about 4 to 5ft high is exposed. On the landward side about 10ft from the broch are the remains of an outer bank or wall, now some 8ft wide at the base.

 

A report in 1964 said the broch was visible as a circular enclosure, covered in grass, with the wall no more than 1.1 metres (3 ft 7 in) high on the inside, and no more than 1.5 metres (4 ft 11 in) high on the exterior. The cliff edge had eroded, partly exposing traces of the north of the wall. There was a shallow depression around the broch and a low bank on the southwest side that may have been the remains of the outer defense wall. Coastal erosion was undercutting the cliff, making the site unsafe. Between 1966 and 1972 Fairhurst and Taylor excavated the ruin. The remains of the broch were then pushed over the cliff by a bulldozer, the site grassed over, and a memorial cairn erected.

 

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

When Carl Sagan had famously said that “we’re made of star stuff,” he wasn’t joking because the facts are that the cosmos are hidden within all of us humans. We are the SO BELOW here on earth in which the cosmos and heavens are the AS ABOVE.

Albert Pike, 33rd Degree Freemason and Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite said; “Lucifer the Son of the Morning! Is it he who bears the Light, and with its splendours intolerable blinds feeble sensual, or selfish souls? Doubt it not! ”

And one of Freemasonry’s greatest philosophers that has ever lived, 33rd Degree Freemason and master Rosicrucian Manly P. Hall said this about Lucifer in his book, All Seeing Eye; “Lucifer represents the individual intellect and will which rebels against the domination of Nature and attempts to maintain itself contrary to natural impulse. Lucifer, in the form of Venus, is the morning star spoken of in Revelation, which is to be given to those who overcome the world.”

Many people mistakenly think that Lucifer is Satan and vice versa, but the facts are that is simply not true. This misinformation, conspiracies and lies have been propagated to the people through many books and movies to the point today in this year 2013, that most people equate Lucifer with Satan or evil. Hopefully you have an open mind and will get past this propaganda like I did myself, in order for you to discover the truth. I AM sure this is the case or else most likely you wouldn’t be reading this website.

If you are asking the question, “Who is Lucifer?,” the answer that you will find often depends on who you ask or where you perform your search. But the facts are that if you were to research the true meaning of Lucifer that is somewhat hidden in secret societies such as Freemasonry, you would find that some of the world’s most prolific 33rd Degree Freemasons have already established the meaning of Lucifer, that they have written about in their books on the occult.

The word “occult” simply means hidden, which is the whole point of the misinformation that you will find on the true meaning of Lucifer. In addition, if you know where to look, the true definition of Lucifer along with corresponding information is now common knowledge on Wikipedia. However, due to countless publications of misinformation via articles, books and videos all over Youtube; the truth is still buried beneath a pile of ignorance.

Therefor, for us smart researchers, we have come to understand this simple fact: That in order to find the light, we have to uncover the truth which is buried at the bottom of these lies and hundreds of years of church, government and ignorant human propaganda. The real story of Lucifer is no different. We have to perform some fact checking of our own like you are doing right now, so that we all can get to the bottom of this disinformation in order to get to the light of the truth.

This article will do just that for you, by helping clear the lies in order for you to see the light of Lucifer for what he truly represents.

Jesus morning star

In the occult, Lucifer is often referred to as the ‘morning star.’ In the Bible, you will find this same exact reference to Jesus as well who says in Revelation 22:16 – “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.”

You see, just as Lucifer is known as the morning star, Jesus also calls himself ‘the bright morning star’ and as I stated above, Manly P. Hall had said, “Lucifer, in the form of Venus, is the morning star spoken of in Revelation, which is to be given to those who overcome the world.” Hence, rest assured that Jesus and Lucifer are one and the same which will become clearly evident to those with an eye to see the true light amongst the darkness in which we live.

The reason that both Lucifer and Jesus can be considered one and the same is because of an often little understood chemical compound that is hidden within each of our own DNA called ‘Phosphorus.’ Phosphorus is essential for life and the phosphate is a component of DNA, RNA, ATP, and also the phospholipids that form all cell membranes.

Simply put, without phosphorus, we humans would simply not be human because consciousness and our spiritual energy would not exist. It is through our DNA which contains phosphorus, that we become conscious to the world and who we are in order to live in the light. Hence, Lucifer is really just an allegory to describe ‘Phosphorus’ which resides in our DNA.

The literal meaning of phosphorus (Phosp-Horus = Lucifer) is “Light-Bringer.”

Horus winged sun

Here is the definition that you will find on Wikipedia; Phosphorus (Greek Φωσφόρος Phōsphoros), a name meaning “Light-Bringer”, is the Morning Star, the planet Venus in its morning appearance. Another Greek name for the Morning Star is Ἑωσφόρος (Heōsphoros), which means “Dawn-Bringer”.

The Latin word corresponding to Greek Phosphorus is “Lucifer”. It is used in its astronomical sense both in prose and poetry. The Latin word lucifer, corresponding to, was used as a name for the morning star and thus appeared in the Vulgate translation of the Hebrew word הֵילֵל (helel) – meaning Venus as the brilliant, bright or shining one – in Isaiah 14:12, where the Septuagint Greek version uses, not Φωσφόρος, but Ἑωσφόρος.

origins of freemasonry

Venus is the brightest morning “star” and is currently the focal point of the eastern dawn sky. This would be the reason why you will find that all Freemason Lodges face the north and south, but when you walk into the lodge room, you’re symbolically facing the East and all masonic rituals are performed while facing the East in preparation of the son of the morning via the dawn of a new day under the light of the morning star.

Manly P. Hall writes in his book, Initiates of the Flame: “It is said that in ancient times the Sphinx was the gateway of the Pyramid, and that there was an underground passage which led from the Sphinx to Cheops (Great Pyramid)” (Initiates of the Flame, p. 68).

The Sphinx symbolizes man. The Sphinx again symbolizes man, with the mind and spirit of the human rising out of the animal desires and emotions. It is the riddle of the ages, and man is once more the answer. The four fixed signs of which the Sphinx is a symbol are Taurus the Bull, Leo the Lion, Scorpio the Eagle, and Aquarius the Man, or the human head.

So, how can Lucifer be the the prince of darkness, when it has been established that Lucifer is really phosphorus, which a derived from a Greek name meaning “Light-Bringer?”

The facts are that is he is not the prince of darkness or Satan because Lucifer is really phosphorus that resides in our DNA. Once you understand this reality that is science based, you will then have one of the secret keys to the mysteries of the universe.

The light within each one of us humans is where we find Lucifer or Jesus, AKA the morning star.

sphynxeye

Hence, KNOW THYSELF and KNOW GOD. In ancient Egypt is was said; “The body is the house of God,” and one of the many proverbs is “Man, know thyself … and thou shalt know the gods,” and what Manly P. Hall called Aquarius the Man, or the human head represented by the Egyptian Sphinx.

When we KNOW THYSELF, we carry the water of Aquarius the Man and thus become Lion Kings of our own domain which the Egyptians had represented with the figure of a sphinx (Greek: Σφίγξ /sphinx, Bœotian: Φίξ /Phix) which is a mythical creature with, as a minimum, the body of a lion and the head of a human.

Unfortunately, with the advent of certain religions such as Christianity and Islam along with other government controls on the people, these ancient gnostic teachings were corrupted, modified or simply hidden from the multitudes of people because they are or were at one time very dangerous to the church and or government.

These authoritarian institutions operate primarily on the basis of having a master that is outside of you dictating your life, souls and spirit at every step, and they would rather “tell you who you are, where you come from and where you will be going,” rather than us humans being unique individuals who “know thyself … and thou shalt know the gods.”

The facts are that a person who KNOWS THYSELF and KNOWS GOD, is very hard to control by the powers that be because they loose their grip on this persons soul once they figure out “the game” which from day one has been an attempt to trick or steal us all out of our true beings, souls and spirits. Hence, the reason why there are all these lies and propaganda surrounding the name Lucifer.

lucifer 1

Lucifer represents the angel of light with individual intellect who ‘rebels’ against the outside ‘dark authority’. This is why he is called the ‘fallen angel.’ The dark and outside authority can be attributed to our flesh and fleshly desires coupled with the outside material world that attempts to take us away from the true light within each one of us.

This darkness tries to fool us into looking without when we should have always been looking within the whole time. Hence, this is the whole illusion of the matrix in which Satan, the true prince of darkness that represents the flesh and free will is looking to control you, so you do not look within yourself for the “prince of light” or “the morning star.”

The reference to the Venus is the AS ABOVE of which Lucifer, AKA Phosphorus is the AS BELOW.

The facts are that we are made of stardust” or star debris and are therefore “one with the universe.” This is where we get the AS ABOVE, in the SO BELOW and the AS WITHIN , of the AS WITHOUT. It is that star dust hidden inside you in the form of Phosphorus, which I have already stated is essential for life. The phosphate is a component of DNA, RNA, ATP, and also the phospholipids that form all cell membranes. This is the ‘spark’ in our DNA that makes us human. Lucifer is in all of us in the form of Phosphorus.

This may be where our souls access our divine consciousness and thus we become divine like Saint John or a Christ like Jesus. Or is this what the church calls evil in Lucifer because a conscious soul and spirit is a dangerous one and maybe that is why Jesus was crucified?

What is the fall of Lucifer?

fall of lucifer

It is an allegory of the light that resides in us and the fall is simply the fall away from this light. With the advent of most religions, this caused the fall of mankind. A fall away from the light within us that was then exchanged or forced by a false light that that was to be found outside of ourselves within a book or church.

Hence, the fall of Lucifer is the fall that each one of us takes when we look outside for answers as opposed to looking within for the true light, that which will guide us to the promise land or own own personal heavens.

As I stated above, Lucifer and the Morning Star are references to Phosphorus which is essential for life. Without phosphorus, consciousness, energy and the creation of this article would simply not be happening. When we turn away from this light within, we too fall away from grace. Hence, we fall for lies and truth in which we then become one of Satan’s tools that is represented by the planet Saturn. However, that will be a new article in itself.

Whether you choose to believe what I AM stating here and by confirming what I have written and quoted above, is entirely up to you because this is your path where you have to decide truth from fiction or light from dark on your own. However, if you have not done your own research and you have already reached an ignorant conclusion based on heresay or lies, then you are what Mr. Pike calls intolerable blinds feeble sensual, or selfish souls, in which you are one of the billions of Satan’s weak human tools. A soul who chooses darkness rather than light and an unawakened human who worships lies over truth, where ignorance rules your actions over that of true wisdom.

Hence, another brick in the wall…….

Albert Pike’s full quote of Lucifer in his famous book, Morals and Dogma on page 321;

albert-pike on lucifer

albert-pike

“The Apocalypse is, to those who receive the nineteenth degree, the Apotheosis of that Sublime Faith which aspires to God alone, and despises all the pomps and works of Lucifer. Lucifer. The Light Bearer! Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of Darkness! Lucifer the Son of the Morning! Is it he who bears the Light, and with its splendours intolerable blinds feeble sensual, or selfish souls? Doubt it not! For traditions are full of Divine Revelations and Inspirations: and Inspiration is not of one Age nor of one Creed Plato and Philo also, were also inspired.”

  

Moe

Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. A website dedicated to both the ancient and modern teachings of Gnosticism.

 

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68 Comments

Realist

Realist on January 25, 2019 at 11:24 am

Lucifer is the devil. The same one who was thrown down to earth with the other rebellious angels. Hence: how art thou fallen from heaven, oh lucifer (or horus, wotan, quetzalcoatl, shiva, jahbulon, e.t.c). If there was no devil, there would be no atlantis myth (Ezekiel’s Tyre), from where the so-called “aryans” and their global “all seeing eye” religion originated. And the dragon (reptilian) said to the woman: for if you eat of the fruit, your “eye” will be opened and you will become (equal) like a god, knowing (gnosis) good and evil.

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Thoth Al Khem

Thoth Al Khem on January 24, 2019 at 1:36 pm

The WORD Lucifer is a MISTRANSLATION by St. Jerome in 382 AD ! PERIOD !!!!!! In Hebrew the word is Heylel/Halal…Hey (Yod) Lamed Lamed. Isaiah 14 is about a MAN….READ IT. The ONLY Lucifer was St. Lucifer of Cagliari who died 10 years before St Jerome PURPOSELY Mistranslated Isaiah 14:12. Doesn’t ANYONE ACTUALLY read the Bible? KILL LIST from King James Bible. YHVH 2,476,633 NOT including the Flood or Sodom and Gomorrah…..SATAN? only 10. There is NO Devil………

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Moe

Moe on January 24, 2019 at 3:32 pm

The Hebrew word Hêlêl or Heylel is found just once in the Hebrew Bible. It means to shine or shining one, to flash. The Septuagint renders הֵילֵל in Greek as Ἑωσφόρος (heōsphoros), “bringer of dawn” and Lucifer is Latin for the Greek phosphorus.

The Church had labeled Simon Magus as Satan.

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Realist

Realist on January 21, 2019 at 12:13 pm

How art thou fallen from heaven, oh Lucifer, the deciever, together with his fellow reptilians. He is the one who will take his followers to the lake of fire. Jesus Christ is God and saviour to all who accept Him.

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Leonard

Leonard on January 18, 2019 at 1:39 am

Therefore, are you saying that Lucifer is Jesus? Most of all this piece of information are craps and they are produced to confuse, brainwash and deviate us from the only true God, Jesus Christ, the one who died on the cross of calvary in order to set us free from the grip of Satan, prince of peace, the only begotten son of God, the bright and morning star, the only way, the truth and life. Nobody cometh to the father except through him. Any book contradicting what is stated in the bible, the word of God is satanic. Satan is evil and what most occult worship is satan the ark enemy of the true living God, the creator of the universe.

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Love2ClearClouds (Cherokee Name)

Love2ClearClouds (Cherokee Name) on December 3, 2018 at 9:22 am

Who is Lucifer?

I was taught in the SDA religion that Lucifer was Satan’s name before he fell from heaven. Felt stupid even when I was 11 years old.

I now understand that the Bible is astrology and physiology, as above so below. “JESUS” was originally IESOUS, the Greek name for the sUn in the sky. Each of the 12 “disciples” are actually symbolic/allegories of the 12 constellations. Those aren’t “halos” around the head of “Jesus” and the disciples, those lit heads are hints to the true identities and the actual truth that they are literally the sUn and the primary stars of the 12 primary constellations.

Every culture and time period gave their own names to the heavenly bodies. The ancients were well aware that everything in our 3D reality is frequency and vibration.

“ if you want to know the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.”

-Nikola Tesla

This sUn emits codes through frequencies and scientists have recorded the sounds coming from the sun. The stars and planets are emiting their own frequencies and all frequencies affect us here as we are affecting everything out there.

In the book of Job, the oldest book in the Bible, there are several references to astrology…Mazzaroth, which is the Hebrew word for the 12 primary constellations/clock in the sky, and Zodiac is the Greek word. In the book of Job you read about the sweet influences of the Pleiades and about the mother bear and her cub/Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.

TPTB KNOW and use this knowledge/science to their own benefit and to our detriment. Becoming educated in astrology and it’s effects on our physiology will finally break the chains that have held us in these man-made prisons for millennia.

Ultimately, what we can not live without is the SUN. The eternal SUN gives life, it triggers cell regeneration and can extend life, it heals and restores.

I am a sungazer as was Akhenaton in Egypt before the bloodline, that still rules today, killed him. Because of sungazing, I no longer have the eyeglass restriction on my drivers license. I began my son gazing practice for years ago. Two years ago, I had to go in person for my 20 year drivers license renewal. I passed the eye exam for the first time in my 43 years of driving. I had given up the practice but after passing that eye exam I have been back at it the past couple of months. I am hoping to get to the level of not needing to eat food anymore. No more hunger…isn’t that what “Jesus” promised?

🌞🌟

Reply

Love2ClearClouds

Love2ClearClouds on December 3, 2018 at 8:47 am

I was taught in the SDA religion that Lucifer was Satan’s name before he fell from heaven. Felt stupid even when I was 11 years old.

I now understand that the Bible is astrology and physiology, as above so below. “JESUS” was originally IESOUS, the Greek name for the sUn in the sky. Each of the 12 “disciples” are actually symbolic/allegories of the 12 constellations. Those aren’t “halos” around the head of “Jesus” and the disciples, those lit heads are hints to the true identities and the actual truth that they are literally the sUn and the primary stars of the 12 primary constellations.

Every culture and time period gave their own names to the heavenly bodies. The ancients were well aware that everything in our 3D reality is frequency and vibration.

“ if you want to know the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.”

-Nikola Tesla

This sUn emits codes through frequencies and scientists have recorded the sounds coming from the sun. The stars and planets are emiting their own frequencies and all frequencies affect us here as we are affecting everything out there.

In the book of Job, the oldest book in the Bible, there are several references to astrology…Mazzaroth, which is the Hebrew word for the 12 primary constellations/clock in the sky, and Zodiac is the Greek word. In the book of Job you read about the sweet influences of the Pleiades and about the mother bear and her cub/Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.

TPTB KNOW and use this knowledge/science to their own benefit and to our detriment. Becoming educated in astrology and it’s effects on our physiology will finally break the chains that have held us in these man-made prisons for millennia.

Reply

Jen

Jen on November 24, 2018 at 6:45 pm

Lovely work, as usual.

Lucifer can also relate to Samael, the Archangel. Fixed Zodiacal signs were Angels (Angels) of the Arch. The most crucial of the four fixed signs were depicted through most variations of the Sphynx, which was usually seen as a half lion and half human. In particular, an upper half woman with one breast exposed. This brings Aquarius and Leo into significance as gaurdians of the gateway of the Archs. (Think Zenith/vernal Equinox and Nadir, it’s opposition). Our most profound (and cataclysmic) events of history tend to happen when the Platonic year hits the 0 degree Pisces mark (beginning of the Age of Aquarius) and 0 degree Virgo (Beginning of the Age of Leo). The light will return during the Great Conjunction of winter 2020, the official beginning of the Age of Aquarius, by the Western systems. Strap on your seatbelts, folks. It’s going to be a wild ride! : )

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Gene

Gene on November 18, 2016 at 5:18 pm

People/ mankind want to see these 2 as a person/s or creatures. Lucifer, some form of being and Jesus the man. When all of this is astrology/ astronomy personified.

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Kirk Nyman

Kirk Nyman on October 21, 2016 at 4:28 am

I was taught in church growing up that Lucifer was Satan before his fall from grace due to his pride so he lost his once great name meaning light bearer to Satan meaning enemy opposer and slanderer. Just a thought, could it be that beings he was no longer the bright and morning star that Jesus came in to claim that title?

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Bhsas

Bhsas on August 31, 2016 at 3:00 pm

then who is it that the occultists are sacrificing animals, babies, and children to in the rituals if Lucifer the angel, the prince of the darkness?

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Lawrence clay rogers

Lawrence clay rogers on October 11, 2016 at 10:00 am

These are all ways they who are trying to prevent what must happen establish confusion for our people, they have failed

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John lester anoya duo

John lester anoya duo on August 25, 2016 at 10:16 pm

I know who is lucifer

Reply

Lawrence clay rogers

Lawrence clay rogers on October 11, 2016 at 10:00 am

Do you?

Reply

ishi

ishi on July 15, 2016 at 10:23 pm

..i love how you write..it is good to see truth being spoken again..i will join as soon as it is financially possible to do so

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angela frost

angela frost on May 31, 2016 at 4:28 pm

fantastic stuff moe,,,its great to see it put in the right context for me ,,something i have felt alone with for so long ,,i am not a scholar or a scientist of the enforced + restricted denied false truth seekers ,,,,,i just saw the real truth at the age of 5 yrs old before adults tricked me into their strange denying deliberately blinkered world of dellusional safety ,,,when my cat died ,,i watched all the elements join together to my cat more alive than his cold empty body lying in front of me ,,,it was normal to me …i knew there was no death ,,but only constant renewal ,,,but its a lonely world when you clearly see what everyone else prefers not to simply through fear of majority brain-washed acceptance

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Joseph

Joseph on February 9, 2016 at 5:35 am

This is an excellent article. However I contend that the ‘fall’ of Lucifer was not a bad thing, but a good thing. The ‘fall’ of Christ and the ‘fall’ we must individually go through to knock us from a sensual/individual type of pride and give us true humility to be able to handle the power of ‘being as a God’ is what the ‘fall’ was really about. The single biggest problem in this material existence is power/control and individuals inability to handle it. The reason this is so is because people see themselves as ‘individuals’ and not part of the One. There is a veil placed in front of their faces. That is the deception Satan/Yaldabaoth placed upon mankind in order to rule them fully. Gnostic teaching states Satan is the God/Creator of this world and the Serpent came to show us ‘the way’. He took a ‘fall’ for that. Lucifer/Prometheus took a ‘fall’ to help us, Jesus took a ‘fall’ to help us…and if you have truly lived in this material existence…it is a requirement to take a ‘fall’ to do truly good.

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Joseph

Joseph on February 8, 2016 at 5:55 am

Very good article. Something you must experience before you read and learn about. I have one comment I’d like to point out however. I believe the ‘fall’ that we take, as did Lucifer is not a bad thing or a falling away, but rather a necessary thing and a falling towards. If we are to follow true Gnostic teaching which basically teaches that Satan/The Demiurge is the God of this creation and material world, then to ‘fall’ away from it would truly be a blessing. It is described as a ‘fall’ in the sense that it is all about humility. Christ himself learned it as we must before we inherit the power of a God. Just look around. Power/Control is the single issue among separated beings. When one ‘falls’ one experiences a sense of powerlessness and helplessness. It is then true unity is infused and the individual, now realizing they are not an ‘individual’, but part of the One…can now rise up, with TRUE power, and go in and out of this material existence with relative ease and comfort. Just a thought.

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KRISTA

KRISTA on January 15, 2016 at 5:43 pm

I am one of the original Starchildren God made in the beginning. I am the Evening Star. No joking whats so ever.

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stacy

stacy on June 4, 2016 at 7:59 pm

me too are you rh neg?

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Jecht

Jecht on December 31, 2015 at 1:42 pm

Good content. Very well laid out.

Wish you would go more deeply into the light. Our stardust deep inside us.

How do you determine your purpose?

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ishi

ishi on July 15, 2016 at 10:32 pm

…sometimes….our ‘purpose’…is late in coming to us…sometimes..it is just one thing, one act….get to Know yourself & do what you are best at..wait patiently..when it is time for you, you will then know what to do

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Jakob Albert

Jakob Albert on November 29, 2015 at 1:01 am

TheCloning of God

Godhad an inner compulsion to externalise himself: to make aconsciousness outside and beyond himself, and through this othernessto come to full consciousness.

Hegel,one of the greatest grandmasters of the Illuminati, said, “Thedivine Idea is just this: to disclose itself, to posit the Otheroutside itself and to take it back again into itself in order to besubjectivity and mind/spirit.”

Consciousness,including that of God, requires interaction with otherness if it isto develop. God is compelled to create otherness – to externalisehimself – and through a study of that otherness we can gain sureknowledge of God.

Hegelcriticised conventional Western religion on the grounds that itseparates God from the universe, and makes all of his attributesindependent of the universe. God, according to the traditional view,would be exactly the same whether or not anything else existed. Hisnature wouldn’t alter in the slightest even if there were no universeand no other creatures. Hegel fiercely attacks this view. If God hadno inner need to create anything else then why did he? Is hecapricious? Was he bored? Curious? None of these make any sense inrelation to a perfect God without deficiency. God is entirelyself-sufficient and needs nothing else according to the tenets ofmainstream Western religion. Hegel said, “If God is allsufficient and lacks nothing, how does he come to release Himselfinto something so clearly unequal to him?”

NoChristian, Jew or Muslim can answer why God creates the world when hehas no need to do so. If he does it for a reason such as wanting tospread his love then it implies that he has a need to do that, yetGod, by definition, needs nothing. If he does it because he wants tobe obeyed and worshipped then that also indicates deficiency on hispart. If God is truly self-sufficient, it is impossible that he wouldever have felt the need to create anything. Therefore God is notself-sufficient. Therefore a God of whom it is claimed that he isself-sufficient cannot exist. God creates otherness because he must.He has no choice. He is compelled. Creation is an act of innernecessity. God needs others as much as they need him. Anyone whodoesn’t understand that single truth can never understand God. Theywill always believe in a fantasy.

Godcreated many things as he evolved – a dazzling realm fashioned fromlight – but none of them gave him what he needed: an othernesscomparable to himself. Eventually, after endless experiments, Godsucceeded in cloning himself. The clone was the being that is nowknown as Lucifer, Son of God, the Angel of Light, the Morning Star,Lux Mundi, the Light of the World.

God,through his interaction with Lucifer, became fully self-conscious, asdid Lucifer. Between them, they created the first language, thedivine language. Then Lucifer wanted a brother as a companion and Godgranted his wish. The second son of God was a fateful being. Hisoriginal name was Paracletus, meaning “the Comforter” or”one called to help” because he was to be Lucifer’s brotherand friend. But religion knows him by his later name of Satanel, thensimply Satan. Satan means “accuser/adversary”. It will beexplained below why Paracletus, second son of God and beloved brotherof Lucifer, became the sworn enemy of his father and brother andacquired his dread new name.

Satan’sfatal flaw was “hyperephania” – extreme pride. Afflicted bydoubts about himself, lacking self-esteem, in awe of his father,envious of his radiant brother, unsure of his identity, Satancompensated by cultivating an exaggerated ego. After an age, hebelieved himself superior to Lucifer and even God. He resented theirrelationship and was jealous of it. He resented being the youngestand least powerful. Resentment became hate. Hate became action. Thataction was rebellion. He stood as the adversary of God and Lucifer.He accused them of plotting against him. He opposed all of theirplans.

Havingcreated Lucifer and Paracletus, God provided his sons with the secretof how to clone themselves. The clones of the two sons were thebeings now known as angels. The realm of light became populated bymany beings of light: God, his two sons and the choirs of angels. Butthe angels were loyal to their respective creators and reflectedtheir natures. Satan’s angels were infected with his discontent.

Satanand his army of angels rebelled against God, Lucifer and their loyalangels. The struggle was long and furious, but Satan and hisfollowers lost and fell. They were banished from God’s realm, beingcast out into darkness where the light of God never penetrated.

Satanwanted his own realm where he was the sole master. He discovered thesecret of matter and fashioned a rival universe of matter rather thanlight. This was the universe of the Big Bang – our universe. “Letthere be light,” Satan announced as he brought this universeinto existence: a mockery of God’s light. Satan is the creator andruler of our universe of the Big Bang, and he’s assisted by his rebelangels – called the archons, groups of whom were given regions of theuniverse to rule on Satan’s behalf. 144 archons are assigned toearth. They are responsible for most of the secret history of earth.They are opposed by two groups within that secret history: theIlluminati (consisting of approximately 6,000 people i.e. a similarnumber to that of the Old World Order), and the small group thatcreated the Illuminati but stands outside of the society, just as thearchons stand outside the Old World Order. That small group consistsof 36 angels of Lucifer.

TheIlluminati and the Old World Order are mirror images. Both groupsknow the secret history of earth, and the strange and fatefulstruggle that takes place behind the scenes and to which the rest ofhumanity is mostly oblivious.

Satanwas almost as bright as Lucifer in his earliest days, but he grewrepelled by light and made himself dark. He became “darknessvisible” to use John Milton’s immortal phrase. He is truly theprince of darkness, yet it must never be forgotten that he is the Sonof God and contains the divine spark.

ThroughSatan, evil entered the universe. The birth of evil is not difficultto understand. It is a product of a damaged self-consciousness, oflow self esteem finding a way to overcompensate. It is exactly thesort of situation with which Freud and Jung would be familiar. Whyshould gods be any different from humans? We are made in their image.

Self-consciousnessis a prerequisite for distinguishing good from evil. Animals cannotcommit acts of evil. Evil can be defined according to three levels:strong, medium and weak. Strong evil is the voluntary commission ofmalicious, harmful and even fatal acts towards others, to suit theselfish desires of the perpetrator. Medium evil is the voluntarycommission of acts to promote a selfish agenda, regardless of theimpact on others. Weak evil is captured by Burke’s famous aphorism:”The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for goodmen to do nothing.”

Goodness,likewise, comes in three strengths. Strong goodness is the voluntarycommission of benevolent, helpful acts towards others to promotecooperative, altruistic ends. Medium goodness is the commission ofacts that are intended not to have any ill impact on others. Weakgoodness is where someone does nothing to stand in the way of goodacts by others.

Only a self-consciousness is capable of making achoice between good and evil acts. The Tree of Knowledge of good andevil is a metaphor for that choice. Knowledge, arising fromself-consciousness, allows the commission of moral or immoral acts.Without knowledge, without choice, without self-consciousness, goodand evil would not exist.

Thereason that evil triumphs is simple: most people are evil.

The meaning of life, by Jakob Albert Boor, Johannesburg SA 2011

This Poem I write to you, are you troubled by silent questions?

Still aware, that spoken questions deserve answers, followed by actions?

The biggest question we have, deserves the world, the worth, to put it in words?

Again some week answer? And hide away, silently remembering historical hurts?

Did life won the feared battle from us individually, and us all?

In the ‘’flock of sheep’’ we feel save, with courage so small.

Standing alone in silence, self decision making seems rough?

Just make the decision, in the end you will feel tough enough.

Visualizing the wall so high, the border so far, even to scared while imagining!

Imagining building inner trust, strength and pride that will be never ending!

Where the trigger does should come from, something needed to start,

Will we be waiting for the bomb, as that power provides, will awaken our hart?

The world showed his errors, examples, way too big or too small.

Everything what states ’too’’ will be a too big responsibility? Again excusing us weakened all?

The mindset we are having, the excuses from weakness we’ll make.

Not teaching us to stand strong while we are forced on steps to take.

Humans think often, the world is too much to take.

Do we use survival instinct, when that world is at stake?

Now with some details, I will show the irony in this.

Walking by, around real essentials, and leave them as it is….

We must look different to needed changes, cultures and mindsets heading for the cliffs and loose.

The roots of the problem measured, we’ll brainstorm for solutions from which together! we will choose.

Troubleshooting, attitude and believes, core reactors make it happen, you’ll see.

Opens different kinds of doors, for the lonely life changer the entrance to be?

As stepping out of the box at first, loneliness is part of the challenge.

Need an example? You will find in the movies, visuals will help with the balance.

As you may choose the right, but difficult path

You‘ll be tested mentally, trust will recognize the value in it, you should now that.

Believing is the keyword; you don’t need a religion for that?

Believing is you! That pure feeling inside! No world war started from that.

Can we stand still, could a simple poem stand a difference..?

No! It will be the reader who breaks down his offence.

Important is that it is able to trigger what’s already there!

It’s already in everybody’s hart; yes, you will get the credits! That would only be fair.

Isaiah: 64…

”Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountain would tremble before you!

As when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil,

come down to make your name known to your enemies

and cause the nations to quake before you”

Isaiah 64:7-8

No one calls on your name

or strives to lay hold of you:

For you have hidden your face from us

and makes us waste away because of our sins.

Yet O Lord, You are our Father.

We are the clay, you are the Potter:

We are all the work of your hand.

Isaiah: 63;16-17 !!

BUT YOU ARE OUR FATHER,

THOUGH ABRAHAM DOES NOT KNOW US,

OR ISRAEL ACKNOWLEDGE US:

YOU OUR LORD, ARE OUR FATHER,

OUR REDEEMER FROM OF OLD IS YOUR NAME.

WHY OUR LORD, MAKE US WANDER FROM YOUR WAYS

AND HARDEN OUR HEARTS SO WE DO NOT REFER YOU?

RETURN FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR SERVANTS

THE TRIBES THAT ARE YOUR INHERITANCE…..

ISAIAH 52:6

THEREFORE MY PEOPLE WILL KNOW MY NAME;

THEREFORE IN THAT DAY THEY WILL KNOW

THAT IT IS I WHO FORETOLD IT,

YES, IT IS I…

ISAIAH: 49;5 😉

Reply

James

James on November 9, 2015 at 2:53 pm

This is about having strength within, and showing why strength within is important, because there is always one testing your inner strength. When you try to be strong externally, sometimes in a moment of anger or argument, you’re giving up your inner strength.

Reply

jessu beluang

jessu beluang on October 30, 2015 at 5:52 am

any idea about lucifer?

Reply

farang

farang on October 20, 2015 at 7:51 am

Lucifer is a king. A very real king, not an abstract concept and certainly not Istar/Venus. His son is “Satan.” I suppose one could label me a 34th degree realist, I read and gain knowledge. His name “Lucifer” is the French way of saying his name, much like Lazerus. Hint: Lazerus is “The Blue”…azure…same as the statue of Osiris found in Tut’s tomb. You are welcome…She asked me to spread the truth for those with ears to hear. What I am saying is from mainstream evidence easily found for those that will bother to look. User Fau was his actual name, Moe. User means “crown Prince.”

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Daniel

Daniel on June 27, 2015 at 2:28 am

I believe that all religions were created for balancing purposes and the only true creator is what everyone knows as god in which most pray to as god ,created all so god is the love and sin of all, also it is stated in the bible that we were all made perfect which we were we all chose this life we live now and the reason for this is to learn unique lessons that we have chosen, xenu/Lucifer etc were all real entities brought upon by personal belief produced by the reptilians on to man and other species and in which many beings have conquered this world single headedly, also this world has been inhabited many times over by us and different beings like us which we have ultimately destroyed ourselves in the end thanks to the help of other beings, now a systematic person who has no psychic awareness will disregard this as crap well that is ok your just not evolved enough to realise the truth and most likely have been suppressed by society all your life which is ok you will learn maybe in the next life as you have already started looking into these things in this one, but a true psychic who can communicate with the cross dimensional reptilians like I and see them in there dimension know other whys, now belief creates all and belief comes from the source I have shape shifted into what you could call Lucifer and felt his power I have also been gang stalked for the last five years and live with a spy for the last two who is my girlfriend, I have spotted many military people hiding in close quarters of the house to and get tested daily even by young kids which the government promotes, the truth is we all can be whatever we want to be but because we are evolving to quickly we are suppressed by other beings because we are very dangerous to them also here’s a few things that you should know, if you know the real truth you are a target, the reason why they presented the bali 9 all over tv was for historical purposes, the government will set up something catastrophic to enforce a new law that will take more of our rights away and cause the presentation subliminally of a coming war/ hostility or for the benefit of a new historical purpose, all crime syndicates are run by the government for the preservation of balance now non surpressed people will know this as true but it is harder to find people like I as I are killed of for we are truth

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The Quantumologist

The Quantumologist on June 2, 2015 at 6:21 am

Isaiah Chapter 14 is the ONLY direct reference in the Old Testament to Lucifer, and it’s here: www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Isaiah-Chapter-14/

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lallala

lallala on May 6, 2015 at 5:24 pm

lucifer is the light in darkness. He paves our way towards fully becoming a human being once again.

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jv

jv on May 2, 2015 at 1:19 am

The first references of Lucifer come from the HOLY Word of God. Lucifer was cast out of Heaven for wanting to be above the one true HOLY God. There is NO other place in the entire world that the truth about Lucifer is spoken. Satan means fallen angel and deceiver. The reason why some say Luciferian is because they believe he is like God, whom is actually the roaring lion, seeking to devour and to destroy people, God’s creation. It is truly sad that I come to these sites and find people who seek the easier way, which the Bible clearly calls the wide road, of which many find, but leads to destruction. You cannot take things out of context and pick and choose verses, when the Bible is literally God’s Holy Word spoken spiritually to followers all that time ago. Lucifer and Satan ARE proven the same. The Bible is complete, and cannot be separated. Many new versions have come out with the intention to change or leave out scripture. This is also blasphemy and heresy. Jesus Christ IS God whom came to save the world from being lost and helpless.

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Cruise4

Cruise4 on December 25, 2015 at 6:31 pm

Christ, Christos is the oil produced when the Kundalini hits a gland in the brain. It sits there for 3 days and then flows over the pineal gland. I think this may equate to enlightenment. Jesus is an allegory of the Sun, and also each of us. Whether he actually existed or not is moot. Do what he says or you are no christian, and he taught the above, as is quite clear in various parables such as the Bride and Groom. This is what ‘they’ suppress in us by all means possible.

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Deb

Deb on February 8, 2015 at 4:48 pm

I agree with some of this and much of it makes sense. However, there are, in my opinion, some holes in your logic. For example, intellect is not always contrary to nature, nor is nature evil. Nature is loving and brutal, nurturing and deadly, just as is the human archetype of the divine, in whatever form. I think that you are perhaps equating nature with the feminine and maybe that is where the misogynistic tone of your other articles is coming from if you consider nature evil. Nature itself has a vast intelligence. There would be no intellect without it and certainly no avenue of expression for that intellect. Also, you say that we all have to walk our own paths and not be lead by others, which I absolutely agree with 100%. However, you also take a very condescending tone with those who disagree with you and accuse them of being blind, refusing to see the truth, etc. I would gently remind you that you are human and fallible and therefore you should take care not to sound so much like the very authorities you rightfully accuse of deceiving the people. As for Lucifer, I see him as neither perfect light or perfect darkness. He is, in my opinion, an archetype with strengths and weaknesses. He is the symbol of an truth that, as Cliff pointed out below, must be balanced with love. That love is often expressed in feminine terms as women are the great nurturers. I am reminded of nothing so much as the blind men and the elephant, all accusing each other of lies while simply looking at the same thing in a different way.

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Moe

Moe on February 9, 2015 at 5:27 am

Do you think you know it all? Do you think you are going to insult me on my blog, great work and I’m going to be Mr. Nice to you? It is clear to me you have took the new age information hook line and sinker like 99.9% of the people who have not done their own independent research which is expected so don’t feel bad. Lucifer is simply Latin for the alchemical element known in Greek as phosphorus in which Lucifer is from the morning star known a Jupiter. The feminine aspect is portrayed as the goddess Isis (Cybele, Rhea, the Magna Mater etc) who represents sulfur from the planet Venus. You are making this about men and women or into a gender battle as if Isis was a real and Lucifer was some dude who fell from heaven. They are ancient memes for the profane and ignorant like you who are truly the blind and zombified.

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Francine Stroman

Francine Stroman on April 5, 2015 at 4:02 pm

Moe- I found this article to be very “materialistic” in nature. This experience that you are having right now isn’t actually about anything, in human terms anyway. It’s just hyper intelligent light shining forth and even that is saying too much. On another note it might not be such a bad thing for to learn to acept some constructive critism..

That’s ok I love ya anyway;)

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Guest

Guest on September 28, 2015 at 1:13 pm

I have to say More, I love how you take no crap from people on here. If anyone who did their research would know your right. Opinions are like butt-holes we all have one. This people are profane. And you are sharing very guarded secret s. Which I do not agree with, but that’s out of my control. It was planned long ago, and is designed to happen. Anyways stay strong, stay a warrior

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sinner

sinner on November 15, 2015 at 7:20 pm

Lucifer means The Anti Christ, by the way u idiot Moe why u insist anti christ evil calling Lucifer, ok u have ur belief , don,t u worry ur messiah will not survive except for few years, stop pretending being good guy and inventor of white magic . Have spell on me idiot, if u practice magic I hope u know what does exist to counter magic and ur messiah Lucifer ,

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Cruise4

Cruise4 on December 25, 2015 at 6:09 pm

ISIS can be conversed with, as a feminine aspect/spirit, by taking Ayahuasca. So can Lucifer who apparently comes across as somewhat arrogant. As above so below, As within so without may allow sulpher and phosphorous to be synonomous, same as planets (stars).

I’m seeing an X formation… Lucifer (Red,love of the self), Satan (Blue, love of the mother), as the left and right in this X. Whats on the other ends? We have the woman and the whore in the Bible. Inversion, tops and bottoms. Middles (balance,heart) as green. The whole construction is being prised open, the black and the white of the papersea (papacy) and represents the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This is behaviour of Light, see Goethe. Some of this information is encoded in ‘Jupiter Rising’ and ‘How to train your Dragon 2’.

Very hard to convey in such a short space. ISIS is a real something though. Confirmed and certain, and it’s why they are trying to demonise the name at present with ‘terrorist’ association etc. She is also an illusionist, I’m thinking. Spiders from Ma’s… Ma Sons?

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Cruise4

Cruise4 on December 25, 2015 at 6:16 pm

One other very interesting thing… On one of the Jeff Rense shows dealing with reverse speech (approx. January ish 2015), Obama said ‘There will be no pursuit of the woman’. They had no clue what it meant but it was one of the clearest reverses I’ve ever heard.

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Cliff

Cliff on February 6, 2015 at 9:26 am

Lucifer does indeed represent the light, that is to say the pure light of the rational intellect, and just the intellect. It is the cold light of pure reason unmitigated by the warm light of the heart and thus unbalanced. It is the light that allows the means to justify the end, as pure reason would demand it do so. The Christ you quote also said that ‘by their works you shall know them’ . Your Albert Pike stated that three world wars would be required to bring in the Masonic Age, The Masons have been major players in creating two of them and are on the cusp of igniting the third, so please do not equate your luciferian objectives with that of the light of the Gnostic Christ self. Notwithstanding this, there are many truths still contained in your article, however it seems that these are very cleverly placed to capture those who seek for the light within, an imitation of the path of the seeker after truth, two paths that appear to be subtlely similar and yet ultimately lead to devastating different results. ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ , Albert Pike’s and the Mason’s very definately is.

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Larry

Larry on March 12, 2016 at 10:16 pm

Quite an interesting point: ‘those who seek for the light within, an imitation of the path of the seeker after truth, two paths that appear to be subtlely similar and yet ultimately lead to devastating different results.’

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THE ALL

THE ALL on December 4, 2014 at 5:14 pm

there are several important points which need to be understood…Christianity does not have a monopoly on the term “Lucifer” nor on its definition. The Christian concept and definition of the term “Lucifer” is merely the latest in a long line of definitions and interpretations of this pre-Christian term.

The word “Lucifer” occurs only once in the entire Bible. This is in Isaiah 14:12, which says: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!” Those who read this verse in its actual context will clearly see that the sentence is applied specifically to a certain Babylonian king who was an enemy in war of the Israelites. The original Hebrew text uses the word הֵילֵל which literally means “bright star” or “shining one,” a term applied sarcastically or mockingly by the Israelites to this particular enemy of theirs. The translators of the King James Version of the Bible – one of the chief of whom was the well known Rosicrucian initiate Dr Robert Fludd, a fact which will no doubt shock and horrify many Christians – chose to translate this word with the Latin word “Lucifer.” .“Lucifer” literally means Lightbringer, Lightbearer, Bringer of Dawn, Shining One, or Morning Star. The word has no other meaning. Historically and astronomically, the term “Morning Star” has always been applied to the planet Venus. Since the only occurrence of the word “Lucifer” in the Bible is that one verse in Isaiah, there is absolutely nothing in the Bible which says that Lucifer is Satan or the devil. It was Pope Gregory the Great (540-604 AD) who was the first person to apply that passage of scripture to Satan and thus to equate Lucifer with Satan. But even then this notion didn’t catch on in a big way until the much more recent popularisation of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” in which Lucifer is used as another name for Satan, the evil adversary of God. Also, such luminaries of the Christian world as Martin Luther and John Calvin considered it “a gross error” to apply Isaiah 14:12 to the devil, “for the context plainly shows these statements must be understood in reference to the king of the Babylonians.”

Thus the Christians who claim that Lucifer is the devil actually have no Biblical basis or authority for such a belief. Though they may claim to be “Bible believing Christians” whose faith is built solely on “the Word of God” they are actually followers – in this and many other respects – of Christian religious tradition and not of the Christian Bible. Or have they quietly conferred divine infallibility upon the Pope and Milton without informing the rest of the world?

H.P. Blavatsky was never at any point in her life a Christian, gave no credence to Christian theology and did not believe in any type of personal or anthropomorphic God nor in any type of personal or anthropomorphic devil. She believed and taught that there is but ONE Infinite Divine Life which is everything and in everything and that It has no adversary or enemy, since there is nothing but That – the boundless, impersonal, omnipresent Principle of Absolute Existence Itself. She was against the notion of worshipping or praying to anyone or anything. She taught that evil is really imperfection, which is the automatic and inevitable byproduct of the existence of matter.

Now let us take a look at some of the statements HPB made about Lucifer in “The Secret Doctrine”…

* “Esoteric philosophy admits neither good nor evil per se, as existing independently in nature. The cause for both is found, as regards the Kosmos, in the necessity of contraries or contrasts, and with respect to man, in his human nature, his ignorance and passions. There is no devil or the utterly depraved, as there are no Angels absolutely perfect, though there may be spirits of Light and of Darkness; thus LUCIFER – the spirit of Intellectual Enlightenment and Freedom of Thought – is metaphorically the guiding beacon, which helps man to find his way through the rocks and sandbanks of Life, for Lucifer is the LOGOS in his highest, and the “Adversary” in his lowest aspect – both of which are reflected in our Ego.” (Vol. 2, p. 162)

* “In antiquity and reality, Lucifer, or Luciferus, is the name of the angelic Entity presiding over the light of truth as over the light of the day. In the great Valentinian gospel Pistis Sophia it is taught that of the three Powers emanating from the Holy names of the Three Tριδυνάμεις, that of Sophia (the Holy Ghost according to these gnostics – the most cultured of all) resides in the planet Venus or Lucifer.” (Vol. 2, p. 512)

* “It is but natural – even from the dead letter standpoint – to view Satan, the Serpent of Genesis, as the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual mankind. For it is he who was the “Harbinger of Light,” bright radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of the automaton created by Jehovah, as alleged; and he who was the first to whisper: “in the day ye eat thereof ye shall be as Elohim, knowing good and evil” – can only be regarded in the light of a Saviour. An “adversary” to Jehovah the “personating spirit,” he still remains in esoteric truth the ever-loving “Messenger” (the angel), the Seraphim and Cherubim who both knew well, and loved still more, and who conferred on us spiritual, instead of physical immortality – the latter a kind of static immortality that would have transformed man into an undying “Wandering Jew”.” (Vol. 2, p. 243)

* “The Fall was the result of man’s knowledge, for his “eyes were opened.” Indeed, he was taught Wisdom and the hidden knowledge by the “Fallen Angel,” for the latter had become from that day his Manas, Mind and Self-consciousness. In each of us that golden thread of continuous life – periodically broken into active and passive cycles of sensuous existence on Earth, and super-sensuous in Devachan – is from the beginning of our appearance upon this earth. It is the Sutratma, the luminous thread of immortal impersonal monadship, on which our earthly lives or evanescent Egos are strung as so many beads – according to the beautiful expression of Vedantic philosophy.

“And now it stands proven that Satan, or the Red Fiery Dragon, the “Lord of Phosphorus” (brimstone was a theological improvement), and Lucifer, or “Light-Bearer,” is in us: it is our Mind – our tempter and Redeemer, our intelligent liberator and Saviour from pure animalism. Without this principle – the emanation of the very essence of the pure divine principle Mahat (Intelligence), which radiates direct from the Divine mind – we would be surely no better than animals.” (Vol. 2, p. 513)

So we see that in the teachings of Theosophy – which are at times deliberately symbolical, allegorical, and esoteric – the Lightbringer or Bringer of Dawn (Lucifer in Latin) is our Mind Principle, our individual self-consciousness and spark of intelligence, which was awakened in mankind around the middle period of the Third Root Race, also known as the Lemurian Epoch. Our mind can either be our adversary (which is what the word “satan” literally means) or it can be the lightbearer (the Lucifer) of spiritual Truth to us, the knowledge of which brings about our liberation from ignorance, including spiritual self-ignorance. Jose M. Herrou Aragon, in his book “Primordial Gnosis: The Forbidden Religion,” writes…“According to Gnostic legends and myths, the great Unknowable God sent Lucifer, angel of indescribable fire and light, to show man the light and to help him wake up and see his true origin, the origin of his Spirit, which has been perversely imprisoned in this impure matter called body-soul. He is an uncreated being, who came to the created world to bring Light: Liberating Gnosis. The saving knowledge which can wake man up and help him free his imprisoned Spirit. The knowledge which allows him to know who he truly is, why he is here in this world and what he has to do to liberate himself and fulfil his Spirit, which belongs to another uncreated and unknowable plane. “We have said that Lucifer came to the world to wake man up, to help him remember his divine origin, the divine origin of his Spirit, and to help him free himself from the body-soul in which he is trapped, and from created time and matter.” Theosophy interprets all these allegorical Gnostic teachings as referring to “the lighting up of Manas” (Manas is the Sanskrit word for Mind) which we mentioned above. When we bear in mind that “The Secret Doctrine” teaches that the Lemurian Root Race was born under the influence of Venus and received its “light and life” from the Planetary Spirit of Venus, it all becomes clearer, since Lucifer has been an accepted synonym for Venus – the bright and morning star – since long before the days of Christian theology and millennia before Lucifer was first ignorantly equated with the devil. In “The Secret Doctrine” we read that “Venus, or Lucifer (also Sukra and Usanas) the planet, is the Light-Bearer of our Earth, in both its physical and mystic sense.” Venus is said to be the “spiritual prototype” of Earth and “the Guardian Spirit of the Earth and Men.” It is “the most occult, powerful, and mysterious of all the planets; the one whose influence upon, and relation to the Earth is most prominent” and every change that takes place on Venus “is felt on, and reflected by, the Earth.” Since it would take too long and also be out of place here to try to explain all of this to the reader unfamiliar with Theosophy, we can sum up by saying that what H.P. Blavatsky has to say about Lucifer is entirely esoteric, symbolical, and philosophical. Those four excerpts quoted above are virtually the only specific statements and explanations she ever made about Lucifer, although fanatical Christians and half-crazed conspiracy theorists like to give the impression that she spent almost all her time ranting and raving about Lucifer, which is simply not true. As for the reason her magazine was named “Lucifer,” she wrote in its very first article – titled “What’s in a Name?” – that “the first and most important, if not the sole object of the magazine, is expressed in the line from the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, on its title page. It is to bring light to “the hidden things of darkness,” (iv. 5); to show in their true aspect and their original real meaning things and names, men and their doings and customs; it is finally to fight prejudice, hypocrisy and shams in every nation, in every class of Society, as in every department of life. The task is a laborious one but it is neither impracticable nor useless, if even as an experiment. Thus, for an attempt of such nature, no better title could ever be found than the one chosen. … No fitter symbol exists for the proposed work – that of throwing a ray of truth on everything hidden by the darkness of prejudice, by social or religious misconceptions; especially by that idiotic routine in life, which, once that a certain action, a thing, a name, has been branded by slanderous inventions, however unjust, makes respectable people, so called, turn away shiveringly, refusing to even look at it from any other aspect than the one sanctioned by public opinion. Such an endeavour then, to force the weak-hearted to look truth straight in the face, is helped most efficaciously by a title belonging to the category of branded names.” But as she was later to remark, the ignorant and erroneous belief that Lucifer = Satan “has struck its roots too deep in the soil of blind faith” to allow many people to bravely, boldly, and unashamedly reveal the true origins and true nature of what the so-called Lucifer actually is. Those who attempt to do so are always bound to be immediately labelled as “satanists” and “devil worshippers” by a certain class of Christian, those whose trademark characteristics invariably tend to be wilful ignorance and mental laziness. It has indeed become a “branded name,” one which still automatically conjures up the image of an anthropomorphic devil even in the minds of the most hardened atheists. Yet who can deny that even Jesus is portrayed as boldly proclaiming his identity with Venus the Lightbringer in Revelation 22:16, where he says “I, Jesus, am the bright and morning star.” If the translators had chosen to translate this verse using Latin just as they did with Isaiah 14:12, it would read “I, Jesus, am Lucifer.” Theosophists are not afraid of public opinion or misguided prejudice, nor of the claims and threats of Christianity, that most arrogant, ignorant, and impudent of all the world’s religions. “There is no religion higher than Truth” – and eventually, as always, the Truth will prevail.

 

Phosphorus? How did the ancients know about, and zero in on this single element? Also, what was the mystery secret that was imparted to Alexander the great by his Greek mentor that enabled him to defeat a million man Persian army with only 35.000 of his men?

 

Before it was known by the word Phosphorus which is a word given to us by the Greeks, and the Latin Lucifer, it was simply known as the Elixir of Life or the Flower of Life. Often it was called by the plant names they used for the Elixir of Life or the Flower of Life that were high in Phosphorus such as Mandrake, the Lotus and Red Barley of the Gods.

 

Our thoughts are words,words are sounds,sounds vibrates,vibration is energy, energy glows and that glowing is LIGHT.Everything is Light.Even our thoughts.>> “It is through our DNA which contains phosphorus, that we become conscious to the world and who we are in order to live in the light.” Wrong. “live in the light” suggests you and I are separate from this universe of light ,that there is a “we” somehow not attached .EVERYTHING IS LIGHT.You and me and everything inbetween all made up of the same light energy . Light is a LIE ,there is nothing there. 99.9999999 EMPTY SPACE (potential).Lucifer =Bringer of LIGHT.

 

It is not correct that Lucifer equals Jesus, as Yourself also quote.

“Lucifer represents the individual intellect and will which rebels against the domination of Nature and attempts to maintain itself contrary to natural impulse. Lucifer, in the form of Venus, is the morning star spoken of in Revelation, which is to be given to those who overcome the world.”

Lucifer from Madam Blavatsky and Freemasonry has highjacked Jesus’ title, for evil, not for good.

The Christian mystic Rudolf Steiner says Lucifer and Satan (The Devil) is two different spiritual entities, but to compare ANY of the two as Jesus is way off target.

“Rudolf Steiner taught that the two great demons, Lucifer and Ahriman, offer mankind gifts — from Lucifer, we receive the gift of intellectual thought; from Ahriman, mastery of the physical realm. These gifts are beneficial and even necessary at our current stage of evolution, but they also entail great risks, temptations that can lead us badly astray. According to Steiner, Christ — the Intelligence of the Sun — needs to interpose between Lucifer and Ahriman, balancing them so that we may receive their influences in the proper, beneficial proportions”.

 

gnosticwarrior.com/lucifer.html

The sparrow project is an attempt to improve my bird story telling along with honing eye hand/AF coordination skills using a common subject readily available. The subjects must be in motion as a prerequisite since shooting ducks in a barrel is just no sport at all.

 

I was spurred into the project due to my complete dissatisfaction of prior attempts while on a trip to Tanzania. Learning the delicate balance between shutter speed, proper long lens techniques, iso settings and AF modes is a challenge for something just slightly slower than a speeding bullet.

 

This will be ongoing to support my next African adventure later this year.

 

See me also at instagram.com/charlesgyoung/

(further pictures and information you can get by going to the end of page and clicking two times on the link!)

Voith Villa

Garden of the Manor House

The former Voith Villa in St. Pölten was the home of industrialist Walther Voith and is now, along with the gatehouse, enclosure and gazebo, a listed building. The neo-baroque manor house complex emerged in the years 1910 to 1917 and was extended in 1922 and 1929. Today the villa is owned by the city of St. Pölten, in it the Culture Home South is housed, the park is open to the public and is called South Park.

History

Outline of the garden (1913)

The company Voith from Heidenheim opened in 1903 in St. Pölten a subsidiary factory. Walther Voith, one of the sons of Friedrich Voith, took over the management of the factory. He commissioned a few years later Rudolf Frass with the planning of a mansion. The gatehouse and the enclosure arose from 1910 to 1911 as the first building step, from 1913 followed the villa. It and the park-like garden were completed in 1917. The gatehouse was enlarged in 1922 and 1931, the villa was in 1922 extended to the north-facing domestic wing and received in 1929 the east-side veranda. Architect of the rebuilding of the mansion was Alfred Keller.

The Voith in 1945 was put under USIA management *), the villa was used as a nursery. After the occupation the Voith continued the Kindergarten before the whole complex in 1960 the city of St. Pölten was given. The city of Sankt Pölten brought the former mansion to a predominantly cultural use, now the Music School is located in it. Moreover, different events in the now called Culture Home South building take place, by the magistrate also civil weddings in the ceremonial hall of the villa are offered.

*) Administration for Soviet Property in Austria

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see USIA (disambiguation).

Trattnerhof in Graben, Vienna, former headquarters of the USIA.

The Administration for Soviet Property in Austria, or the USIA (Russian: Управление советским имуществом в Австрии) was formed in the Soviet zone of Allied-occupied Austria in June 1946 and operated until the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1955. USIA operated as a de facto state corporation and controlled over four hundred expropriated Austrian factories, transportation and trading companies. USIA assets included formerly independent Austrian companies (ÖAF), factories once owned by German corporations (AEG) and former SS enterprises (DEST). At its peak in 1951 the conglomerate employed around 60 thousand people,[1] or 10% of Austrian industrial labor.[2] USIA was exempt from Austrian tariffs, disregarded Austrian taxation, and could easily trade with Eastern Europe despite the Iron Curtain and Western trade embargoes. The extraterritorial corporation attempted to be self-sufficient and was very weakly integrated with the rest of Austrian economy.

Map of today's complex

Building description

Mansion

The former manor house lies at the northern edge of the property the south side facing the park-like garden.

The mansard roof of the to 1913 built main wing is staggered and reaches at the side wings beyond the first floor. The north façade is dominated by a centrally disposed risalit, before that is located under a large canopy supported by four columns the main portal. On the risalit is a fenced lookout point. The garden facade has on both sides of the balcony on the first floor each an octagonal risalit with own roof helmet. Under the semi-circular balcony there is a terrace which is connected by two curved staircase arms with the forecourt of the park. The white windows are preserved in their original and are surrounded by turquoise shutters.

Gatehouse

The gatehouse was the first building of the ensemble in 1910. The first building was extended in 1922 according to plans by Rudolf Jäger (Vienna), 1931 followed another conversion.

The single-storey, provided with mansard roof house still possesses the original wooden doorway, in the front building is a two-coloured terrazzo and a small groin vault.

Park

The park is dominated by the two lateral pergolas and the water basin in the southern area. In the northern area of ​​the park there is a small pavilion with turned supports. In the park there are numerous sculptures representing the casts of several baroque statues. The draft versions are standing, among others, before the Schwaighof and the castle Wasserburg.

Gallery

The portal of the north side of the mansion

The gatehouse seen from the street

The grounds from the mansion

The pavilion in the park

de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voithvilla

 

(further information is available by clicking on the link at the end of page!)

History of the City St. Pölten

In order to present concise history of the Lower Austrian capital is in the shop of the city museum a richly illustrated full version on CD-ROM.

Tip

On the occasion of the commemoration of the pogroms of November 1938, the Institute for Jewish History of Austria its virtual Memorbuch (Memory book) for the destroyed St. Pölten Jewish community since 10th November 2012 is putting online.

Prehistory

The time from which there is no written record is named after the main materials used for tools and weapons: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. Using the latest technologies, archaeologists from archaeological finds and aerial photographs can trace a fairly detailed picture of life at that time. Especially for the time from the settling down of the People (New Stone Age), now practicing agriculture and animal husbandry, in the territory of St. Pölten lively settlement activity can be proved. In particular, cemeteries are important for the research, because the dead were laid in the grave everyday objects and jewelry, the forms of burial changing over time - which in turn gives the archeology valuable clues for the temporal determination. At the same time, prehistory of Sankt Pölten would not be half as good documented without the construction of the expressway S33 and other large buildings, where millions of cubic meters of earth were moved - under the watchful eyes of the Federal Monuments Office!

A final primeval chapter characterized the Celts, who settled about 450 BC our area and in addition to a new culture and religion also brought with them the potter's wheel. The kingdom of Noricum influenced till the penetration of the Romans the development in our area.

Roman period, migrations

The Romans conquered in 15 BC the Celtic Empire and established hereinafter the Roman province of Noricum. Borders were protected by military camp (forts), in the hinterland emerged civilian cities, almost all systematically laid out according to the same plan. The civil and commercial city Aelium Cetium, as St. Pölten was called (city law 121/122), consisted in the 4th Century already of heated stone houses, trade and craft originated thriving urban life, before the Romans in the first third of the 5th Century retreated to Italy.

The subsequent period went down as the Migration Period in official historiography, for which the settlement of the Sankt Pöltner downtown can not be proved. Cemeteries witness the residence of the Lombards in our area, later it was the Avars, extending their empire to the Enns.

The recent archaeological excavations on the Cathedral Square 2010/2011, in fact, the previous knowledge of St.Pölten colonization not have turned upside down but enriched by many details, whose full analysis and publication are expected in the near future.

Middle Ages

With the submission of the Avars by Charlemagne around 800 AD Christianity was gaining a foothold, the Bavarian Benedictine monastery of Tegernsee establishing a daughter house here - as founder are mentioned the brothers Adalbert and Ottokar - equipped with the relics of St. Hippolytus. The name St. Ypolit over the centuries should turn into Sankt Pölten. After the Hungarian wars and the resettlement of the monastery as Canons Regular of St. Augustine under the influence of Passau St. Pölten received mid-11th Century market rights.

In the second half of the 20th century historians stated that records in which the rights of citizens were held were to be qualified as Town Charters. Vienna is indeed already in 1137 as a city ("civitas") mentioned in a document, but the oldest Viennese city charter dates only from the year 1221, while the Bishop of Passau, Konrad, already in 1159 the St. Pöltnern secured:

A St. Pöltner citizen who has to answer to the court, has the right to make use of an "advocate".

He must not be forced to rid himself of the accusation by a judgment of God.

A St. Pöltner citizen may be convicted only by statements of fellow citizens, not by strangers.

From the 13th Century exercised a city judge appointed by the lord of the city the high and low jurisdiction as chairman of the council meetings and the Municipal Court, Inner and Outer Council supported him during the finding of justice. Venue for the public verdict was the in the 13th Century created new marketplace, the "Broad Market", now the town hall square. Originally square-shaped, it was only later to a rectangle reduced. Around it arose the market district, which together with the monastery district, the wood district and the Ledererviertel (quarter of the leather goods manufacturer) was protected by a double city wall.

The dependence of St. Pölten of the bishop of Passau is shown in the municipal coat of arms and the city seal. Based on the emblem of the heraldic animal of the Lord of the city, so the Bishop of Passau, it shows an upright standing wolf holding a crosier in its paw.

Modern Times

In the course of the armed conflict between the Emperor Frederick III . and King Matthias of Hungary pledged the Bishop of Passau the town on the Hungarian king. From 1485 stood Lower Austria as a whole under Hungarian rule. The most important document of this period is the awarding of the city coat of arms by King Matthias Corvinus in the year 1487. After the death of the opponents 1490 and 1493 could Frederick's son Maximilian reconquer Lower Austria. He considered St. Pölten as spoils of war and had no intention of returning it to the diocese of Passau. The city government has often been leased subsequently, for instance, to the family Wellenstein, and later to the families Trautson and Auersperg.

That St. Pölten now was a princely city, found its expression in the coat of arms letter of the King Ferdinand I. from 1538: From now on, the wolf had no crosier anymore, and the from the viewer's point of view left half showed the reverse Austrian shield, so silver-red-silver.

To the 16th Century also goes back the construction of St. Pöltner City Hall. The 1503 by judge and council acquired house was subsequently expanded, rebuilt, extended and provided with a tower.

A for the urban history research important picture, painted in 1623, has captured scenes of the peasant uprising of 1597, but also allows a view to the city and lets the viewer read some of the details of the then state of construction. The economic inconveniences of that time were only exacerbated by the Thirty Years War, at the end of which a fifth of the houses were uninhabited and the citizenry was impoverished.

Baroque

After the successful defense against the Turks in 1683, the economy started to recover and a significant building boom began. Lower Austria turned into the land of the baroque abbeys and monasteries, as it is familiar to us today.

In St. Pölten, the change of the cityscape is closely connected to the Baroque architect Jakob Prandtauer. In addition to the Baroquisation of the interior of the cathedral, a number of buildings in St. Pölten go to his account, so the reconstruction of the castle Ochsenburg, the erection of the Schwaighof and of the core building of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Englische Fräuleins - English Maidens) - from 1706 the seat of the first school order of St.Pölten - as well as of several bourgeois houses.

Joseph Munggenast, nephew and co-worker of Prandtauer, completed the Baroquisation of the cathedral, he baroquised the facade of the town hall (1727) and numerous bourgeois houses and designed a bridge over the Traisen which existed until 1907. In the decoration of the church buildings were throughout Tyroleans collaborating, which Jakob Prandtauer had brought along from his homeland (Tyrol) to St. Pölten, for example, Paul Troger and Peter Widerin.

Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II: Their reforms in the city of the 18th Century also left a significant mark. School foundings as a result of compulsory education, the dissolution of the monasteries and hereinafter - from 1785 - the new role of St. Pölten as a bishop's seat are consequences of their policies.

1785 was also the year of a fundamental alteration of the old Council Constitution: The city judge was replaced by one magistrate consisting of five persons, at the head was a mayor. For the first mayor the painter Josef Hackl was chosen.

The 19th century

Despite the Napoleonic Wars - St. Pölten in 1805 and 1809 was occupied by the French - and despite the state bankruptcy of 1811, increased the number of businesses constantly, although the economic importance of the city for the time being did not go beyond the near vicinity.

Against the background of monitoring by the state secret police, which prevented any political commitment between the Congress of Vienna and the 1848 revolution, the citizens withdrew into private life. Sense of family, fostering of domestic music, prominent salon societies in which even a Franz Schubert socialized, or the construction of the city theater were visible signs of this attitude.

The economic upswing of the city did not begin until after the revolution of the year 1848. A prerequisite for this was the construction of the Empress Elisabeth Western Railway, moving Vienna, Linz, soon Salzburg, too, in a reachable distance. The city walls were pulled down, St. Pölten could unfold. The convenient traffic situation favored factory start-ups, and so arose a lace factory, a revolver factory, a soap factory or, for example, as a precursor of a future large-scale enterprise, the braid, ribbon and Strickgarnerzeugung (knitting yarn production) of Matthias Salcher in Harland.

In other areas, too, the Gründerzeit (years of rapid industrial expansion in Germany - and Austria) in Sankt Pölten was honouring its name: The city got schools, a hospital, gas lanterns, canalization, hot springs and summer bath.

The 20th century

At the beginning of the 20th Century the city experienced another burst of development, initiated by the construction of the power station in 1903, because electricity was the prerequisite for the settlement of large companies. In particular, the companies Voith and Glanzstoff and the main workshop of the Federal Railways attracted many workers. New Traisen bridge, tram, Mariazell Railway and other infrastructure buildings were erected; St. Pölten obtained a synagogue. The Art Nouveau made it repeatedly into the urban architecture - just think of the Olbrich House - and inspired also the painting, as exponents worth to be mentioned are Ernst Stöhr or Ferdinand Andri.

What the outbreak of the First World War in broad outlines meant for the monarchy, on a smaller scale also St. Pölten has felt. The city was heavily impacted by the deployment of army units, a POW camp, a military hospital and a sick bay. Industrial enterprises were partly converted into war production, partly closed. Unemployment, housing emergency and food shortages long after the war still were felt painfully.

The 1919 to mayor elected Social Democrat Hubert Schnofl after the war tried to raise the standard of living of the people by improving the social welfare and health care. The founding of a housing cooperative (Wohnungsgenossenschaft), the construction of the water line and the establishment of new factories were further attempts to stimulate the stiffening economy whose descent could not be stopped until 1932.

After the National Socialist regime had stirred false hopes and plunged the world into war, St. Pölten was no longer the city as it has been before. Not only the ten devastating bombings of the last year of the war had left its marks, also the restrictive persecution of Jews and political dissidents had torn holes in the structure of the population. Ten years of Russian occupation subsequently did the rest to traumatize the population, but at this time arose from the ruins a more modern St. Pölten, with the new Traisen bridge, district heating, schools.

This trend continued, an era of recovery and modernization made the economic miracle palpable. Already in 1972 was - even if largely as a result of incorporations - exceeded the 50.000-inhabitant-limit.

Elevation to capital status (capital of Lower Austria), 10 July 1986: No other event in this dimension could have become the booster detonation of an up to now ongoing development thrust. Since then in a big way new residential and commercial areas were opened up, built infrastructure constructions, schools and universities brought into being to enrich the educational landscape. East of the Old Town arose the governmental and cultural district, and the list of architects wears sonorous names such as Ernst Hoffmann (NÖ (Lower Austria) Landhaus; Klangturm), Klaus Kada (Festspielhaus), Hans Hollein (Shedhalle and Lower Austrian Provincial Museum), Karin Bily, Paul Katzberger and Michael Loudon ( NÖ State Library and NÖ State Archive).

European Diploma, European flag, badge of honor, Europe Price: Between 1996 and 2001, received St. Pölten numerous appreciations of its EU commitment - as a sort of recognition of the Council of Europe for the dissemination of the EU-idea through international town twinnings, a major Europe exhibition or, for example, the establishment and chair of the "Network of European medium-sized cities".

On the way into the 21st century

Just now happened and already history: What the St. Pöltnern as just experienced sticks in their minds, travelers and newcomers within a short time should be told. The theater and the hospital handing over to the province of Lower Austria, a new mayor always on the go, who was able to earn since 2004 already numerous laurels (Tags: polytechnic, downtown enhancement, building lease scheme, bus concept) - all the recent changes are just now condensed into spoken and written language in order to make, from now on, the history of the young provincial capital in the 3rd millennium nachlesbar (checkable).

www.st-poelten.gv.at/Content.Node/freizeit-kultur/kultur/...

:: Basics ::

Your Name: Arcadia Rococo Bliss

Your Mum/Dads Name: Libba

Base Doll: Margaret Meets Ladybug

How long have you been with your current family? Not even a week!

What customizations do you have? I was lightly sandmatted by my fabulous former mum.

 

:: Your Favorites ::

Favorite color: red

Favorite eye-chip color: aqua

Favorite animal: owls (it's a prerequisite at my current home)

Favorite song: Duh! "Rococo" by Arcade Fire"

Favorite Flickr dolly friend: I'm going with the as-yet unnamed camillaeatfiftyeggs's Rosie, since I helped her find her new home :)

Favorite Flickr human friend: Hmmmm, I love you all! But I especially love to hear from aveuch (Hec), riverbear, girlenchanted, and camilla!

 

:: Flickr Friends ::

Whose closet would you like to raid: girlenchanted and rockymountainroz (that's a given!)

Who has the coolest sister: Brat, because she gets to chill with Harrison Anne.

Who does the most fun things: girlenchanted's Kenners!

Who has the nicest mum/dad: Oz

What non-Blythe friend would you like to spend the day with: Tia :)

Who takes the best pictures: Shannon Taylor & girlenchanted

Who has the best hair: kathiminikatie's Tinsley! It's so soft!

 

:: Fashion ::

If you could only wear one dress, it would be by: oooo, either sleepforever or I_love_george

Who makes your favorite accessories: hmmmm, we don't have many accessories in this house, but we love our owl hats by Enchanted Pumpkin

Do you prefer dresses, skirts or jeans: Dresses (thus far, but fall's around the corner.)

Do you wear socks: Never, in fact, no one in this house even wears shoes that often!

How many pairs of shoes do you have: None (right now :)

 

Tag ONE person in your "add people" to sign next ! :o) Tia's OZ!!!!

Shah Hussain was a Punjabi poet and Sufi saint. His Urs (annual death anniversary) is celebrated at his shrine every year. It is known as "Mela Chiraghan" ("Festival of Lights"). Shah Hussain was the pioneer of the Kafi form of Punjabi poetry, which are very popular form of sufi singing in Punjab.In the new Lahore lies buried Shah Husain and with him lies buried the myth of Lal Husain. Still, at least once a year we can hear the defused echoes of the myth. As the lights glimmer on the walls of Shalamar, the unsophisticated rhythms of swinging bodies and exulting voices curiously insist on being associated with Husain. This instance apparently defies explanation. But one is aware that an undertone of mockery pervades the air - released feet mocking the ancient sods of Shalamar and released voices mocking its ancient walls. Husain too, the myth tells us, danced a dance of mockery in the ancient streets of Lahore. Grandson of a convert weaver, he embarrassed every one by aspiring to the privilege of learning what he revered guardians of traditional knowledge claimed to teach.

 

Then again, fairly late in life, he embarrassed every one by refusing to believe in the knowledge he had received from others, and decided to know for himself. He plucked the forbidden fruit anew.

 

The myth of Lal Husain has lived a defused, half-conscious life in the annual Fare of Lights. The poetry of shah Husain which was born out of common songs of the people of the Punjab has kept itself alive by becoming a part of those very songs. In recent past, the myth of Madhu Lal Husain and the poetry of Husain have come to be connected. But the time for the myth to become really alive in our community is still to come.

 

Husain s poetry consists entirely of short poems known as "Kafis." A typical Husain Kafi contains a refrain and some rhymed lines. The number of rhymed lines is usually from four to ten. Only occasionally a more complete form is adopted. To the eye of a reader, the structure of a "Kafi" appears simple. But the "Kafis" of Husain are not intended for the eye. They are designed as musical compositions to be interpreted by the singing voice. The rhythm in the refrain and in the lines are so balanced and counterpointed as to bring about a varying, evolving musical pattern.

 

It may be asserted that poetry is often written to be sung. And all poetry carries, through manipulation of sound effects, some suggestion of music. Where then lies the point in noticing the music in the "Kafis" of Shah Husain? Precisely in this: Husain s music is deliberate - not in the sense that it is induced by verbal trickery but in the sense that it is the central factor in the poet s meaning.

 

The music that we have here is not the vague suggestion of melodiousness one commonly associates with the adjective "lyrical : it is the symbolic utterance of a living social tradition. The "Kafis" draw for their musical pattern on the Punjabi folk songs. The Punjabi folk songs embody and recall the emotional experience of the community. They record the reactions to the cycle of birth, blossoming, decay and death. They observe the play of human desire against the backdrop of this cycle, symbolizing through their rhythms the rhythms of despair and exultation, nostalgia and hope, questioning and faith. These songs comprehend the three dimensions of time - looking back into past and ahead into future and relating the present to both. Also, these songs record the individual s awareness of the various social institutions and affiliations and clinging to them at the same time - asserting his own separate identity and also seeking harmony with what is socially established.

 

Through this deliberate rhythmic design, Shah Husain evokes the symbolic music of the Punjabi folk songs. His "Kafis" live within this symbolic background and use it for evolving their own meaning.

 

By calling into life the voice of the folk-singer, Husain involves his listeners into the age-old tension which individual emotions have borne it its conflicts with the unchanging realities of Time and Society. But then, suddenly one is aware of a change. One hears another different voice also. It is the voice of Husain himself, apparently humanized with the voice of the folk-singer, and yet transcending it. The voice of the folk-singer has for ages protested against the bondage of the actual, but its fleeting sallies into the freedom of the possible have always been a torturing illusion. The voice of the folk-singer is dragged back to its bondage almost willingly, because it is aware of the illusory nature of its freedom and is reluctant run after a shade, fearing the complete loss of its identity. The voice of Shah Husain is transcending folk-singer s voice brings into being the dimension of freedom - rendering actual what had for long remained only possible:

 

Ni Mai menoon Kherian di gal naa aakh

Ranjhan mera, main Ranjhan di, Kherian noon koori jhak

Lok janey Heer kamli hoi, Heeray da wer chak

 

Do not talk of the Kheras to me,

O mother, do not.

I belong to Ranjha and he belongs to me.

And the Kheras dream idle dreams.

Let the people say, "Heer is crazy; she has given her-self to the cowherd." He alone knows what it all means.

O mother, he alone knows.

Please mother, do not talk to me of Kheras.

 

At first , the little "Kafi" deftly suggests the underlying folk-song patter. The usual figures in the marriage song - the girls, the mother, the perspective husband and the perspective in-laws are all there. And the refrain calls the plaintive marriage-song address of the girl to he mother on the eve of her departure from the parents house.

 

But the folk-song pattern remains at the level of an underlying suggestion. The mother and the daughter in the folk-song were both helpless votaries of an accepted convention, bowing before the acknowledged power of an unchanging order. Here in the "Kafi" the daughter assumes the power of choice and rejection. She stands outsides the cycles of time and society. The mother continues to represent the social order and the accepted attitudes according to her convictions, the Kheras offer the best possible future for her daughter because they assure mundane security and prestige, within a decaying order. But the daughter I snow determined to go beyond this order and seek further inner development. To her the Kheras, her unacceptable in-laws, represent the tyranny of the actual forced on the individual. To her, Ranjha, the socially condemned cowherd, represents the consummation of her revolt, promising a union which is the real inner fulfillment. The accepted attitudes are based on a superficial vision,

 

which takes appearance to be the only reality. Ranjha, who always hides his real self behind the shabby garb of a jogi or a cowherd can never be understood and can never be preferred to the wealthy Kheras. His real identity is a mystery that can be realized only in Heer s individual emotions. And for such a realization, a conscious break with the order of appearances is a prerequisite. Husain s triumph is achieved, not by evading the bondage s of the actual but by suffering them and finally transforming them. The mother remains a part of the daughter s consciousness - in addressing her she addresses herself. But this part of her consciousness is now subjected to more vital individual self. In the refrain:

 

Ni Mai menon Kherian di gal naa aakh

  

there is a tone of confidence - a mixture of earnest protestation and assured abandon.

 

Here is a "Kafi" presenting a different emotion:

 

Sujjen bin raatan hoiyan wadyan

Ranjha jogi, main jogiani, kamli kar kar sadian

Mass jhurey jhur pinjer hoyya, karken lagiyan hadyan

Main ayani niyoonh ki janan, birhoon tannawan gadiyan

Kahe Husain faqeer sain da, larr tairay main lagiyaan

 

Nights swell and merge into each other as I stand a wait for him.

Since the day Ranjha became jogi, I have scarcely been my old self and people every where call me crazy. My young flesh crept into creases leaving my young bones a creaking skeleton. I was too young to know the ways of love; and now as the nights swell and merge into each other, I play host to that unkind guest - separation.

 

The slower tempo of the refrain sets the mood of the "Kafi." The voice of the singer stretches in an ecstasy of suffering along the lengthening vowel sounds. The vowel sounds initiated by the refrain are taken up by rhythms and several other words.

 

The Heer-Ranjha motif is used here in a different emotional background. The intense loneliness here contrasts sharply with the confidence of fulfillment shown in the earlier "Kafi." Here people s preoccupation with appearances is not treated with indifference;

 

Ranjha jogi, main jogiani, kamli kar kar sadian

 

instead it adds to the plain. But in the notes of suffering, there is a strange quality of single-mindedness. One is not aware of any fidgety second thoughts. The plain does not evince any desperation: in fact there is an air of contemplative pose, born out of the awesome finality of commitment.

 

In another "Kafi" using the Heer-Ranjha motif, we are taken back to a still earlier stage of the poet s emotional Odyssey:

 

Main wi janan dhok Ranjhan di, naal mare koi challey

Pairan paindi, mintan kardi, janaan tan peya ukkaley

Neen wi dhoonghi, tilla purana, sheehan ney pattan malley

Ranjhan yaar tabeeb sadhendha, main tan dard awalley

Kahe Husain faqeer namana, sain senhurray ghalley

  

Travelers, I too have to go; I have to go to the solitary hut of Ranjha. Is there any one who will go with me? I have begged many to accompany me and now I set out alone. Travelers, is there no one who could go with me?

 

The River is deep and the shaky bridge creaks as people step on it. And the ferry is a known haunt of tigers. Will no one go with me to the lonely hut of Ranjha?

 

During long nights I have been tortured by my raw wounds. I have heard he in his lonely hut knows the sure remedy. Will no one come with me, travelers? <

 

The folk-song locale is present here in the shape of a river, a ferry and a batch of travelers. The travelers gather to set off to remote places for business, duty and other reasons. And there is the self conscious girl who comes daily to hear some chance gossip drop a word about her friend. The river for centuries has flowed between desire and fulfillment. No one knows where it goes; it has no beginning and no end. The river is ancient and unfathomable - holding mysterious dangers. It causes both life and death but shows a fascinating indifference that compels awed men and women to kneel and worship the river. There is another reason for this homage. The river bounds the village. It limits and defines the known and tried capacities of humanity. The girl s father has no possessions beyond the river. What she was born with lies placidly marked this side of the river. What is beyond, is vaguely threatening. But this hazardous unknown fascinates the girl and seeks to lure her out of the complacent peace she was born with.

 

But the girl in the "Kafi" differs from the girl in the folk-song in one vital respect. The girl in the folk-song has for ages, waited on this side of the river. She visits the ferry and moves among the travelers with questioning looks. But in her words and looks there lurks the knowledge of perpetual impossibility, the acknowledge that desire is never more than a wish is often less than it. The girl in the "Kafi" is prepared to bridge the gap between desire and attainment. She too is aware of the hazards of her ways but for her he imperative need to set out has become the supreme fact.

 

The image of a patient, desperately looking for a last remedy contains subtle implications. When Heer fakes illness in the house of her in-laws, Ranjha the fake jogi was approached for some magic cure. Heer was cured in a way the people did not foresee and her illness turned out to be of an unexpected nature. Those believing in appearances as the only reality were given a dramatic lesson. Here in the "Kafi", the metaphorical background is recreated. The girl earnestly wishes to align herself with ordinary motives and measures. But the uncommon purpose of her journey and the uncommon destination still stand out among the group of travelers. Her request for some one to accompany her only throws into stranger relief her unique loneliness.

 

The ecstatic rhythm brings to the refrain a tone of finality, a finality comparable to that of death. The journey across the river is a transition as radical as death. The two worlds of experience are as different from each other as the familiar life and the unknown beyond. (1959)

Cairngorms National Park is a national park in northeast Scotland, established in 2003. It was the second of two national parks established by the Scottish Parliament, after Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park, which was set up in 2002. The park covers the Cairngorms range of mountains, and surrounding hills. Already the largest national park in the United Kingdom, in 2010 it was expanded into Perth and Kinross.

 

Roughly 18,000 people reside within the 4,528 square kilometre national park. The largest communities are Aviemore, Ballater, Braemar, Grantown-on-Spey, Kingussie, Newtonmore, and Tomintoul. Tourism makes up about 80% of the economy. In 2018, 1.9 million tourism visits were recorded. The majority of visitors are domestic, with 25 per cent coming from elsewhere in the UK, and 21 per cent being from other countries.

 

The Cairngorms National Park covers an area of 4,528 km2 (1,748 sq mi) in the council areas of Aberdeenshire, Moray, Highland, Angus and Perth and Kinross. The mountain range of the Cairngorms lies at the heart of the national park, but forms only one part of it, alongside other hill ranges such as the Angus Glens and the Monadhliath, and lower areas like Strathspey and upper Deeside. Three major rivers rise in the park: the Spey, the Dee, and the Don. The Spey, which is the second longest river in Scotland, rises in the Monadhliath, whilst the Dee and the Don both rise in the Cairngorms themselves.

 

The Cairngorms themselves are a spectacular landscape, similar in appearance to the Hardangervidda National Park of Norway in having a large area of upland plateau.[citation needed] The range consists of three main plateaux at about 1000–1200 m above sea level, above which domed summits (the eroded stumps of once much higher mountains)[8] rise to around 1300 m. Many of the summits have tors, free-standing rock outcrops that stand on top of the boulder-strewn landscape.[9] The edges of the plateaux are in places steep cliffs of granite and they are excellent for skiing, rock climbing and ice climbing. The Cairngorms form an arctic-alpine mountain environment, with tundra-like characteristics and long-lasting snow patches.

 

The Monadhliath mountains lie to the north of Strathspey, and comprise a bleak, wide plateau rising to between 700 and 950 m.

 

Two major transport routes run through the park, with both the A9 road and the Highland Main Line crossing over the Pass of Drumochter and running along Strathspey, providing links between the western and northern parts of the park and the cities of Perth and Inverness. The Highland Main Line is the only mainline rail route through the park, however there are several other major roads, including the A86, which links Strathspey to Fort William, and the A93, which links the Deeside area of the park to both Perth and Aberdeen.

 

The idea that parts of Scotland of wild or remote character should be designated to protect the environment and encourage public access grew in popularity throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1931 a commission headed by Christopher Addison proposed the creation of a national park in the Cairngorms, alongside proposals for parks in England and Wales. Following the Second World War ten national parks were established in England and Wales, and a committee was established to consider the issue of national parks in Scotland. The report, published in 1945, proposed national parks in five areas, one of which was the Cairngorms. The government designated these five areas as "National Park Direction Areas", giving powers for planning decisions taken by local authorities to be reviewed by central government, however the areas were not given full national park status. In 1981 the direction areas were replaced by national scenic areas, of which there are now 40. In 1990 the Countryside Commission for Scotland (CCS) produced a report into protection of the landscape of Scotland, which recommended that four areas were under such pressure that they ought to be designated as national parks, each with an independent planning board, in order to retain their heritage value. The four areas identified were similar to those proposed in 1945, and thus again included the Cairngorms.

 

Despite this long history of recommendations that national parks be established in Scotland, no action was taken until the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. The two current parks were designated as such under the National Parks (Scotland) Act 2000, which was one of the first pieces of legislation to be passed by the Parliament. Before the national park was established in 2003, Scottish Natural Heritage conducted a consultation exercise, considering the boundary and the powers and structure of the new park authority.

 

Following the establishment of the park many groups and local communities felt that a large area of highland Perth and Kinross should form part of the park and carried out a sustained campaign. On 13 March 2008 Michael Russell announced that the national park would be extended to take in Blair Atholl and Spittal of Glenshee, and the park was duly extended on 4 October 2010.

 

In 2015, 53 km (33 mi) of the 132 kV power line in the middle of the park was taken down, while another section along the edge of the park was upgraded to 400 kV.

 

Tourism accounts for much of the economy and 43% of employment within the park area. In 2018, 1.9 million tourism visits were recorded. The park's mandate is sustainable tourism "that builds on, conserves and enhances [its] special qualities". The Cairngorms Business Partnership includes 350 private sector member businesses. In early 2017, the park was voted by Hundredrooms as one of the top seven eco-tourism destinations in Europe and discussed as a "mecca for outdoor enthusiasts". The Visit Scotland web site discusses the amenities and indicates that this park "has more mountains, forest paths, rivers, lochs, wildlife hotspots, friendly villages and distilleries than you can possibly imagine".

 

The park is popular for activities such as walking, cycling, mountain biking, climbing and canoeing: for hillwalkers there are 55 Munros (mountains above 3,000 feet (910 m) in height) in the park.[6] Two of Scotland's Great Trails pass through the park: the Speyside Way and the Cateran Trail.

 

A skiing and winter sports industry is concentrated in the Cairngoms, with three of Scotland's five resorts situated here. They are the Cairn Gorm Ski Centre, Glenshee Ski Centre and The Lecht Ski Centre. There was controversy surrounding the construction of the Cairngorm Mountain Railway at the Cairn Gorm Ski Centre, a scheme supported by the national park authority. Supporters of the scheme claimed that it would bring in valuable tourist income, whilst opponents argued that such a development was unsuitable for a protected area. To reduce erosion, the railway operates a "closed scheme" and only allows skiers (in season) out of the upper Ptarmigan station: other visitors may not access the mountain from the railway unless on a guided walk.

 

The Cairngorm Mountain Railway funicular was closed in October 2018 "due to health and safety concerns", or "structural problems" according to reports in summer 2019. At the time, an investigation was still underway to determine whether modifications would be "achievable and affordable". (The same situation was reported in December 2019.) This railway first opened in 2001 and connects the base station with a restaurant on Cairn Gorm mountain.

 

Aviemore is a busy and popular holiday destination, located close to Glenmore Forest Park and the Cairn Gorm Ski Centre. The Strathspey Railway is preserved railway running steam and heritage diesel services between Aviemore railway station and Broomhill via Boat of Garten, along part of the former Highland Railway.

 

The Highland Wildlife Park also lies within the national park, and the Frank Bruce Sculpture Trail is located near Feshiebridge. This short trail through the woods features a sculptures created by Frank Bruce between 1965 and 2009.

 

In addition to the Cairngorm Brewery, six distilleries are located within the Park area: Dalwhinnie distillery, The Glenlivet distillery, Tomintoul distillery, Royal Lochnagar distillery, Balmenach distillery and The Speyside distillery. Royal Lochnagar, Dalwhinnie, Cairngorm Brewery and Glenlivet are set up to receive visitors on a regular basis. Tomintoul, Balmenach and Speyside can be visited but require an appointment made in advance.

 

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

Milky Way Galaxy taken in 2010 before I knew much about astrophotography. But I figured, why not just post them so I can have the prerequisite Milky Way photo that everyone seems to need in their feed.

Up and up to the roof terrace

The Dockland is a popular destination at Hamburg’s port for tourists and locals alike. The six-storey glass and steel building looks right at home overlooking the Elbe — its parallelogram silhouette gives the distinct impression of a ship.

 

Those who successfully master the 136-step wood and glass staircases to the public viewing platform will be rewarded with a beautiful view: the Elbe, the Hamburg skyline, the neighboring Cruise Center Altona and maybe even a cruise ship just on the wharf. Especially at sunset, the Dockland platform offers one of the best photo opportunities in the city. The fish market and Oevelgönne are each only one ferry stop away from Dockland, and the Christianskirche church and the Altona Town Hall are within 15 minutes walking distance.

 

Creation

The building was designed by Hamburg architecture firm Bothe Richter Teherani in 1995. However, before the design could be realized, one of the most important prerequisites for the project's success was the dumping of sand on the banks of the Elbe. The approximately 132-metre-long Dockland was inaugurated on 31 January, 2006 and awarded the architectural Leaf Award in the Best Structural Design category in 2005 and the German Steel Construction Prize in 2006.

 

Dockland: business with a view

The many offices that call the Dockland home don’t need to worry about nosy tourists looking in on meetings. The office space is not visible from the 500 square meter roof terrace, so that the tenants can work undisturbed. And to match the uniqueness of the sloping architecture and the glass façade, the office building was equipped with other special features, such as a diagonal passenger elevator. A special highlight is the sloping overhead dome at the top of the building from looking directly into the water and thus giving the feeling of being in the middle of a luxury liner.

 

Tu BiShvat, or Tu B'Shvat, or Tu BeShevat 2021 will begin at sundown on the evening of

Thursday, January 28 which is the 15th of Sh'vat, 5782, (Hebrew: ט״ו בשבט ) in the Hebrew Calendar.

And it will end after sundown on the evening of

Friday, January 29

 

It is also called "The New Year of the Trees" or (Hebrew: ראש השנה לאילנות, Rosh HaShanah La'Ilanot‎). Tu BiShvat is one of four "New Years" mentioned in the Mishnah.

 

Okay, now here is the fun part:

I'm reprinting this from Chabad's Kaballah Online

www.chabad.org/kabbalah/article_cdo/aid/379846/jewish/Tu-...

________________________

Tu B’Shevat: Basics

Beginner

By Yerachmiel Tilles

Tu B’Shevat: Basics

Meet the New Year for the Trees.

The Meaning of Tu B’Shevat

 

The 15th day of the Jewish month of Shevat is the official “birthday” for trees in Israel. Calculating the years of a tree is necessary for several mitzvot of the Torah: ma'aserot—tithing [of each year’s fruit]; orlah—forbidden fruit of a tree’s first three years; reva’i—[redemption of] the fruit of a tree’s fourth year; and shemitah—the Sabbatical year. Tu B’Shevat is considered the beginning of the year for trees because it is the midpoint of winter: the strength of the cold becomes less, the majority of the year’s rains (in Israel) have fallen, and the sap of the trees starts to rise. As a result, fruit begins to form. (Fruit that was already ripe is known to have been nurtured by the previous year’s rain.)

 

The Tu B’Shevat Celebration

 

The Code of Jewish Law states that on Tu B’Shevat fasting and eulogies are forbidden, and all penitential prayers are omitted. One of the most important authorities, the Magen Avraham, adds (131:16): “It is the custom to eat many different kinds of fruit.” The almond tree is always the first to bloom...

 

The Kabbalistic celebration of Tu B’Shevat that originated in Safed involves eating particular fruits in a specific order [or seder, in Hebrew] and reading mystical passages appropriate to each of them. It was first recorded in Pri Etz Hadar, a 50-page pamphlet arranged by a student of Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, the Ari (1534–1572), the greatest Kabbalist of Safed. Since not everyone can always find 30 fruits that are appropriate [see below] set out below are the primary 12 fruits recommended for the Seder, corresponding to the 12 possible permutations of G‑d’s four-letter name, along with related verses and themes to focus on while eating, which we have substituted for the lengthy Zohar passages of the original.

 

Guidelines

 

1) Gather a bunch of Jews. Each one should help with the preparations, including researching something to say.

 

2) Buy as many different fruits as you can (see “30 Fruits,” below). Make an extra effort to obtain the 12 listed below in “The First Twelve.”

 

3) Also buy at least two bottles of sealed kosher wine: one white, one red (see below, “Four Cups”).

 

4) Bake (or purchase) cake or cookies, or anything tasty that is made primarily from wheat flour.

 

5) Set the table festively—tablecloth, candles, flowers, etc.

 

6) Be sure each participant knows which blessings to say before and after each food. The proper blessings are very important, and are printed in every Jewish prayerbook. (See “Blessings,” below.)

 

7) Begin by serving the cake and saying the blessing for it.

 

8) On this occasion, the blessing over fruit should be said over one of those for which the Land of Israel is specially praised (numbers 2–6 in “The First Twelve”), either the one for which you have a strong preference or the one nearest the top of the list.

 

9) The first cup of wine should be poured at the beginning (see “Four Cups”). You may recite the blessing and drink it between the cake and the fruit, or after reaching grapes (#4 on the list).

 

10) Have a good time, but don’t be too light-headed. This is a unique opportunity to effect awesome spiritual rectifications (see “Tikkunim” and “Blessings”).

 

The First 12 Fruits of the Seder

 

1. Wheat is the basis for our sustenance (see Psalms 81:17, 104:15, 147:14), but only after we labor to grow, harvest and prepare it. (Barley, although not included in the order of the meal, is one of the seven fruits for which Israel is praised. Often used for feeding animals. Its designation for the Omer offering inspires our efforts to harness our animalistic tendencies.)

 

2. Olives yield the best of their oil only when the fruit is crushed. Olive oil floats on top of all liquids. (See also Jeremiah 11:16.)

 

3. Dates are often a metaphor for the righteous (Psalms 92:13, Song of Songs 7:9), as the date tree is both lofty and fruit-bearing. Also, as the date tree is impervious to the changing winds, so too are the Jewish people.

 

4. Grapes can be turned into very different sorts of food (raisins) and drink (wine); so too, each Jew has the potential to be successful in some aspect of Torah and mitzvah observance, and to be special in his or her own way. (See also Psalms 20:4; Hosea 9:10.)

 

5. Figs must be picked as soon as they ripen, for they quickly go bad. Similarly, we must be quick to do mitzvot at hand before the opportunity “spoils.” (See also Song of Songs 2:10.)

 

6. Pomegranates, it is said, have exactly 613 pips, equal to the number of mitzvot in the Torah. Try counting! In any case, “Even the least of Jews are as full of merit as a pomegranate is [full of pips]” (see Song of Songs 4:4, 6:7).

 

7. Etrogim [Hebrew for “citrons”] are considered to be an extremely beautiful fruit, and are of great importance at Sukkot time (see Lev. 23:40 and commentaries). The etrog remains on the tree throughout the entire year, benefiting from all four seasons and unifying them.

 

8. Apples take 50 days to ripen. So too, the Jews ripened—and still ripen—during the 50 days from Pesach to Shavuot. And just as the apple tree produces fruit before leaves, so too do Jews perform mitzvot without the prerequisite of total understanding—“We will do, and [then] we will hear” (Exodus 24:7). See also Song of Songs 2:3.

 

9. Walnuts are divided into four sections, corresponding to the four letters of G‑d’s name [Havayah] and the four legs of G‑d’s chariot (see Ezekiel ch. 1). As walnuts have two shells which have to be removed, one hard, one soft, we too have to undergo both physical and spiritual circumcision (see Deut. 30:6).

 

10. Almonds signify enthusiasm in serving G‑d, for the almond tree is always the first to bloom. This is why Aaron’s rod sprouted specifically almond blossoms (Num. 17:23). [See also Jer. 1:11–12—be sure to catch the pun in the original Hebrew.]

 

11. Carobs take longer to grow than any other fruit (there is a nice story about this in the Talmud, Taanit 23a). They remind us of the necessity to invest many years in Torah study in order to attain worthwhile, clear understanding.

 

12. Pears of different strains still maintain a close affinity (see Mishnah, Kilayim 1:4).

 

Blessings

 

Fruits grow because G‑d wills so; not to recognize this by (saying the proper) blessing is to put the entire Creation in jeopardy. (Pri Etz Hadar) Moreover, the blessings before eating help us to focus our minds on the vital energy and potential for elevation of the food, not just its taste. To eat without first pronouncing the appropriate blessing constitutes theft: not only is it taking without proper acknowledgement, it is depriving the world of the divine beneficence that could have been channeled into it by means of the blessing. To eat many different fruits on this day . . . is a wonderful spiritual anchoring . . .

 

Eating a fruit for the first time in its season is considered one of the appropriate occasions for the special blessing of joy, Shehecheyanu: “Blessed are You...who has granted us life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this occasion.” Everyone should make an effort to have available a fruit over which to recite this blessing on Tu B’Shevat. (By the way, if both the Shehecheyanu and the blessing for the fruit, “borei pri ha’etz,” are being made over the same piece of fruit, most authorities state that the Shehecheyanu should be said first.)

 

Tikkunim (Spiritual Rectifications)

 

In Kabbalah, the flow of G‑d’s beneficence is called the “Tree of Life”: the roots, above in G‑d’s essence; the fruit, here below. By eating fruit on this day we rectify and increase this flow. (Pri Etz Hadar) The Ari teaches that while eating fruit on Tu B’Shevat, one should reflect on the sin of Adam and Eve (that they ate forbidden fruit), and intend to rectify it.

 

Rabbi Meir says: “The fruit of (the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil) was a grape...”; Rabbi Nechemiah says: “It was a fig...”; Rabbi Yehudah says: “It was wheat...” (Talmud, Berachot 40a) [see there for their reasons. Notice that no one says “apple”!]

 

30 Fruits

 

Rabbi Chaim Vital (the main disciple of the Ari) explained that there are 30 fruits which parallel the ten sefirot as they are manifest in each of the three lower [of the four] spiritual worlds, Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah. Beriah is far removed from the realm of impurity, and is represented by those fruits which are wholly edible: fruits with soft cores (such as apples and pears) and with cookable skins (like lemons and oranges) are considered totally edible, even if those parts are undesirable. Yetzirah is a lesser level of purity, and is represented by those fruits of which all is eaten except for a pit on the inside. Asiyah can be described as being the realm that we experience, in which evil exerts a powerful attraction; it is represented by those fruits which are enclosed in a totally inedible, protective shell.

 

Four Cups of Wine (Or At Least a Few Sips)

 

The spirit of the occasion includes drinking white wine at the beginning of the Seder and red wine at the end. Some are accustomed to drink four cups, parallel to Passover night. The first is all white, the second mostly white, the third half-and-half, and the fourth mostly red. Why? See the discussion of the Four Worlds in “30 Fruits,” above.

 

Classic Thoughts

 

“A land of wheat and barley, and (grape)vines, and figs, and pomegranates; a land of oil-olives and (date-)honey” (Deut. 8:8)

 

Charoset (for the Passover Seder) should be made from those fruits to which Israel is compared in Song of Songs... (Tosafot, Pesachim 116a)

 

Rabbi Elazar would eat less and save money, in order to be able to eat all the new fruits on Tu B’Shevat.

 

We have a tradition from R. Tzvi Elimelech of Dinov (the author of Bnei Yissaschar) to pray on Tu B’Shevat that G‑d should make available for us a kosher and especially beautiful etrog in time for Sukkot.

 

After Sukkot we fry the etrog that we used for the Four Species, and on Tu B’Shevat we eat it. (Likutei Maharich)

 

To eat many different fruits on this day and to recite various passages and praises while doing so . . . is a wonderful spiritual anchoring. (Pri Etz Hadar)

  

IMG_9604 V2

A security forces Airman plunges into the combat water survival test at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Colo., July 17, 2015. The event was part of a daylong course for Airmen across the Front Range area to determine if they are physically and mentally ready to attend the U.S. Army Pre-Ranger Training Assessment Course, a prerequisite to attending U.S. Army Ranger School at Fort Benning, Ga. (U.S. Air Force photo/Jason Gutierrez)

 

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.

 

Ardvreck Castle is a castle, now ruinous, standing on a rocky promontory in Loch Assynt, Sutherland, Scotland, UK. The structure dates from about 1490 and is associated with the then landowners, the Macleods of Assynt.

 

The castle was built in the 15th century by the MacLeods of Assynt. It replaced Assynt Castle which was four miles north-west of Inchnadamph.

 

Ardvreck is notable as the place where the royalist James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose was handed over in 1650 to the Covenanter forces by MacLeod, Laird of Assynt after the Battle of Carbisdale. The true history of this event is unclear. One account is that MacLeod, loyal to the Covenanters, arrested the weary, fleeing, Montrose and held him. Another is that he provided comfortable shelter, but betrayed Montrose for a £25,000 reward.

 

Clan Mackenzie attacked and captured Ardvreck Castle in 1672, and then took control of the Assynt lands. In 1726 they constructed a more modern manor house nearby, Calda House which takes its name from the Calda burn beside which it stands. A fire destroyed the house in 1737 and both Calda House and Ardvreck Castle stand as ruins today. They are designated as scheduled monuments.

 

The castle was a simple rectangular keep with a round staircase tower at the south-east angle. It was corbelled out on the upper floors to form square rooms, the small stair turret to these upper rooms being carried on the corbelling. There were three compartments on the ground floor which were all vaulted. There appear to have been four floors, and the first of these is also vaulted with the other floors being simply joisted. The castle also had several gunports.

 

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

A falconer with a Harris’s Hawk on display at Amsterdam’s Muiderslot castle. August 2019

 

Falconry is the hunting of wild animals in their natural state and habitat by means of a trained bird of prey. Small and larger animals are hunted; squirrels and rabbits often fall prey to these birds. There are two traditional terms used to describe a person involved in falconry: a falconer flies a falcon; an Austringer (French origin) flies a hawk (Accipiter, some buteos and similar) or an eagle (Aquila or similar). In modern falconry, the red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis), the Harris's hawk (Parabuteo unicinctus), and the peregrine falcon (Falco perigrinus) are some of the more commonly used birds of prey. The practice of hunting with a conditioned falconry bird is also called hawking or gamehawking, although the words hawking and hawker have become used so much to refer to petty traveling traders, that the terms falconer and falconry now apply to most use of trained birds of prey to catch game. Many contemporary practitioners still use these words in their original meaning, however.

 

Historically, falconry was a popular sport and status symbol among the nobles of medieval Europe, the Middle East, and Mongolian Empire. Falconry was largely restricted to the noble classes due to the prerequisite commitment of time, money, and space. In art and in other aspects of culture such as literature, falconry remained a status symbol long after it was no longer popularly practiced. The historical significance of falconry within lower social classes may be underrepresented in the archaeological record, due to a lack of surviving evidence, especially from nonliterate nomadic and non-agrarian societies. Within nomadic societies like the Bedouin, falconry was not practiced for recreation by noblemen. Instead, falcons were trapped and hunted on small game during the winter months in order to supplement a very limited diet.

In the UK and parts of Europe, falconry probably reached its zenith in the 17th century, but soon faded, particularly in the late 18th and 19th centuries, as firearms became the tool of choice for hunting. (This likely took place throughout Europe and Asia in differing degrees.) Falconry in the UK had a resurgence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries during which time a number of falconry books were published.

 

Source: Wikipedia

 

en.landschaftspark.de/startseite

 

Industrial history

 

The north of Duisburg was one of those areas in the Ruhr District which was torn from its bucolic idyll at a time of intense industrialisation. With the migration of industry northwards from the Ruhr valley the landscape began to change such that nothing of its original form is recognisable today.

 

In Meiderich in 1901 August Thyssen had his ironworks company start work on the construction of a blast furnace complex, immediately adjacent to the coal fields he had acquired previously, thus creating the prerequisites for the necessary link between coal and iron. Until the closure of the works in 1985, when overcapacity in the European steel market had to be reduced, the works produced pig iron – as a rule as a primary product for further processing in Thyssen's steel works.

 

The demise of iron production left an industrial wasteland of more than 200 hectares waiting for a new use. The great commitment of interested citizens makes it possible to stop the threatened demolition and a new type of park was created between the city districts of Meiderich and Hamborn, which has forged a connection between areas overgrown with weeds and the ironworks' industrial buildings.

 

Recently I've been feeling an impeding sense of "you-haven't-done-anything-worthwhile-and-you're-wasting-large-chunks-of-your-life." So here I am, sat late at night and making myself into a ghost.

 

I'm starting classes back up next Wednesday and I just got an e-mail from a professor saying I might not have the prerequisite for a class I registered (and paid!) for, although I KNOW I do! Pants :(

 

explored #70! :D

(further information and pictures are available by clicking on the link at the end of section and of page!)

 

Synagogue St. Pölten

Exterior of the former St. Pölten Synagogue

The St. Pölten Synagogue was up to the November pogroms in 1938 the main synagogue of the Jewish Community of St. Pölten. The In the years 1912 to 1913 by the architects Theodor Schreier and Viktor Postelberg built Art Nouveau synagogue is located in the Dr. Karl Renner Promenade in St. Pölten and is now the headquarters of the Institute for Jewish History in Austria.

History

The old synagogue, which was demolished in favor of the new one

The first prayer rooms of in 1863 founded Jewish Community of St. Pölten were located in the premises of the former Kattunmanufaktur (cotton manufactory), the later Gasser factory at school ring. A building of this factory was adapted between 1885 and 1890 as a synagogue. This adaptation was associated with considerable effort, which is why the members of the Jewish community already since 1888 endeavoured to get a new building, until 1903 but this was rejected by the township. At this time, a redesign of the promenade was planned, which was only possible by demolition of the in the street course standing synagogue. After lengthy preparations, a preparatory committee was elected in April 1907, which in addition to building site and plans the necessary financing should provide.

1911, a building committee was chosen and agreed with the community a real estate exchange. At the architectural competition, which was tendered in the same year, participated among others Jacob Modern, Jacob Gartner, Ignaz Reiser and Theodor Schreier. The latter was together with his partner Viktor Postelberg by the Committee commissioned another project for a temple with room for 220 men and 150 women to submitt, which was then realized. The conditions for the planning work developed Rudolf Frass. The necessary funds were raised through collections and appeals for donations throughout the country, so that could be started with the construction in June 1912. The gilding works were carried out by Ferdinand Andri. After little more than a year of construction and 141 390 crowns total investment, the synagoge on 17 August 1913 was solemnly consecrated.

Destruction

On the night of 9th to the 10th November 1938 invaded several SS and SA members the rooms of the synagogue, smashed windows and set fire. The that night caused damage was limited, as the fire could be extinguished relatively quickly. On the following morning 300 to 400 people gathered, some in civilian clothes, in front of the building. They moved with the singing of political songs in the sacred spaces and destroyed them completely. The windows were broken, Torah scrolls, Torah shrine, benches and images burned. Even water pipes and door posts were torn from the walls. The books of the extensive library were largely thrown on the road and burned. Some people climbed the dome and tore the Star of David of the roof .

Almost all of the movable property of the Jewish community was destroyed or stolen . A limited set of books were placed in the city archives, the City Museum there's still a donation box and a painting of Emperor Franz Josef, which hung in the entrance area. A single prayer book is since 1998 owned again by the Jewish Community.

In the following years the side rooms of the building of the SA were used as an office, the interior was used among other things as furniture warehouse. 1942, the synagogue became the property of the city of St. Pölten, which used it as a detention center for Russian forced laborers. In last fightings and bombings in 1945 the building was further damaged.

1945

The Red Army used the former synagogue as a grain storage until it was in 1947 returned to the city. The application of restitution was recognized in 1952 by the city council, which then returned the synagogue to the Jewish Community Vienna. In the following years, the former house of God continued to decay as after the Holocaust no Jewish community in St. Pölten could establish. The domed roof showed severe damage, individual components were threatening to collapse completely and through the boarded windows came rain and snow into the by dovecotes populated house.

In 1975, the Jewish Community Vienna (IKG - Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien) offered the city of St. Pölten to purchase the synagogue, which did not accept the offer due to lack of uses. Then the Jewish Community Vienna wanted to initiate the demolition, but this was prevented by the fact that the Federal Monuments Office the building put under monument protection. Then it was renovated from 1980 to 1984. Here, for example, many wall paintings were recovered, on the other hand, some structural changes were made (especially removal of water basins for the ritual washing of the hands), since it was clear from the beginning that the building would not be used as a synagogue, but as an event center.

Since 1988 in the premises of the former synagogue the Institute for Jewish History of Austria is located, further regular events are realized. The original function the synagoge never could fulfill again, as too few Jews returned after the Holocaust to St. Pölten.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the synagogue the City Museum in St. Pölten 2013/14 the building dedicates its own special exhibition. In doing so there is also shown a recently found photo of the interior before the destruction. It is also pointed out that the synagogue due to lack of funding already again is abandoned to a certain decay.

The St. Pölten rabbi

Interior of the synagogue with part of the dome ceiling, in the center of the former shrine

Name Period of office

Moritz Tintner 1863-1869

Adolf Kurrein 1873-1876

Samuel Marcus 1876-1878

Adolf Hahn 1878-1882

Jacob Reiss 1882-1889

Bernhard Zimmels 1889-1891

Leopold Weinsberg 1891-1897

Adolf Schächter 1897-1934

Arnold Frankfurt 1934-1936

Manfred Papo 1936-1938

Building description

Outside

The dominant element of the synagogue is the octagonal, completed by a large dome main building, to which the eastern and western side wings are attached. Connected to the synagogue is the former school building in Lederergasse 12.

Main tract

The main tract houses the former sanctuary. The facade is divided into a low ground floor, high upper floor and the dome. At the facade facing the street can be found in the two storeys each three windows, that are executed on the ground floor as low segmental arch windows with above running continuously cordon cornice. The windows on the upper floor, however, are high, rectangular windows, the space between them is divided by pilasters. The original stained glass windows were destroyed from 1938, today, clear glass can be found in the windows. Directly under the dome there is a large segment gable with representations of the Tablets of the Law, set in floral vines. Beneath it is written in Hebrew the text of Psalm 118, verse 19.

" פתחו לי שערי צדק אבא בם אודה יה "

"Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will enter and give thanks to God".

- Inscription under the law boards.

On the short, lateral oblique walls of the main building on the ground floor there are side entrances, in the transition to the dome there are embedded large oval windows.

Side wings

To the eastern side wing, which in comparison to the western tract is designed very narrowly, connects the former school building and was once home to the shrine. At the by segment gable and barrel roof completed tract can be found on the northern front in the upper floor a tall, rectangular window of the same type as that of the main wing. At the eastern side a round window is embedded, in the ground floor begins a connecting room to the school building.

The western side wing is identical to the east in the basic form, but it is significantly wider. In addition, in front of it there are entrance buildings. Both at the road side and on the opposite side between the main wing and the western annex are wide projecting semi-circular staircases, next to it can be found till half the height of the first upper floor each a buttress with two low windows. Road side, this buttress is preceded by a walk-in porch, which on three sides is open round-arched. The with triangular gable completed building ends in a concave enclosure, where a commemorative plaque is attached today. The west facade repeats the design of the main building, it can be found on the ground floor low segmental arch windows with above running continuously, jagged cordon cornice. On the first floor the windows are, however, significantly lower than in the main wing.

Former school building

The former school building has its main facade towards Lederergasse and there has the number 12. The road-side main facade of the two-storey building is divided into four axes. The window on the ground floor are round-arched disigned, the ones on the upper floor rectangularly. Between side wing of the synagogue and the main wing of the school building there is a tower-like, curved stairwell risalit up to the attic.

de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synagoge_St._P%C3%B6lten

 

(further information is available by clicking on the link at the end of page!)

History of the City St. Pölten

In order to present concise history of the Lower Austrian capital is in the shop of the city museum a richly illustrated full version on CD-ROM.

Tip

On the occasion of the commemoration of the pogroms of November 1938, the Institute for Jewish History of Austria its virtual Memorbuch (Memory book) for the destroyed St. Pölten Jewish community since 10th November 2012 is putting online.

Prehistory

The time from which there is no written record is named after the main materials used for tools and weapons: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. Using the latest technologies, archaeologists from archaeological finds and aerial photographs can trace a fairly detailed picture of life at that time. Especially for the time from the settling down of the People (New Stone Age), now practicing agriculture and animal husbandry, in the territory of St. Pölten lively settlement activity can be proved. In particular, cemeteries are important for the research, because the dead were laid in the grave everyday objects and jewelry, the forms of burial changing over time - which in turn gives the archeology valuable clues for the temporal determination. At the same time, prehistory of Sankt Pölten would not be half as good documented without the construction of the expressway S33 and other large buildings, where millions of cubic meters of earth were moved - under the watchful eyes of the Federal Monuments Office!

A final primeval chapter characterized the Celts, who settled about 450 BC our area and in addition to a new culture and religion also brought with them the potter's wheel. The kingdom of Noricum influenced till the penetration of the Romans the development in our area.

Roman period, migrations

The Romans conquered in 15 BC the Celtic Empire and established hereinafter the Roman province of Noricum. Borders were protected by military camp (forts), in the hinterland emerged civilian cities, almost all systematically laid out according to the same plan. The civil and commercial city Aelium Cetium, as St. Pölten was called (city law 121/122), consisted in the 4th Century already of heated stone houses, trade and craft originated thriving urban life, before the Romans in the first third of the 5th Century retreated to Italy.

The subsequent period went down as the Migration Period in official historiography, for which the settlement of the Sankt Pöltner downtown can not be proved. Cemeteries witness the residence of the Lombards in our area, later it was the Avars, extending their empire to the Enns.

The recent archaeological excavations on the Cathedral Square 2010/2011, in fact, the previous knowledge of St.Pölten colonization not have turned upside down but enriched by many details, whose full analysis and publication are expected in the near future.

Middle Ages

With the submission of the Avars by Charlemagne around 800 AD Christianity was gaining a foothold, the Bavarian Benedictine monastery of Tegernsee establishing a daughter house here - as founder are mentioned the brothers Adalbert and Ottokar - equipped with the relics of St. Hippolytus. The name St. Ypolit over the centuries should turn into Sankt Pölten. After the Hungarian wars and the resettlement of the monastery as Canons Regular of St. Augustine under the influence of Passau St. Pölten received mid-11th Century market rights.

In the second half of the 20th century historians stated that records in which the rights of citizens were held were to be qualified as Town Charters. Vienna is indeed already in 1137 as a city ("civitas") mentioned in a document, but the oldest Viennese city charter dates only from the year 1221, while the Bishop of Passau, Konrad, already in 1159 the St. Pöltnern secured:

A St. Pöltner citizen who has to answer to the court, has the right to make use of an "advocate".

He must not be forced to rid himself of the accusation by a judgment of God.

A St. Pöltner citizen may be convicted only by statements of fellow citizens, not by strangers.

From the 13th Century exercised a city judge appointed by the lord of the city the high and low jurisdiction as chairman of the council meetings and the Municipal Court, Inner and Outer Council supported him during the finding of justice. Venue for the public verdict was the in the 13th Century created new marketplace, the "Broad Market", now the town hall square. Originally square-shaped, it was only later to a rectangle reduced. Around it arose the market district, which together with the monastery district, the wood district and the Ledererviertel (quarter of the leather goods manufacturer) was protected by a double city wall.

The dependence of St. Pölten of the bishop of Passau is shown in the municipal coat of arms and the city seal. Based on the emblem of the heraldic animal of the Lord of the city, so the Bishop of Passau, it shows an upright standing wolf holding a crosier in its paw.

Modern Times

In the course of the armed conflict between the Emperor Frederick III . and King Matthias of Hungary pledged the Bishop of Passau the town on the Hungarian king. From 1485 stood Lower Austria as a whole under Hungarian rule. The most important document of this period is the awarding of the city coat of arms by King Matthias Corvinus in the year 1487. After the death of the opponents 1490 and 1493 could Frederick's son Maximilian reconquer Lower Austria. He considered St. Pölten as spoils of war and had no intention of returning it to the diocese of Passau. The city government has often been leased subsequently, for instance, to the family Wellenstein, and later to the families Trautson and Auersperg.

That St. Pölten now was a princely city, found its expression in the coat of arms letter of the King Ferdinand I. from 1538: From now on, the wolf had no crosier anymore, and the from the viewer's point of view left half showed the reverse Austrian shield, so silver-red-silver.

To the 16th Century also goes back the construction of St. Pöltner City Hall. The 1503 by judge and council acquired house was subsequently expanded, rebuilt, extended and provided with a tower.

A for the urban history research important picture, painted in 1623, has captured scenes of the peasant uprising of 1597, but also allows a view to the city and lets the viewer read some of the details of the then state of construction. The economic inconveniences of that time were only exacerbated by the Thirty Years War, at the end of which a fifth of the houses were uninhabited and the citizenry was impoverished.

Baroque

After the successful defense against the Turks in 1683, the economy started to recover and a significant building boom began. Lower Austria turned into the land of the baroque abbeys and monasteries, as it is familiar to us today.

In St. Pölten, the change of the cityscape is closely connected to the Baroque architect Jakob Prandtauer. In addition to the Baroquisation of the interior of the cathedral, a number of buildings in St. Pölten go to his account, so the reconstruction of the castle Ochsenburg, the erection of the Schwaighof and of the core building of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Englische Fräuleins - English Maidens) - from 1706 the seat of the first school order of St.Pölten - as well as of several bourgeois houses.

Joseph Munggenast, nephew and co-worker of Prandtauer, completed the Baroquisation of the cathedral, he baroquised the facade of the town hall (1727) and numerous bourgeois houses and designed a bridge over the Traisen which existed until 1907. In the decoration of the church buildings were throughout Tyroleans collaborating, which Jakob Prandtauer had brought along from his homeland (Tyrol) to St. Pölten, for example, Paul Troger and Peter Widerin.

Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II: Their reforms in the city of the 18th Century also left a significant mark. School foundings as a result of compulsory education, the dissolution of the monasteries and hereinafter - from 1785 - the new role of St. Pölten as a bishop's seat are consequences of their policies.

1785 was also the year of a fundamental alteration of the old Council Constitution: The city judge was replaced by one magistrate consisting of five persons, at the head was a mayor. For the first mayor the painter Josef Hackl was chosen.

The 19th century

Despite the Napoleonic Wars - St. Pölten in 1805 and 1809 was occupied by the French - and despite the state bankruptcy of 1811, increased the number of businesses constantly, although the economic importance of the city for the time being did not go beyond the near vicinity.

Against the background of monitoring by the state secret police, which prevented any political commitment between the Congress of Vienna and the 1848 revolution, the citizens withdrew into private life. Sense of family, fostering of domestic music, prominent salon societies in which even a Franz Schubert socialized, or the construction of the city theater were visible signs of this attitude.

The economic upswing of the city did not begin until after the revolution of the year 1848. A prerequisite for this was the construction of the Empress Elisabeth Western Railway, moving Vienna, Linz, soon Salzburg, too, in a reachable distance. The city walls were pulled down, St. Pölten could unfold. The convenient traffic situation favored factory start-ups, and so arose a lace factory, a revolver factory, a soap factory or, for example, as a precursor of a future large-scale enterprise, the braid, ribbon and Strickgarnerzeugung (knitting yarn production) of Matthias Salcher in Harland.

In other areas, too, the Gründerzeit (years of rapid industrial expansion in Germany - and Austria) in Sankt Pölten was honouring its name: The city got schools, a hospital, gas lanterns, canalization, hot springs and summer bath.

The 20th century

At the beginning of the 20th Century the city experienced another burst of development, initiated by the construction of the power station in 1903, because electricity was the prerequisite for the settlement of large companies. In particular, the companies Voith and Glanzstoff and the main workshop of the Federal Railways attracted many workers. New Traisen bridge, tram, Mariazell Railway and other infrastructure buildings were erected; St. Pölten obtained a synagogue. The Art Nouveau made it repeatedly into the urban architecture - just think of the Olbrich House - and inspired also the painting, as exponents worth to be mentioned are Ernst Stöhr or Ferdinand Andri.

What the outbreak of the First World War in broad outlines meant for the monarchy, on a smaller scale also St. Pölten has felt. The city was heavily impacted by the deployment of army units, a POW camp, a military hospital and a sick bay. Industrial enterprises were partly converted into war production, partly closed. Unemployment, housing emergency and food shortages long after the war still were felt painfully.

The 1919 to mayor elected Social Democrat Hubert Schnofl after the war tried to raise the standard of living of the people by improving the social welfare and health care. The founding of a housing cooperative (Wohnungsgenossenschaft), the construction of the water line and the establishment of new factories were further attempts to stimulate the stiffening economy whose descent could not be stopped until 1932.

After the National Socialist regime had stirred false hopes and plunged the world into war, St. Pölten was no longer the city as it has been before. Not only the ten devastating bombings of the last year of the war had left its marks, also the restrictive persecution of Jews and political dissidents had torn holes in the structure of the population. Ten years of Russian occupation subsequently did the rest to traumatize the population, but at this time arose from the ruins a more modern St. Pölten, with the new Traisen bridge, district heating, schools.

This trend continued, an era of recovery and modernization made the economic miracle palpable. Already in 1972 was - even if largely as a result of incorporations - exceeded the 50.000-inhabitant-limit.

Elevation to capital status (capital of Lower Austria), 10 July 1986: No other event in this dimension could have become the booster detonation of an up to now ongoing development thrust. Since then in a big way new residential and commercial areas were opened up, built infrastructure constructions, schools and universities brought into being to enrich the educational landscape. East of the Old Town arose the governmental and cultural district, and the list of architects wears sonorous names such as Ernst Hoffmann (NÖ (Lower Austria) Landhaus; Klangturm), Klaus Kada (Festspielhaus), Hans Hollein (Shedhalle and Lower Austrian Provincial Museum), Karin Bily, Paul Katzberger and Michael Loudon ( NÖ State Library and NÖ State Archive).

European Diploma, European flag, badge of honor, Europe Price: Between 1996 and 2001, received St. Pölten numerous appreciations of its EU commitment - as a sort of recognition of the Council of Europe for the dissemination of the EU-idea through international town twinnings, a major Europe exhibition or, for example, the establishment and chair of the "Network of European medium-sized cities".

On the way into the 21st century

Just now happened and already history: What the St. Pöltnern as just experienced sticks in their minds, travelers and newcomers within a short time should be told. The theater and the hospital handing over to the province of Lower Austria, a new mayor always on the go, who was able to earn since 2004 already numerous laurels (Tags: polytechnic, downtown enhancement, building lease scheme, bus concept) - all the recent changes are just now condensed into spoken and written language in order to make, from now on, the history of the young provincial capital in the 3rd millennium nachlesbar (checkable).

www.st-poelten.gv.at/Content.Node/freizeit-kultur/kultur/...

The would-be mad scientist must know how to behave in the face of shocking discovery ("the Eureka moment"). This is all for posterity after all, and one must think of how they will be remembered in film and monuments.

 

To prepare for these Eureka moments, one of the requirements for the Mad Science major is in the Theater department:

 

Emoting 101 for Scientists (1 credit hour)

Course description: Students will learn to develop memorable catch-phrases, dramatic postures, wild facial expressions and expressive gestures. Bonus project in expressionist lighting.

Prerequisite: Abnormal Psychology

 

- - - - -

Created for the We're Here visit to Mad Scientists - Mad Science.

Loch Inver is a 3.62-kilometre-long (1+61⁄64-nautical-mile) sea loch in Assynt, Sutherland and is on the northwest coast of Scotland. The loch meets the coastal embayment of Enard Bay at the north end and The Minch, where it meets Soyea Island at its mouth.

 

At the head of the bay is Soyea Island. It is small rocky uninhabited island whose radial axis lies on a horizontal line, the same as the bay, and is located 1+3⁄4 nmi (3 km) from Badnaban on a bearing of broadly east if slightly north and 2 nmi (4 km) south-southwest of Achmelvich.

 

Assynt is a sparsely populated area in the south-west of Sutherland, lying north of Ullapool on the west coast of Scotland. Assynt is known for its landscape and its remarkable mountains, which have led to the area, along with neighbouring Coigach, being designated as the Assynt-Coigach National Scenic Area, one of 40 such areas in Scotland.

 

The western part of Assynt has many distinctively shaped mountains, including Quinag, Canisp, Suilven and Ben More Assynt, that rise steeply from the surrounding "cnoc and lochan" scenery. These can often appear higher than their actual height would indicate due to their steep sides and the contrast with the moorland from which they rise. Many of the most distinctive peaks such as Suilven were formed during the last Ice Age, when they were left exposed above the ice sheet as nunataks, and they now remain as inselbergs of highly eroded Torridonian sandstone sitting on a bedrock of much older Lewisian gneiss. The Moine Thrust runs through the area, and is most visible at Knockan Crag National Nature Reserve, which includes a visitor centre interpreting the geological features of the landscape. In the east of Assynt lies a region of limestone scenery surrounding Ben More Assynt. This part of Assynt hosts the longest cave in Scotland, Uamh an Claonaite, which lies five miles (eight kilometres) south of Inchnadamph. The geological importance of Assynt is reflected in its inclusion in the North West Highlands Geopark.

 

The name Assynt may derive from an Old Norse word meaning 'ridge end'. There is also a tradition that the name comes from a fight between the two brothers Unt and Ass-Unt, (meaning Man of Peace and Man of Discord). The latter having won the tussle gave his name to the parish.

 

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

A male redwinged blackbird never lets down his guard: that was true for this fellow's father, and that's why it's true for him and will be true for his sons. It's the prerequisite for reproductive success and assures that the marsh will be equally noisy next spring. Keene airport, Swanzey, NH (2020)

NASA

Approach and Landing Test - ALT-12

S-77-27512

August 12, 1977

 

The Shuttle Orbiter 101 Enterprise and a NASA 747 carrier aircraft conducted the first free flight of the Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests (ALT) on August 12, 1977 at the Dryden Flight Research Center in Southern California. Astronauts Fred W. Haise Jr., commander, and C. Gordon Fullerton, pilot, were the crew of the Enterprise. The ALT free flights were designed te verify Orbiter subsonic airworthiness, integrated system operations and pilot-guided approach and landing capability and satisfying prerequisited to automatic flight control and navigation mode.

  

Vintage chromogenic print on Kodak paper, 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10in), with "This Paper Manufactured By Kodak" watermarks on the verso, numbered "S-77-27512" in red in top margin.

Eilean Donan is a small tidal island situated at the confluence of three sea lochs (Loch Duich, Loch Long and Loch Alsh) in the western Highlands of Scotland, about 1 kilometre (5⁄8 mi) from the village of Dornie. It is connected to the mainland by a footbridge that was installed early in the 20th century and is dominated by a picturesque castle that frequently appears in photographs, film and television. The island's original castle was built in the thirteenth century; it became a stronghold of the Clan Mackenzie and their allies, the Clan MacRae. However, in response to the Mackenzies' involvement in the Jacobite rebellions early in the 18th century, government ships destroyed the castle in 1719. The present-day castle is Lieutenant-Colonel John Macrae-Gilstrap's 20th-century reconstruction of the old castle.

 

Eilean Donan is part of the Kintail National Scenic Area, one of 40 in Scotland. In 2001, the island had a recorded population of just one person, but there were no "usual residents" at the time of the 2011 census.

 

Eilean Donan, which means simply "island of Donnán", is named after Donnán of Eigg, a Celtic saint who was martyred in 617. Donnán is said to have established a church on the island, though no trace of this remains.

 

It is possible that an early Christian monastic cell was founded on the island in the 6th or 7th century, and that it was dedicated to Donnán of Eigg, an Irish saint who was martyred on Eigg in April 617. No remains of any Christian buildings survive, though fragments of vitrified stone (stone that has been subjected to very high temperatures) have been discovered, indicating that there was an Iron Age or early medieval fortification on the island.

 

In the earlier thirteenth century, during the reign of Alexander II (ruled 1214–1249), a large curtain-wall castle (wall of enceinte) was constructed; it enclosed much of the island. At this time, the area around the island was at the boundary of the Norse-Celtic Lordship of the Isles and the Earldom of Ross: Eilean Donan provided a strong defensive position against Norse expeditions. A founding legend has it that the son of a chief of the Mathesons acquired the power to communicate with birds; as a result of this power, and after many adventures overseas, he gained wealth, power, and the respect of Alexander II, who asked him to build the castle to defend his realm.

 

At a later date, the island became a stronghold of the Mackenzies of Kintail, originally vassals of William I, Earl of Ross. At this early stage, the castle is said to have been garrisoned by Macraes and Maclennans, both clans that were later closely associated with the Mackenzies. Traditional Mackenzie clan histories relate that Earl William sought advantage from the Treaty of Perth of 1266, by which King Magnus VI of Norway ceded the Hebrides to Scotland, and demanded that his kinsman Kenneth Mackenzie return the castle to allow his expansion into the islands. Mackenzie refused, and Earl William led an assault against Eilean Donan that the Mackenzies and their allies repulsed.

 

The Mackenzie clan histories also claim (with little, if any, supporting contemporary evidence), that Robert the Bruce sheltered at Eilean Donan during the winter of 1306 to 1307; the castle escaped any other involvement in the Wars of Scottish Independence. In 1331 Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, sent an officer to Eilean Donan to warn the occupants of his forthcoming visit. In preparation 50 wrongdoers were rounded up and executed, their heads being displayed on the castle walls to Moray's approval. By the middle of the 14th century the Mackenzies are said to have been on the losing side in the ongoing feuding with the Earls of Ross. William III, Earl of Ross granted Kintail to Raghnall Mac Ruaidhrí in 1342. With the assistance of Leod Macgilleandrais, the Earl allegedly apprehended Kenneth Mackenzie, 3rd of Kintail, and had him executed in 1346 at Inverness. Through this period Eilean Donan is said to have been held by Duncan Macaulay for the Mackenzies, against the Earl and his allies. Kenneth's young son Murdo Mackenzie supposedly evaded the Earl's attempts to eliminate him, and on the return of David II from exile Murdo Mackenzie was allegedly confirmed in the lands of Kintail and Eilean Donan by a charter of 1362 (of which, however, no trace survives to the present day). At some point in the earlier 14th century it is thought that the Clan Macrae began to settle in Kintail as a body, having migrated from the Beauly Firth, and there gained the trust of the Mackenzie lairds through possible kinship and an advantageous marriage. The Macraes began to act as Mackenzie's bodyguards, acquiring the soubriquet "Mackenzie's shirt of mail".

 

James I, determined to pacify the Highlands, journeyed to Inverness in 1427 and invited the principal chiefs to meet him there. Allegedly among them was the young Alexander Mackenzie, 6th Earl of Kintail. James then arrested him, along with the other chiefs, on their arrival. Mackenzie clan histories relate that, although several chiefs were executed or imprisoned, Alexander, due to his youth, was instead sent to Perth to attend school. Alexander's uncles attempted to seize control of Kintail, but the constable Duncan Macaulay continued to hold Eilean Donan on his behalf. Fionnla Dubh mac Gillechriosd, considered by clan historians to be the founder of the Clan Macrae in Kintail, was dispatched to fetch the young laird back. During his lairdship Alexander appears to have supported the monarchy against the MacDonald Lords of the Isles and was allegedly rewarded by another charter of Kintail in 1463. Alexander died in about 1488 at a great age, and was succeeded by Kenneth Mackenzie, 7th of Kintail who won the Battle of Blar Na Pairce against the MacDonalds. Kenneth died a few years later and was succeeded first by his eldest son, then on his death in 1497 by his second son, John of Killin, who was still a minor. His uncle, Hector Roy Mackenzie, attempted to usurp the Mackenzie lands and installed his own constable in Eilean Donan, Malcolm Mac Ian Charrich Macrae. Hector's lawless activities caused the Mackenzies to be branded rebels, and in 1503 the Earl of Huntly offered to deliver Eilean Donan to the king, and to hold it on his behalf. James IV supplied a ship to support the enterprise. Eventually, John compelled his uncle to relinquish his claim, and Hector agreed to hand over Eilean Donan. The constable refused however, and John's supporters laid siege. Malcolm Mac Ian Charrich was eventually persuaded by Hector to relinquish the castle, after which he was dismissed as constable and Christopher Macrae (Gillechriosd Mac Fionnlagh Mhic Rath) was appointed in his place in around 1511. John of Killin obtained a further charter of Kintail and Eilean Donan in 1509.

 

In 1539, Donald Gorm Macdonald of Sleat ravaged the lands of MacLeod of Dunvegan on Skye and then attacked the Mackenzie lands of Kinlochewe, where Miles (Maolmure), brother of Christopher Macrae, was killed. After a series of retaliatory raids, Donald Gorm learned that Eilean Donan was weakly garrisoned and launched a surprise attack. In fact, only two people were in the castle: the recently appointed constable Iain Dubh Matheson and the warden. Duncan MacGillechriosd of the Clan Macrae, son of the former constable, arrived at the start of the attack and killed several MacDonalds at the postern gate. Arrows launched by the attackers killed Matheson and the warden, but MacGillechriosd managed to hit Donald Gorm with his last arrow, fatally wounding Gorm, and the Macdonalds retreated. Duncan MacGillechriosd expected to be appointed as the new constable but was considered too headstrong: the local clergyman John MacMhurchaidh Dhuibh (John Murchison) was appointed as a compromise between rival Macrae and Maclennan interests. Furious at this treatment, MacGillechriosd left Kintail and joined the service of Lord Lovat, though he eventually returned to settle at Inverinate. Meanwhile, an aggrieved Maclennan apparently shot MacMhurchaidh in the buttocks with an arrow.

 

MacGillechriosd's son Christopher Macrae became constable of Eilean Donan in turn, and held the castle during yet another clan feud, this time between the Mackenzies and the MacDonalds of Glengarry. Feuding broke out in 1580 and continued for almost 25 years. In around 1602 Eilean Donan was the base for a sea skirmish at the narrows of Kyle Rhea led by Christopher's son Duncan. During the action the MacDonalds were driven on to the Cailleach Rock at the eastern tip of Skye and Angus, son of MacDonald of Glengarry, was killed. Christopher was succeeded as constable by the Rev. Murdoch Murchison, minister of Kintail.

 

The Rev. Farquhar Macrae, son of Christopher Macrae, was born at the castle in 1580. After attending Edinburgh University and taking holy orders, in 1618 he was appointed constable of the castle and minister of Kintail on the death of Murdoch Murchison. Colin Mackenzie of Kintail was created Earl of Seaforth in 1623. He lived mainly at Chanonry of Ross in Fortrose, but made regular visits to Eilean Donan where the constable was required to entertain him and his retinue of between 300 and 500 retainers, as well as the neighbouring lairds. In 1635 George Mackenzie, 2nd Earl of Seaforth, appointed Farquhar as tutor to his six-year-old son Kenneth, who was subsequently raised at Eilean Donan.

 

In the civil wars of the mid 17th century, the Earl of Seaforth sided with Charles I. In 1650, after the king's execution, the Parliament of Scotland ordered a garrison to Eilean Donan. The local people did not welcome the garrison. When a party of 30 soldiers came out from the castle to request provisions from the local people, a band of 10 men who opposed their demands met the occupiers. An argument broke out, which led to the garrison men being driven off with several casualties. Shortly thereafter the garrison departed. The following year the Earl's brother, Simon Mackenzie of Lochslin, gathered troops for the royalist cause around Eilean Donan. For reasons unrecorded, he fell out with Farquhar Macrae and demanded his removal from the castle. Farquhar initially resisted, and despite interventions by the young Kenneth, had to be marched out by Lochslin and George Mackenzie (later Earl of Cromartie). He was finally persuaded to leave without violence, stating that he was too old to dwell in the cold castle. Farquhar was thus the last constable to dwell in Eilean Donan until its reconstruction, although he retained the ministry of Kintail until his death in 1662, at the age of 82.

 

After this time, the castle was briefly occupied by the Earl of Balcarres and his wife, who were in the Highlands in support of the Earl of Glencairn's royalist uprising, although Balcarres later disagreed with Glencairn and departed. In June 1654 General Monck, Oliver Cromwell's military governor in Scotland, marched through Kintail while suppressing the uprising. His troops destroyed much property, and stole 360 of Farquhar Macrae's cattle, though only one man was killed.

 

In 1689, King James VII of the House of Stuart was declared to have to forfeit the throne, and the crown was offered to William of Orange, in the so-called "Glorious Revolution". The revolution also established Presbyterianism in Scotland, although the Highlands generally remained Roman Catholic and loyal to the Stuarts. A series of Jacobite risings followed, leading to an increased military presence in Scotland as government forces attempted to penetrate and subdue the Highlands. In 1714 while surveying fortifications for the government, the military engineer Lewis Petit made the only surviving drawing of Eilean Donan. The sketch-elevation and carefully drawn plan show a dilapidated castle, largely roofless but for a small building by the entrance.

 

A major Jacobite uprising took place in 1715. Led by the Earl of Mar, it was an attempt to restore the exiled James Stuart, the "Old Pretender", to the throne. William Mackenzie, 5th Earl of Seaforth, joined the Jacobite army, leading out men of the Clan Mackenzie and Clan Macrae. The Macraes mustered at Eilean Donan, and are said to have danced on the roof of the castle before setting out to the Battle of Sheriffmuir where 58 Macraes were among the Jacobite dead. The battle was indecisive and the rising collapsed soon after.

 

Following the failure of the rising of 1715, the Jacobites found new support from Spain, now opposing both Britain and France in the War of the Quadruple Alliance. The Duke of Ormonde led the main invasion fleet from Spain, while an advance party of 300 Spanish soldiers under George Keith, 10th Earl Marischal, arrived in Loch Duich in April 1719, and occupied Eilean Donan Castle. The expected uprising of Highlanders did not occur, and the main Spanish invasion force never arrived. At the beginning of May, the Royal Navy sent ships to the area. Early in the morning on Sunday 10 May 1719 HMS Worcester, HMS Flamborough and HMS Enterprise anchored off Eilean Donan and sent a boat ashore under a flag of truce to negotiate. When the Spanish soldiers in the castle fired at the boat, it was recalled and all three frigates opened fire on the castle for an hour or more. The next day the bombardment continued while a landing party was prepared. In the evening under the cover of an intense cannonade, a detachment went ashore in the ships' boats and captured the castle against little resistance. According to Worcester's log, in the castle were "an Irishman, a captain, a Spanish lieutenant, a serjeant, one Scottish rebel and 39 Spanish soldiers, 343 barrels of powder and 52 barrels of musquet shot." The naval force spent the next two days in the castle and landed 27 barrels of gunpowder. The frigates' official logs are curiously worded, perhaps to conceal the reputed fact that the Macraes succeeded in destroying the castle although in naval hands, in order to prevent the English from garrisoning it: at all events, the castle was demolished by the gunpowder exploding. Flamborough then took the Spanish prisoners to Edinburgh. The remaining Spanish troops were defeated on 10 June at the Battle of Glen Shiel.

 

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

Ben Nevis is the highest mountain in Scotland, the United Kingdom and the British Isles. The summit is 1,345 metres (4,413 ft) above sea level and is the highest land in any direction for 739 kilometres (459 miles). Ben Nevis stands at the western end of the Grampian Mountains in the Highland region of Lochaber, close to the town of Fort William.

 

The mountain is a popular destination, attracting an estimated 130,000 ascents a year, around three-quarters of which use the Mountain Track from Glen Nevis. The 700-metre (2,300 ft) cliffs of the north face are among the highest in Scotland, providing classic scrambles and rock climbs of all difficulties for climbers and mountaineers. They are also the principal locations in Scotland for ice climbing.

 

The summit, which is the collapsed dome of an ancient volcano, features the ruins of an observatory which was continuously staffed between 1883 and 1904. The meteorological data collected during this period is still important for understanding Scottish mountain weather. C. T. R. Wilson was inspired to invent the cloud chamber after a period spent working at the observatory.

 

Ben Nevis is the Anglicisation of the Scottish Gaelic name Beinn Nibheis. Whilst Beinn is the common Scottish Gaelic word for 'mountain' the origin of Nibheis is unclear.

 

Nibheis may preserve an earlier Pictish form, *Nebestis or *Nebesta, involving the Celtic root *neb, meaning 'clouds' (compare: Welsh nef )., thus 'Cloudy Mountain'.

 

Nibheis may also have an origin with the words nèamh meaning 'heaven' (which is related to the modern Scottish Gaelic word neamh meaning 'bright, shining') and bathais meaning 'the top of a man's head'. Thus, Beinn Nibheis could derive from beinn nèamh-bhathais, "the mountain with its head in the clouds", or 'mountain of heaven'.

 

The Scottish Gaelic word neimh can be translated as 'malice', 'poison' or 'venom' giving 'venomous mountain', possibly describing the storms that envelop the summit.

 

As is common for many Scottish mountains, it is known both to locals and visitors as simply the Ben.

 

Ben Nevis forms a massif with its neighbours to the northeast, Càrn Mòr Dearg, to which it is linked by the Càrn Mòr Dearg Arête, Aonach Beag and Aonach Mòr. All four are Munros and among the eleven mountains in Scotland over 4,000 feet (1,200 m) (of which nine are currently listed as Munros).

Western flank of the Nevis massif; from Sgùrr Dhòmhnuill

 

The western and southern flanks of Ben Nevis rise 1,200 metres (3,900 ft) in about 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) above the River Nevis flowing down Glen Nevis – the longest and steepest hill slope in Britain – with the result that the mountain presents an aspect of massive bulk on this side. To the north, by contrast, cliffs drop some 600 metres (2,000 ft) to Coire Leis

 

A descent of 200 metres (600') from this corrie leads to the Charles Inglis Clark Memorial Hut (known as the CIC Hut), a private mountain hut 680 metres (2,230 ft) above sea level, owned by the Scottish Mountaineering Club and used as a base for the many climbing routes on the mountain's north face. The hut is just above the confluence of Allt a' Mhuilinn and Allt Coire na Ciste.

 

In addition to the main 1,345-metre (4,413 ft) summit, Ben Nevis has two subsidiary "tops" listed in Munro's Tables, both of which are called Càrn Dearg ("red hill"). The higher of these, at 1,221 metres (4,006 ft), is to the northwest, and is often mistaken for Ben Nevis itself in views from the Fort William area. The other Càrn Dearg (1,020 m (3,350 ft)) juts out into Glen Nevis on the mountain's southwestern side. A lower hill, Meall an t-Suidhe (711 metres (2,333 ft)), is further west, forming a saddle with Ben Nevis which contains a small loch, Lochan Meall an t-Suidhe. The popular tourist path from Glen Nevis skirts the side of this hill before ascending Ben Nevis's broad western flank.

 

Ben Nevis is all that remains of a Devonian volcano that met a cataclysmic end in the Carboniferous period around 350 million years ago. Evidence near the summit shows light-coloured granite (which had cooled in subterranean chambers several kilometres; miles beneath the surface) lies among dark basaltic lavas (that form only on the surface). The two lying side by side is evidence the huge volcano collapsed in on itself creating an explosion comparable to Thera (2nd millennium BC) or Krakatoa (1883). The mountain is now all that remains of the imploded inner dome of the volcano. Its form has been extensively shaped by glaciation.

 

Research has shown igneous rock from the Devonian period (around 400 million years ago) intrudes into the surrounding metamorphic schists; the intrusions take the form of a series of concentric ring dikes. The innermost of these, known as the Inner Granite, constitutes the southern bulk of the mountain above Lochan Meall an t-Suidhe, and also the neighbouring ridge of Càrn Mòr Dearg; Meall an t-Suidhe forms part of the Outer Granite, which is redder in colour. The summit dome itself, together with the steep northern cliffs, is composed of andesite and basaltic lavas.

 

Ben Nevis has a highland tundra climate (ET in the Köppen classification). Ben Nevis's elevation, maritime location and topography frequently lead to cool and cloudy weather conditions, which can pose a danger to ill-equipped walkers. According to the observations carried out at the summit observatory from 1883 to 1904, fog was present on the summit for almost 80% of the time between November and January, and 55% of the time in May and June. The average winter temperature was around −5 °C (23 °F), and the mean monthly temperature for the year was −0.5 °C (31.1 °F). In an average year the summit sees 261 gales, and receives 4,350 millimetres (171 in) of rainfall, compared to only 2,050 millimetres (81 in) in nearby Fort William, 840 millimetres (33 in) in Inverness and 580 millimetres (23 in) in London. Rainfall on Ben Nevis is about twice as high in the winter as it is in the spring and summer. Snow can be found on the mountain almost all year round, particularly in the gullies of the north face – with the higher reaches of Observatory Gully holding snow until September most years and sometimes until the new snows of the following season.

 

The first recorded ascent of Ben Nevis was made on 17 August 1771 by James Robertson, an Edinburgh botanist, who was in the region to collect botanical specimens. Another early ascent was in 1774 by John Williams, who provided the first account of the mountain's geological structure. John Keats climbed the mountain in 1818, comparing the ascent to "mounting ten St. Pauls without the convenience of a staircase". The following year William MacGillivray, who was later to become a distinguished naturalist, reached the summit only to find "fragments of earthen and glass ware, chicken bones, corks, and bits of paper". It was not until 1847 that Ben Nevis was confirmed by the Ordnance Survey as the highest mountain in Britain and Ireland, ahead of its rival Ben Macdui.

 

The summit observatory was built in the summer of 1883, and would remain in operation for 21 years. The first path to the summit was built at the same time as the observatory and was designed to allow ponies to carry up supplies, with a maximum gradient of one in five. The opening of the path and the observatory made the ascent of the mountain increasingly popular, all the more so after the arrival of the West Highland Railway in Fort William in 1894. Around this time the first of several proposals was made for a rack railway to the summit, none of which came to fruition.

 

In 1911, an enterprising Ford dealer named Henry Alexander ascended the mountain in a Model T as a publicity stunt. The ascent was captured on film and can be seen in the archives of the British Film Institute. A statue of Alexander and the car was unveiled in Fort William in 2018.

 

In 2000, the Ben Nevis Estate, comprising all of the south side of the mountain including the summit, was bought by the Scottish conservation charity the John Muir Trust.

 

In 2016, the height of Ben Nevis was officially remeasured to be 1344.527m by Ordnance Survey. The height of Ben Nevis will therefore be shown on new Ordnance Survey maps as 1,345 metres (4,411 ft) instead of the now obsolete value of 1,344 metres (4,409 ft).

 

The 1883 Pony Track to the summit (also known as the Ben Path, the Mountain Path or the Tourist Route) remains the simplest and most popular route of ascent. It begins at Achintee on the east side of Glen Nevis about 2 km (1.2 mi) from Fort William town centre, at around 20 metres (60') above sea level. Bridges from the Visitor Centre and the youth hostel now allow access from the west side of Glen Nevis. The path climbs steeply to the saddle by Lochan Meall an t-Suidhe (colloquially known as the 'Halfway Lochan') at 570 m, then ascends the remaining 700 metres (2000') up the stony west flank of Ben Nevis in a series of zig-zags. The path is regularly maintained but running water, uneven rocks and loose scree make it hazardous and slippery in places. Thanks to the zig-zags, the path is not unusually steep apart from in the initial stages, but inexperienced walkers should be aware that the descent is relatively arduous and wearing on the knees.

 

A route popular with experienced hillwalkers starts at Torlundy, a few miles north-east of Fort William on the A82 road, and follows the path alongside the Allt a' Mhuilinn. It can also be reached from Glen Nevis by following the Pony Track as far as Lochan Meall an t-Suidhe, then descending slightly to the CIC Hut. The route then ascends Càrn Mòr Dearg and continues along the Càrn Mòr Dearg Arête ("CMD Arête") before climbing steeply to the summit of Ben Nevis. This route involves a total of 1,500 metres (5000') of ascent and requires modest scrambling ability and a head for heights. In common with other approaches on this side of the mountain, it has the advantage of giving an extensive view of the cliffs of the north face, which are hidden from the Pony Track.

 

It is also possible to climb Ben Nevis from the Nevis Gorge car park at Steall at the head of the road up Glen Nevis, either by the south-east ridge or via the summit of Càrn Dearg (south-west). These routes require mild scrambling, are shorter and steeper than the Pony Track, and tend only to be used by experienced hill walkers.

 

The summit of Ben Nevis comprises a large stony plateau of about 40 hectares (100 acres). The highest point is marked with a large, solidly built cairn atop which sits an Ordnance Survey trig point. The summit is the highest ground in any direction for 459 miles (739 km) before the Scandinavian Mountains in western Norway are reached.

 

The ruined walls of the observatory are a prominent feature on the summit. An emergency shelter has been built on top of the observatory tower for the benefit of those caught out by bad weather. Although the base of the tower is slightly lower than the true summit of the mountain, the roof of the shelter overtops the trig point by several feet, making it the highest man-made structure in the UK. A war memorial to the dead of World War II is located next to the observatory.

 

On 17 May 2006, a piano that had been buried under one of the cairns on the peak was uncovered by the John Muir Trust, which owns much of the mountain. The piano is believed to have been carried up for charity by removal men from Dundee over 20 years earlier.

 

The view from the UK's highest point is extensive. Under ideal conditions, it can extend to over 190 kilometres (120 mi), including such mountains as the Torridon Hills, Morven in Caithness, Lochnagar, Ben Lomond, Barra Head and to Knocklayd in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

 

A meteorological observatory on the summit was first proposed by the Scottish Meteorological Society (SMS) in the late-1870s, at a time when similar observatories were being built around the world to study the weather at high altitude. In the summer of 1881, Clement Lindley Wragge climbed the mountain daily to make observations (earning him the nickname "Inclement Rag"), leading to the opening on 17 October 1883 of a permanent observatory run by the SMS. The building was staffed full-time until 1904, when it was closed due to inadequate funding. The twenty years worth of readings still provide the most comprehensive set of data on mountain weather in Great Britain.

 

In September 1894, C. T. R. Wilson was employed at the observatory for a couple of weeks as temporary relief for one of the permanent staff. During this period, he witnessed a Brocken spectre and glory, caused by the sun casting a shadow on a cloud below the observer. He subsequently tried to reproduce these phenomena in the laboratory, resulting in his invention of the cloud chamber, used to detect ionising radiation.

 

Ben Nevis's popularity, climate and complex topography contribute to a high number of mountain rescue incidents. In 1999 there were 41 rescues and four fatalities on the mountain. It has also been estimated that there are several deaths annually on Ben Nevis.

 

In two avalanches that occurred on Ben Nevis in 2009 and 2016 two people died on both occasions. In two avalanches that occurred in 1970 and 2019 three people died on both occasions. A climber died in an avalanche on the north face in 2022.

 

Some accidents arise over difficulties in navigating to or from the summit, especially in poor visibility. The problem stems from the fact that the summit plateau is roughly kidney-shaped and surrounded by cliffs on three sides; the danger is particularly accentuated when the main path is obscured by snow. Two precise compass bearings taken in succession are necessary to navigate from the summit cairn to the west flank, from where a descent can be made on the Pony Track in relative safety.

 

In the late 1990s, Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team erected two posts on the summit plateau to assist walkers attempting the descent in foggy conditions. These posts were subsequently cut down by climbers, sparking controversy in mountaineering circles on the ethics of such additions. Critics argued that cairns and posts are an unnecessary man-made intrusion into the natural landscape, which create a false sense of security and could lessen mountaineers' sense of responsibility for their own safety.

 

Supporters of navigational aids pointed to the high number of accidents that occurred on the mountain. Between 1990 and 1995 alone there were 13 fatalities, although eight of these were due to falls while rock climbing rather than navigational error. Also there is a long tradition of placing such aids on the summit, and the potentially life-saving role they could play.

 

In 2016, the John Muir Trust cleared a number of smaller informal cairns which had recently been erected by visitors, many near the top of gullies, which were seen as dangerous as they could confuse walkers using them for navigation.

 

The north face of Ben Nevis is riven with buttresses, ridges, towers and pinnacles, and contains many classic scrambles and rock climbs. It is of major importance for British winter climbing, with many of its routes holding snow often until late April. It was one of the first places in Scotland to receive the attention of serious mountaineers; a partial ascent and, the following day, a complete descent of Tower Ridge in early September 1892 is the earliest documented climbing expedition on Ben Nevis. (It was not climbed from bottom to top in entirety for another two years). The Scottish Mountaineering Club's Charles Inglis Clark hut was built below the north face in Coire Leis in 1929. Because of its remote location, it is said to be the only genuine alpine hut in Britain. It remains popular with climbers, especially in winter.

 

Tower Ridge is the longest of the north face's four main ridges, with around 600 metres (2000') of ascent. It is not technically demanding (its grade is Difficult), and most pitches can be tackled unroped by competent climbers, but it is committing and very exposed. Castle Ridge (Moderate), the northernmost of the main ridges, is an easier scramble, while Observatory Ridge (Very Difficult), the closest ridge to the summit, is "technically the hardest of the Nevis ridges in summer and winter". Between the Tower and Observatory Ridges are the Tower and Gardyloo Gullies; the latter takes its name from the cry of "garde à l'eau" (French for "watch out for the water") formerly used in Scottish cities as a warning when householders threw their waste out of a tenement window into the street. The gully's top wall was the refuse pit for the now-disused summit observatory. The North-east Buttress (Very Difficult) is the southernmost and bulkiest of the four ridges; it is as serious as Observatory Ridge but not as technically demanding, mainly because an "infamous" rock problem, the 'Man-trap', can be avoided on either side.

 

The north face contains dozens of graded rock climbs along its entire length, with particular concentrations on the Càrn Dearg Buttress (below the Munro top of Càrn Dearg NW) and around the North-east Buttress and Observatory Ridge. Classic rock routes include Rubicon Wall on Observatory Buttress (Severe) – whose second ascent in 1937, when it was considered the hardest route on the mountain, is described by W. H. Murray in Mountaineering in Scotland – and, on Càrn Dearg, Centurion and The Bullroar (both HVS), Torro (E2), and Titan's Wall (E3), these four described in the SMC's guide as among "the best climbs of their class in Scotland".

 

Many seminal lines were recorded before the First World War by pioneering Scottish climbers like J. N. Collie, Willie Naismith, Harold Raeburn, and William and Jane Inglis Clark. Other classic routes were put up by G. Graham Macphee, Dr James H. B. Bell and others between the Wars; these include Bell's 'Long Climb', at 1,400 ft (430 m) reputedly the longest sustained climb on the British mainland. In summer 1943 conscientious objector Brian Kellett made a phenomenal seventy-four repeat climbs and seventeen first ascents including fourteen solos, returning in 1944 to add fifteen more new lines, eleven solo, including his eponymous HVS on Gardyloo buttress. Much more recently, an extreme and as yet ungraded climb on Echo Wall was completed by Dave MacLeod in 2008 after two years of preparation.

 

The north face is also one of Scotland's foremost venues for winter mountaineering and ice climbing and holds snow until quite late in the year; in a good year, routes may remain in winter condition until mid-spring. Most of the possible rock routes are also suitable as winter climbs, including the four main ridges; Tower Ridge, for example, is grade IV on the Scottish winter grade, having been upgraded in 2009 by the Scottish Mountaineering Club after requests by the local Mountain Rescue Team, there being numerous benightments and incidents every winter season. Probably the most popular ice climb on Ben Nevis is The Curtain (IV,5) on the left side of the Càrn Dearg Buttress. At the top end of the scale, Centurion in winter is a grade VIII,8 face climb.

 

In February 1960 James R. Marshall and Robin Clark Smith recorded six major new ice routes in only eight days including Orion Direct (V,5 400m); this winter version of Bell's Long Climb was "the climax of a magnificent week's climbing by Smith and Marshall, and the highpoint of the step-cutting era".

 

The history of hill running on Ben Nevis dates back to 1895. William Swan, a barber from Fort William, made the first recorded timed ascent up the mountain on or around 27 September of that year, when he ran from the old post office in Fort William to the summit and back in 2 hours 41 minutes. The following years saw several improvements on Swan's record, but the first competitive race was held on 3 June 1898 under Scottish Amateur Athletic Association rules. Ten competitors ran the course, which started at the Lochiel Arms Hotel in Banavie and was thus longer than the route from Fort William; the winner was 21-year-old Hugh Kennedy, a gamekeeper at Tor Castle, who finished (coincidentally with Swan's original run) in 2 hours 41 minutes.

 

Regular races were organised until 1903, when two events were held; these were the last for 24 years, perhaps due to the closure of the summit observatory the following year. The first was from Achintee, at the foot of the Pony Track, and finished at the summit; It was won in just over an hour by Ewen MacKenzie, the observatory roadman. The second race ran from new Fort William post office, and MacKenzie lowered the record to 2 hours 10 minutes, a record he held for 34 years.

 

The Ben Nevis Race has been run in its current form since 1937. It now takes place on the first Saturday in September every year, with a maximum of 500 competitors taking part. It starts and finishes at the Claggan Park football ground on the outskirts of Fort William, and is 14 kilometres (8.7 mi) long with 1,340 metres (4,400 ft) of ascent. Due to the seriousness of the mountain environment, entry is restricted to those who have completed three hill races, and runners must carry waterproofs, a hat, gloves and a whistle; anyone who has not reached the summit after two hours is turned back. As of 2018, the record for the men's race has stood unbroken since 1984, when Kenny Stuart of Keswick Athletic Club won with a time of 1:25:34. The record for the women's race of 1:43:01 was set in 2018 by Victoria Wilkinson.

 

Ben Nevis is becoming popular with ski mountaineers and boarders. The Red Burn (Allt Coire na h-Urcaire) just to the North of the tourist path gives the easiest descent, but most if not all of the easier gullies on the North Face have been skied, as has the slope once adorned by the abseil poles into Coire Leis. No 4 gully is probably the most skied. Although Tower scoop makes it a no-fall zone, Tower Gully is becoming popular, especially in May and June when there is spring snow.

 

In 2018 Jöttnar pro team member Tim Howell BASE jumped off Ben Nevis which was covered by BBC Scotland.

 

On 6 May 2019, a team of highliners completed a crossing above the Gardyloo Gully, a new altitude record for the UK.

 

Also in May 2019, a team of 12, led by Dundee artist Douglas Roulston carried a 1.5-metre (4.9-foot) tall statue of the DC Thomson character Oor Wullie to the top of the mountain. The statue, which had been painted by Roulston with a 360-degree scene of the view from the summit was later sold at the Oor Wullie Big Bucket Trail charity auction to raise money for a number of Scottish children's charities.

 

The Ben Nevis Distillery is a single malt whisky distillery at the foot of the mountain, near Victoria Bridge to the north of Fort William. Founded in 1825 by John McDonald (known as "Long John"), it is one of the oldest licensed distilleries in Scotland, and is a popular visitor attraction in Fort William. The water used to make the whisky comes from the Allt a' Mhuilinn, the stream that flows from Ben Nevis's northern corrie. "Ben Nevis" 80/‒ organic ale is, by contrast, brewed in Bridge of Allan near Stirling.

 

Ben Nevis was the name of a White Star Line packet ship which in 1854 carried the group of immigrants who were to become the Wends of Texas. At least another eight vessels have carried the name since then.

 

A mountain in Svalbard is also named Ben Nevis, after the Scottish peak. It is 922 metres (3025') high and is south of the head of Raudfjorden, Albert I Land, in the northwestern part of the island of Spitsbergen.

 

A comic strip character, Wee Ben Nevis, about a Scottish Highlands boarding school student with superhuman strength and his antics were featured in the British comic The Beano from 1974 to 1977, named after the mountain.

 

Hung Fa Chai, a 489-metre (1605') hill in Northeast New Territories of Hong Kong was marked as Ben Nevis on historical colonial maps.

 

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

The Mount Elliott Mining Complex is an aggregation of the remnants of copper mining and smelting operations from the early 20th century and the associated former mining township of Selwyn. The earliest copper mining at Mount Elliott was in 1906 with smelting operations commencing shortly after. Significant upgrades to the mining and smelting operations occurred under the management of W.R. Corbould during 1909 - 1910. Following these upgrades and increases in production, the Selwyn Township grew quickly and had 1500 residents by 1918. The Mount Elliott Company took over other companies on the Cloncurry field in the 1920s, including the Mount Cuthbert and Kuridala smelters. Mount Elliott operations were taken over by Mount Isa Mines in 1943 to ensure the supply of copper during World War Two. The Mount Elliott Company was eventually liquidated in 1953.

 

The Mount Elliott Smelter:

 

The existence of copper in the Leichhardt River area of north western Queensland had been known since Ernest Henry discovered the Great Australia Mine in 1867 at Cloncurry. In 1899 James Elliott discovered copper on the conical hill that became Mount Elliott, but having no capital to develop the mine, he sold an interest to James Morphett, a pastoralist of Fort Constantine station near Cloncurry. Morphett, being drought stricken, in turn sold out to John Moffat of Irvinebank, the most successful mining promoter in Queensland at the time.

 

Plentiful capital and cheap transport were prerequisites for developing the Cloncurry field, which had stagnated for forty years. Without capital it was impossible to explore and prove ore-bodies; without proof of large reserves of wealth it was futile to build a railway; and without a railway it was hazardous to invest capital in finding large reserves of ore. The mining investor or the railway builder had to break the impasse.

 

In 1906 - 1907 copper averaged £87 a ton on the London market, the highest price for thirty years, and the Cloncurry field grew. The railway was extended west of Richmond in 1905 - 1906 by the Government and mines were floated on the Melbourne Stock Exchange. At Mount Elliott a prospecting shaft had been sunk and on the 1st of August 1906 a Cornish boiler and winding plant were installed on the site.

 

Mount Elliott Limited was floated in Melbourne on the 13th of July 1906. In 1907 it was taken over by British and French interests and restructured. Combining with its competitor, Hampden Cloncurry Copper Mines Limited, Mount Elliott formed a special company to finance and construct the railway from Cloncurry to Malbon, Kuridala (then Friezeland) and Mount Elliott (later Selwyn). This new company then entered into an agreement with the Queensland Railways Department in July 1908.

 

The railway, which was known as the 'Syndicate Railway', aroused opposition in 1908 from the trade unions and Labor movement generally, who contended that railways should be State-owned. However, the Hampden-Mount Elliott Railway Bill was passed by the Queensland Parliament and assented to on the 21st of April 1908; construction finished in December 1910. The railway terminated at the Mount Elliott smelter.

 

By 1907 the main underlie shaft had been sunk and construction of the smelters was underway using a second-hand water-jacket blast furnace and converters. At this time, W.H. Corbould was appointed general manager of Mount Elliott Limited.

 

The second-hand blast furnace and converters were commissioned or 'blown in' in May 1909, but were problematic causing hold-ups. Corbould referred to the equipment in use as being the 'worst collection of worn-out junk he had ever come across'. Corbould soon convinced his directors to scrap the plant and let him design new works.

 

Corbould was a metallurgist and geologist as well as mine/smelter manager. He foresaw a need to obtain control and thereby ensure a reliable supply of ore from a cross-section of mines in the region. He also saw a need to implement an effective strategy to manage the economies of smelting low-grade ore. Smelting operations in the region were made difficult by the technical and economic problems posed by the deterioration in the grade of ore. Corbould resolved the issue by a process of blending ores with different chemical properties, increasing the throughput capacity of the smelter and by championing the unification of smelting operations in the region. In 1912, Corbould acquired Hampden Consols Mine at Kuridala for Mount Elliott Limited, followed with the purchases of other small mines in the district.

 

Walkers Limited of Maryborough was commissioned to manufacture a new 200 ton water jacket furnace for the smelters. An air compressor and blower for the smelters were constructed in the powerhouse and an electric motor and dynamo provided power for the crane and lighting for the smelter and mine.

 

The new smelter was blown in September 1910, a month after the first train arrived, and it ran well, producing 2040 tons of blister copper by the end of the year. The new smelting plant made it possible to cope with low-grade sulphide ores at Mount Elliott. The use of 1000 tons of low-grade sulphide ores bought from the Hampden Consols Mine in 1911 made it clear that if a supply of higher sulphur ore could be obtained and blended, performance, and economy would improve. Accordingly, the company bought a number of smaller mines in the district in 1912.

 

Corbould mined with cut and fill stoping but a young Mines Inspector condemned the system, ordered it dismantled and replaced with square set timbering. In 1911, after gradual movement in stopes on the No. 3 level, the smelter was closed for two months. Nevertheless, 5447 tons of blister copper was produced in 1911, rising to 6690 tons in 1912 - the company's best year. Many of the surviving structures at the site were built at this time.

 

Troubles for Mount Elliott started in 1913. In February, a fire at the Consols Mine closed it for months. In June, a thirteen week strike closed the whole operation, severely depleting the workforce. The year 1913 was also bad for industrial accidents in the area, possibly due to inexperienced people replacing the strikers. Nevertheless, the company paid generous dividends that year.

 

At the end of 1914 smelting ceased for more than a year due to shortage of ore. Although 3200 tons of blister copper was produced in 1913, production fell to 1840 tons in 1914 and the workforce dwindled to only 40 men. For the second half of 1915 and early 1916 the smelter treated ore railed south from Mount Cuthbert. At the end of July 1916 the smelting plant at Selwyn was dismantled except for the flue chambers and stacks. A new furnace with a capacity of 500 tons per day was built, a large amount of second-hand equipment was obtained and the converters were increased in size.

 

After the enlarged furnace was commissioned in June 1917, continuing industrial unrest retarded production which amounted to only 1000 tons of copper that year. The point of contention was the efficiency of the new smelter which processed twice as much ore while employing fewer men. The company decided to close down the smelter in October and reduce the size of the furnace, the largest in Australia, from 6.5m to 5.5m. In the meantime the price of copper had almost doubled from 1916 due to wartime consumption of munitions.

 

The new furnace commenced on the 16th of January 1918 and 77,482 tons of ore were smelted yielding 3580 tons of blister copper which were sent to the Bowen refinery before export to Britain. Local coal and coke supply was a problem and materials were being sourced from the distant Bowen Colliery. The smelter had a good run for almost a year except for a strike in July and another in December, which caused Corbould to close down the plant until New Year. In 1919, following relaxation of wartime controls by the British Metal Corporation, the copper price plunged from about £110 per ton at the start of the year to £75 per ton in April, dashing the company's optimism regarding treatment of low grade ores. The smelter finally closed after two months operation and most employees were laid off.

 

For much of the period 1919 to 1922, Corbould was in England trying to raise capital to reorganise the company's operations but he failed and resigned from the company in 1922. The Mount Elliott Company took over the assets of the other companies on the Cloncurry field in the 1920s - Mount Cuthbert in 1925 and Kuridala in 1926. Mount Isa Mines bought the Mount Elliott plant and machinery, including the three smelters, in 1943 for £2,300, enabling them to start copper production in the middle of the Second World War. The Mount Elliott Company was finally liquidated in 1953.

 

In 1950 A.E. Powell took up the Mount Elliott Reward Claim at Selwyn and worked close to the old smelter buildings. An open cut mine commenced at Starra, south of Mount Elliott and Selwyn, in 1988 and is Australia's third largest copper producer producing copper-gold concentrates from flotation and gold bullion from carbon-in-leach processing.

 

Profitable copper-gold ore bodies were recently proved at depth beneath the Mount Elliott smelter and old underground workings by Cyprus Gold Australia Pty Ltd. These deposits were subsequently acquired by Arimco Mining Pty Ltd for underground development which commenced in July 1993. A decline tunnel portal, ore and overburden dumps now occupy a large area of the Maggie Creek valley south-west of the smelter which was formerly the site of early miner's camps.

 

The Old Selwyn Township:

 

In 1907, the first hotel, run by H. Williams, was opened at the site. The township was surveyed later, around 1910, by the Mines Department. The town was to be situated north of the mine and smelter operations adjacent the railway, about 1.5km distant. It took its name from the nearby Selwyn Ranges which were named, during Burke's expedition, after the Victorian Government Geologist, A.R. Selwyn. The town has also been known by the name of Mount Elliott, after the nearby mines and smelter.

 

Many of the residents either worked at the Mount Elliott Mine and Smelter or worked in the service industries which grew around the mining and smelting operations. Little documentation exists about the everyday life of the town's residents. Surrounding sheep and cattle stations, however, meant that meat was available cheaply and vegetables grown in the area were delivered to the township by horse and cart. Imported commodities were, however, expensive.

 

By 1910 the town had four hotels. There was also an aerated water manufacturer, three stores, four fruiterers, a butcher, baker, saddler, garage, police, hospital, banks, post office (officially from 1906 to 1928, then unofficially until 1975) and a railway station. There was even an orchestra of ten players in 1912. The population of Selwyn rose from 1000 in 1911 to 1500 in 1918, before gradually declining.

 

Source: Queensland Heritage Register.

(further information and pictures are available by clicking on the link at the end of section and of page!)

Synagogue St. Pölten

Exterior of the former St. Pölten Synagogue

The St. Pölten Synagogue was up to the November pogroms in 1938 the main synagogue of the Jewish Community of St. Pölten. The In the years 1912 to 1913 by the architects Theodor Schreier and Viktor Postelberg built Art Nouveau synagogue is located in the Dr. Karl Renner Promenade in St. Pölten and is now the headquarters of the Institute for Jewish History in Austria.

History

The old synagogue, which was demolished in favor of the new one

The first prayer rooms of in 1863 founded Jewish Community of St. Pölten were located in the premises of the former Kattunmanufaktur (cotton manufactory), the later Gasser factory at school ring. A building of this factory was adapted between 1885 and 1890 as a synagogue. This adaptation was associated with considerable effort, which is why the members of the Jewish community already since 1888 endeavoured to get a new building, until 1903 but this was rejected by the township. At this time, a redesign of the promenade was planned, which was only possible by demolition of the in the street course standing synagogue. After lengthy preparations, a preparatory committee was elected in April 1907, which in addition to building site and plans the necessary financing should provide.

1911, a building committee was chosen and agreed with the community a real estate exchange. At the architectural competition, which was tendered in the same year, participated among others Jacob Modern, Jacob Gartner, Ignaz Reiser and Theodor Schreier. The latter was together with his partner Viktor Postelberg by the Committee commissioned another project for a temple with room for 220 men and 150 women to submitt, which was then realized. The conditions for the planning work developed Rudolf Frass. The necessary funds were raised through collections and appeals for donations throughout the country, so that could be started with the construction in June 1912. The gilding works were carried out by Ferdinand Andri. After little more than a year of construction and 141 390 crowns total investment, the synagoge on 17 August 1913 was solemnly consecrated.

Destruction

On the night of 9th to the 10th November 1938 invaded several SS and SA members the rooms of the synagogue, smashed windows and set fire. The that night caused damage was limited, as the fire could be extinguished relatively quickly. On the following morning 300 to 400 people gathered, some in civilian clothes, in front of the building. They moved with the singing of political songs in the sacred spaces and destroyed them completely. The windows were broken, Torah scrolls, Torah shrine, benches and images burned. Even water pipes and door posts were torn from the walls. The books of the extensive library were largely thrown on the road and burned. Some people climbed the dome and tore the Star of David of the roof .

Almost all of the movable property of the Jewish community was destroyed or stolen . A limited set of books were placed in the city archives, the City Museum there's still a donation box and a painting of Emperor Franz Josef, which hung in the entrance area. A single prayer book is since 1998 owned again by the Jewish Community.

In the following years the side rooms of the building of the SA were used as an office, the interior was used among other things as furniture warehouse. 1942, the synagogue became the property of the city of St. Pölten, which used it as a detention center for Russian forced laborers. In last fightings and bombings in 1945 the building was further damaged.

1945

The Red Army used the former synagogue as a grain storage until it was in 1947 returned to the city. The application of restitution was recognized in 1952 by the city council, which then returned the synagogue to the Jewish Community Vienna. In the following years, the former house of God continued to decay as after the Holocaust no Jewish community in St. Pölten could establish. The domed roof showed severe damage, individual components were threatening to collapse completely and through the boarded windows came rain and snow into the by dovecotes populated house.

In 1975, the Jewish Community Vienna (IKG - Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien) offered the city of St. Pölten to purchase the synagogue, which did not accept the offer due to lack of uses. Then the Jewish Community Vienna wanted to initiate the demolition, but this was prevented by the fact that the Federal Monuments Office the building put under monument protection. Then it was renovated from 1980 to 1984. Here, for example, many wall paintings were recovered, on the other hand, some structural changes were made (especially removal of water basins for the ritual washing of the hands), since it was clear from the beginning that the building would not be used as a synagogue, but as an event center.

Since 1988 in the premises of the former synagogue the Institute for Jewish History of Austria is located, further regular events are realized. The original function the synagoge never could fulfill again, as too few Jews returned after the Holocaust to St. Pölten.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the synagogue the City Museum in St. Pölten 2013/14 the building dedicates its own special exhibition. In doing so there is also shown a recently found photo of the interior before the destruction. It is also pointed out that the synagogue due to lack of funding already again is abandoned to a certain decay.

The St. Pölten rabbi

Interior of the synagogue with part of the dome ceiling, in the center of the former shrine

Name Period of office

Moritz Tintner 1863-1869

Adolf Kurrein 1873-1876

Samuel Marcus 1876-1878

Adolf Hahn 1878-1882

Jacob Reiss 1882-1889

Bernhard Zimmels 1889-1891

Leopold Weinsberg 1891-1897

Adolf Schächter 1897-1934

Arnold Frankfurt 1934-1936

Manfred Papo 1936-1938

Building description

Outside

The dominant element of the synagogue is the octagonal, completed by a large dome main building, to which the eastern and western side wings are attached. Connected to the synagogue is the former school building in Lederergasse 12.

Main tract

The main tract houses the former sanctuary. The facade is divided into a low ground floor, high upper floor and the dome. At the facade facing the street can be found in the two storeys each three windows, that are executed on the ground floor as low segmental arch windows with above running continuously cordon cornice. The windows on the upper floor, however, are high, rectangular windows, the space between them is divided by pilasters. The original stained glass windows were destroyed from 1938, today, clear glass can be found in the windows. Directly under the dome there is a large segment gable with representations of the Tablets of the Law, set in floral vines. Beneath it is written in Hebrew the text of Psalm 118, verse 19.

" פתחו לי שערי צדק אבא בם אודה יה "

"Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will enter and give thanks to God".

- Inscription under the law boards.

On the short, lateral oblique walls of the main building on the ground floor there are side entrances, in the transition to the dome there are embedded large oval windows.

Side wings

To the eastern side wing, which in comparison to the western tract is designed very narrowly, connects the former school building and was once home to the shrine. At the by segment gable and barrel roof completed tract can be found on the northern front in the upper floor a tall, rectangular window of the same type as that of the main wing. At the eastern side a round window is embedded, in the ground floor begins a connecting room to the school building.

The western side wing is identical to the east in the basic form, but it is significantly wider. In addition, in front of it there are entrance buildings. Both at the road side and on the opposite side between the main wing and the western annex are wide projecting semi-circular staircases, next to it can be found till half the height of the first upper floor each a buttress with two low windows. Road side, this buttress is preceded by a walk-in porch, which on three sides is open round-arched. The with triangular gable completed building ends in a concave enclosure, where a commemorative plaque is attached today. The west facade repeats the design of the main building, it can be found on the ground floor low segmental arch windows with above running continuously, jagged cordon cornice. On the first floor the windows are, however, significantly lower than in the main wing.

Former school building

The former school building has its main facade towards Lederergasse and there has the number 12. The road-side main facade of the two-storey building is divided into four axes. The window on the ground floor are round-arched disigned, the ones on the upper floor rectangularly. Between side wing of the synagogue and the main wing of the school building there is a tower-like, curved stairwell risalit up to the attic.

Gallery

Wall lamp

Wall ornament

Wall ornament

Wall ornament

de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synagoge_St._P%C3%B6lten

(further information is available by clicking on the link at the end of page!)

 

History of the City St. Pölten

In order to present concise history of the Lower Austrian capital is in the shop of the city museum a richly illustrated full version on CD-ROM.

Tip

On the occasion of the commemoration of the pogroms of November 1938, the Institute for Jewish History of Austria its virtual Memorbuch (Memory book) for the destroyed St. Pölten Jewish community since 10th November 2012 is putting online.

Prehistory

The time from which there is no written record is named after the main materials used for tools and weapons: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. Using the latest technologies, archaeologists from archaeological finds and aerial photographs can trace a fairly detailed picture of life at that time. Especially for the time from the settling down of the People (New Stone Age), now practicing agriculture and animal husbandry, in the territory of St. Pölten lively settlement activity can be proved. In particular, cemeteries are important for the research, because the dead were laid in the grave everyday objects and jewelry, the forms of burial changing over time - which in turn gives the archeology valuable clues for the temporal determination. At the same time, prehistory of Sankt Pölten would not be half as good documented without the construction of the expressway S33 and other large buildings, where millions of cubic meters of earth were moved - under the watchful eyes of the Federal Monuments Office!

A final primeval chapter characterized the Celts, who settled about 450 BC our area and in addition to a new culture and religion also brought with them the potter's wheel. The kingdom of Noricum influenced till the penetration of the Romans the development in our area.

Roman period, migrations

The Romans conquered in 15 BC the Celtic Empire and established hereinafter the Roman province of Noricum. Borders were protected by military camp (forts), in the hinterland emerged civilian cities, almost all systematically laid out according to the same plan. The civil and commercial city Aelium Cetium, as St. Pölten was called (city law 121/122), consisted in the 4th Century already of heated stone houses, trade and craft originated thriving urban life, before the Romans in the first third of the 5th Century retreated to Italy.

The subsequent period went down as the Migration Period in official historiography, for which the settlement of the Sankt Pöltner downtown can not be proved. Cemeteries witness the residence of the Lombards in our area, later it was the Avars, extending their empire to the Enns.

The recent archaeological excavations on the Cathedral Square 2010/2011, in fact, the previous knowledge of St.Pölten colonization not have turned upside down but enriched by many details, whose full analysis and publication are expected in the near future.

Middle Ages

With the submission of the Avars by Charlemagne around 800 AD Christianity was gaining a foothold, the Bavarian Benedictine monastery of Tegernsee establishing a daughter house here - as founder are mentioned the brothers Adalbert and Ottokar - equipped with the relics of St. Hippolytus. The name St. Ypolit over the centuries should turn into Sankt Pölten. After the Hungarian wars and the resettlement of the monastery as Canons Regular of St. Augustine under the influence of Passau St. Pölten received mid-11th Century market rights.

In the second half of the 20th century historians stated that records in which the rights of citizens were held were to be qualified as Town Charters. Vienna is indeed already in 1137 as a city ("civitas") mentioned in a document, but the oldest Viennese city charter dates only from the year 1221, while the Bishop of Passau, Konrad, already in 1159 the St. Pöltnern secured:

A St. Pöltner citizen who has to answer to the court, has the right to make use of an "advocate".

He must not be forced to rid himself of the accusation by a judgment of God.

A St. Pöltner citizen may be convicted only by statements of fellow citizens, not by strangers.

From the 13th Century exercised a city judge appointed by the lord of the city the high and low jurisdiction as chairman of the council meetings and the Municipal Court, Inner and Outer Council supported him during the finding of justice. Venue for the public verdict was the in the 13th Century created new marketplace, the "Broad Market", now the town hall square. Originally square-shaped, it was only later to a rectangle reduced. Around it arose the market district, which together with the monastery district, the wood district and the Ledererviertel (quarter of the leather goods manufacturer) was protected by a double city wall.

The dependence of St. Pölten of the bishop of Passau is shown in the municipal coat of arms and the city seal. Based on the emblem of the heraldic animal of the Lord of the city, so the Bishop of Passau, it shows an upright standing wolf holding a crosier in its paw.

Modern Times

In the course of the armed conflict between the Emperor Frederick III . and King Matthias of Hungary pledged the Bishop of Passau the town on the Hungarian king. From 1485 stood Lower Austria as a whole under Hungarian rule. The most important document of this period is the awarding of the city coat of arms by King Matthias Corvinus in the year 1487. After the death of the opponents 1490 and 1493 could Frederick's son Maximilian reconquer Lower Austria. He considered St. Pölten as spoils of war and had no intention of returning it to the diocese of Passau. The city government has often been leased subsequently, for instance, to the family Wellenstein, and later to the families Trautson and Auersperg.

That St. Pölten now was a princely city, found its expression in the coat of arms letter of the King Ferdinand I. from 1538: From now on, the wolf had no crosier anymore, and the from the viewer's point of view left half showed the reverse Austrian shield, so silver-red-silver.

To the 16th Century also goes back the construction of St. Pöltner City Hall. The 1503 by judge and council acquired house was subsequently expanded, rebuilt, extended and provided with a tower.

A for the urban history research important picture, painted in 1623, has captured scenes of the peasant uprising of 1597, but also allows a view to the city and lets the viewer read some of the details of the then state of construction. The economic inconveniences of that time were only exacerbated by the Thirty Years War, at the end of which a fifth of the houses were uninhabited and the citizenry was impoverished.

Baroque

After the successful defense against the Turks in 1683, the economy started to recover and a significant building boom began. Lower Austria turned into the land of the baroque abbeys and monasteries, as it is familiar to us today.

In St. Pölten, the change of the cityscape is closely connected to the Baroque architect Jakob Prandtauer. In addition to the Baroquisation of the interior of the cathedral, a number of buildings in St. Pölten go to his account, so the reconstruction of the castle Ochsenburg, the erection of the Schwaighof and of the core building of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Englische Fräuleins - English Maidens) - from 1706 the seat of the first school order of St.Pölten - as well as of several bourgeois houses.

Joseph Munggenast, nephew and co-worker of Prandtauer, completed the Baroquisation of the cathedral, he baroquised the facade of the town hall (1727) and numerous bourgeois houses and designed a bridge over the Traisen which existed until 1907. In the decoration of the church buildings were throughout Tyroleans collaborating, which Jakob Prandtauer had brought along from his homeland (Tyrol) to St. Pölten, for example, Paul Troger and Peter Widerin.

Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II: Their reforms in the city of the 18th Century also left a significant mark. School foundings as a result of compulsory education, the dissolution of the monasteries and hereinafter - from 1785 - the new role of St. Pölten as a bishop's seat are consequences of their policies.

1785 was also the year of a fundamental alteration of the old Council Constitution: The city judge was replaced by one magistrate consisting of five persons, at the head was a mayor. For the first mayor the painter Josef Hackl was chosen.

The 19th century

Despite the Napoleonic Wars - St. Pölten in 1805 and 1809 was occupied by the French - and despite the state bankruptcy of 1811, increased the number of businesses constantly, although the economic importance of the city for the time being did not go beyond the near vicinity.

Against the background of monitoring by the state secret police, which prevented any political commitment between the Congress of Vienna and the 1848 revolution, the citizens withdrew into private life. Sense of family, fostering of domestic music, prominent salon societies in which even a Franz Schubert socialized, or the construction of the city theater were visible signs of this attitude.

The economic upswing of the city did not begin until after the revolution of the year 1848. A prerequisite for this was the construction of the Empress Elisabeth Western Railway, moving Vienna, Linz, soon Salzburg, too, in a reachable distance. The city walls were pulled down, St. Pölten could unfold. The convenient traffic situation favored factory start-ups, and so arose a lace factory, a revolver factory, a soap factory or, for example, as a precursor of a future large-scale enterprise, the braid, ribbon and Strickgarnerzeugung (knitting yarn production) of Matthias Salcher in Harland.

In other areas, too, the Gründerzeit (years of rapid industrial expansion in Germany - and Austria) in Sankt Pölten was honouring its name: The city got schools, a hospital, gas lanterns, canalization, hot springs and summer bath.

The 20th century

At the beginning of the 20th Century the city experienced another burst of development, initiated by the construction of the power station in 1903, because electricity was the prerequisite for the settlement of large companies. In particular, the companies Voith and Glanzstoff and the main workshop of the Federal Railways attracted many workers. New Traisen bridge, tram, Mariazell Railway and other infrastructure buildings were erected; St. Pölten obtained a synagogue. The Art Nouveau made it repeatedly into the urban architecture - just think of the Olbrich House - and inspired also the painting, as exponents worth to be mentioned are Ernst Stöhr or Ferdinand Andri.

What the outbreak of the First World War in broad outlines meant for the monarchy, on a smaller scale also St. Pölten has felt. The city was heavily impacted by the deployment of army units, a POW camp, a military hospital and a sick bay. Industrial enterprises were partly converted into war production, partly closed. Unemployment, housing emergency and food shortages long after the war still were felt painfully.

The 1919 to mayor elected Social Democrat Hubert Schnofl after the war tried to raise the standard of living of the people by improving the social welfare and health care. The founding of a housing cooperative (Wohnungsgenossenschaft), the construction of the water line and the establishment of new factories were further attempts to stimulate the stiffening economy whose descent could not be stopped until 1932.

After the National Socialist regime had stirred false hopes and plunged the world into war, St. Pölten was no longer the city as it has been before. Not only the ten devastating bombings of the last year of the war had left its marks, also the restrictive persecution of Jews and political dissidents had torn holes in the structure of the population. Ten years of Russian occupation subsequently did the rest to traumatize the population, but at this time arose from the ruins a more modern St. Pölten, with the new Traisen bridge, district heating, schools.

This trend continued, an era of recovery and modernization made the economic miracle palpable. Already in 1972 was - even if largely as a result of incorporations - exceeded the 50.000-inhabitant-limit.

Elevation to capital status (capital of Lower Austria), 10 July 1986: No other event in this dimension could have become the booster detonation of an up to now ongoing development thrust. Since then in a big way new residential and commercial areas were opened up, built infrastructure constructions, schools and universities brought into being to enrich the educational landscape. East of the Old Town arose the governmental and cultural district, and the list of architects wears sonorous names such as Ernst Hoffmann (NÖ (Lower Austria) Landhaus; Klangturm), Klaus Kada (Festspielhaus), Hans Hollein (Shedhalle and Lower Austrian Provincial Museum), Karin Bily, Paul Katzberger and Michael Loudon ( NÖ State Library and NÖ State Archive).

European Diploma, European flag, badge of honor, Europe Price: Between 1996 and 2001, received St. Pölten numerous appreciations of its EU commitment - as a sort of recognition of the Council of Europe for the dissemination of the EU-idea through international town twinnings, a major Europe exhibition or, for example, the establishment and chair of the "Network of European medium-sized cities".

On the way into the 21st century

Just now happened and already history: What the St. Pöltnern as just experienced sticks in their minds, travelers and newcomers within a short time should be told. The theater and the hospital handing over to the province of Lower Austria, a new mayor always on the go, who was able to earn since 2004 already numerous laurels (Tags: polytechnic, downtown enhancement, building lease scheme, bus concept) - all the recent changes are just now condensed into spoken and written language in order to make, from now on, the history of the young provincial capital in the 3rd millennium nachlesbar (checkable).

www.st-poelten.gv.at/Content.Node/freizeit-kultur/kultur/...

“Privacy is not something that I'm merely entitled to, it's an absolute prerequisite.” -Marlon Brando

 

Taken on a field trip to the breathtaking Theatre of Dreams (Wendy Addison's Studio/Shop in Port Costa, California -that she opened just for us!) as part of the 2008 ZNE ConvenZioNE.

 

Driving down the M2 motorway, was this interesting Swedish registered Toyota Avensis Wagon. The Avensis Wagon of this generation, despite being produced in the UK, wasn't too popular, i certainly can't recall seeing many on the roads. Typical of cars from Northern Sweden, this one was fitted with aftermarket fog-lamps, which i think look rather cool on this car, but also serve as additional lighting for those long winter nights in Sweden. The plates were also pre-euroband examples, which is always a welcome prerequisite of Swedish spots for me.

 

M2, Kent, United Kingdom

The Mount Elliott Mining Complex is an aggregation of the remnants of copper mining and smelting operations from the early 20th century and the associated former mining township of Selwyn. The earliest copper mining at Mount Elliott was in 1906 with smelting operations commencing shortly after. Significant upgrades to the mining and smelting operations occurred under the management of W.R. Corbould during 1909 - 1910. Following these upgrades and increases in production, the Selwyn Township grew quickly and had 1500 residents by 1918. The Mount Elliott Company took over other companies on the Cloncurry field in the 1920s, including the Mount Cuthbert and Kuridala smelters. Mount Elliott operations were taken over by Mount Isa Mines in 1943 to ensure the supply of copper during World War Two. The Mount Elliott Company was eventually liquidated in 1953.

 

The Mount Elliott Smelter:

 

The existence of copper in the Leichhardt River area of north western Queensland had been known since Ernest Henry discovered the Great Australia Mine in 1867 at Cloncurry. In 1899 James Elliott discovered copper on the conical hill that became Mount Elliott, but having no capital to develop the mine, he sold an interest to James Morphett, a pastoralist of Fort Constantine station near Cloncurry. Morphett, being drought stricken, in turn sold out to John Moffat of Irvinebank, the most successful mining promoter in Queensland at the time.

 

Plentiful capital and cheap transport were prerequisites for developing the Cloncurry field, which had stagnated for forty years. Without capital it was impossible to explore and prove ore-bodies; without proof of large reserves of wealth it was futile to build a railway; and without a railway it was hazardous to invest capital in finding large reserves of ore. The mining investor or the railway builder had to break the impasse.

 

In 1906 - 1907 copper averaged £87 a ton on the London market, the highest price for thirty years, and the Cloncurry field grew. The railway was extended west of Richmond in 1905 - 1906 by the Government and mines were floated on the Melbourne Stock Exchange. At Mount Elliott a prospecting shaft had been sunk and on the 1st of August 1906 a Cornish boiler and winding plant were installed on the site.

 

Mount Elliott Limited was floated in Melbourne on the 13th of July 1906. In 1907 it was taken over by British and French interests and restructured. Combining with its competitor, Hampden Cloncurry Copper Mines Limited, Mount Elliott formed a special company to finance and construct the railway from Cloncurry to Malbon, Kuridala (then Friezeland) and Mount Elliott (later Selwyn). This new company then entered into an agreement with the Queensland Railways Department in July 1908.

 

The railway, which was known as the 'Syndicate Railway', aroused opposition in 1908 from the trade unions and Labor movement generally, who contended that railways should be State-owned. However, the Hampden-Mount Elliott Railway Bill was passed by the Queensland Parliament and assented to on the 21st of April 1908; construction finished in December 1910. The railway terminated at the Mount Elliott smelter.

 

By 1907 the main underlie shaft had been sunk and construction of the smelters was underway using a second-hand water-jacket blast furnace and converters. At this time, W.H. Corbould was appointed general manager of Mount Elliott Limited.

 

The second-hand blast furnace and converters were commissioned or 'blown in' in May 1909, but were problematic causing hold-ups. Corbould referred to the equipment in use as being the 'worst collection of worn-out junk he had ever come across'. Corbould soon convinced his directors to scrap the plant and let him design new works.

 

Corbould was a metallurgist and geologist as well as mine/smelter manager. He foresaw a need to obtain control and thereby ensure a reliable supply of ore from a cross-section of mines in the region. He also saw a need to implement an effective strategy to manage the economies of smelting low-grade ore. Smelting operations in the region were made difficult by the technical and economic problems posed by the deterioration in the grade of ore. Corbould resolved the issue by a process of blending ores with different chemical properties, increasing the throughput capacity of the smelter and by championing the unification of smelting operations in the region. In 1912, Corbould acquired Hampden Consols Mine at Kuridala for Mount Elliott Limited, followed with the purchases of other small mines in the district.

 

Walkers Limited of Maryborough was commissioned to manufacture a new 200 ton water jacket furnace for the smelters. An air compressor and blower for the smelters were constructed in the powerhouse and an electric motor and dynamo provided power for the crane and lighting for the smelter and mine.

 

The new smelter was blown in September 1910, a month after the first train arrived, and it ran well, producing 2040 tons of blister copper by the end of the year. The new smelting plant made it possible to cope with low-grade sulphide ores at Mount Elliott. The use of 1000 tons of low-grade sulphide ores bought from the Hampden Consols Mine in 1911 made it clear that if a supply of higher sulphur ore could be obtained and blended, performance, and economy would improve. Accordingly, the company bought a number of smaller mines in the district in 1912.

 

Corbould mined with cut and fill stoping but a young Mines Inspector condemned the system, ordered it dismantled and replaced with square set timbering. In 1911, after gradual movement in stopes on the No. 3 level, the smelter was closed for two months. Nevertheless, 5447 tons of blister copper was produced in 1911, rising to 6690 tons in 1912 - the company's best year. Many of the surviving structures at the site were built at this time.

 

Troubles for Mount Elliott started in 1913. In February, a fire at the Consols Mine closed it for months. In June, a thirteen week strike closed the whole operation, severely depleting the workforce. The year 1913 was also bad for industrial accidents in the area, possibly due to inexperienced people replacing the strikers. Nevertheless, the company paid generous dividends that year.

 

At the end of 1914 smelting ceased for more than a year due to shortage of ore. Although 3200 tons of blister copper was produced in 1913, production fell to 1840 tons in 1914 and the workforce dwindled to only 40 men. For the second half of 1915 and early 1916 the smelter treated ore railed south from Mount Cuthbert. At the end of July 1916 the smelting plant at Selwyn was dismantled except for the flue chambers and stacks. A new furnace with a capacity of 500 tons per day was built, a large amount of second-hand equipment was obtained and the converters were increased in size.

 

After the enlarged furnace was commissioned in June 1917, continuing industrial unrest retarded production which amounted to only 1000 tons of copper that year. The point of contention was the efficiency of the new smelter which processed twice as much ore while employing fewer men. The company decided to close down the smelter in October and reduce the size of the furnace, the largest in Australia, from 6.5m to 5.5m. In the meantime the price of copper had almost doubled from 1916 due to wartime consumption of munitions.

 

The new furnace commenced on the 16th of January 1918 and 77,482 tons of ore were smelted yielding 3580 tons of blister copper which were sent to the Bowen refinery before export to Britain. Local coal and coke supply was a problem and materials were being sourced from the distant Bowen Colliery. The smelter had a good run for almost a year except for a strike in July and another in December, which caused Corbould to close down the plant until New Year. In 1919, following relaxation of wartime controls by the British Metal Corporation, the copper price plunged from about £110 per ton at the start of the year to £75 per ton in April, dashing the company's optimism regarding treatment of low grade ores. The smelter finally closed after two months operation and most employees were laid off.

 

For much of the period 1919 to 1922, Corbould was in England trying to raise capital to reorganise the company's operations but he failed and resigned from the company in 1922. The Mount Elliott Company took over the assets of the other companies on the Cloncurry field in the 1920s - Mount Cuthbert in 1925 and Kuridala in 1926. Mount Isa Mines bought the Mount Elliott plant and machinery, including the three smelters, in 1943 for £2,300, enabling them to start copper production in the middle of the Second World War. The Mount Elliott Company was finally liquidated in 1953.

 

In 1950 A.E. Powell took up the Mount Elliott Reward Claim at Selwyn and worked close to the old smelter buildings. An open cut mine commenced at Starra, south of Mount Elliott and Selwyn, in 1988 and is Australia's third largest copper producer producing copper-gold concentrates from flotation and gold bullion from carbon-in-leach processing.

 

Profitable copper-gold ore bodies were recently proved at depth beneath the Mount Elliott smelter and old underground workings by Cyprus Gold Australia Pty Ltd. These deposits were subsequently acquired by Arimco Mining Pty Ltd for underground development which commenced in July 1993. A decline tunnel portal, ore and overburden dumps now occupy a large area of the Maggie Creek valley south-west of the smelter which was formerly the site of early miner's camps.

 

The Old Selwyn Township:

 

In 1907, the first hotel, run by H. Williams, was opened at the site. The township was surveyed later, around 1910, by the Mines Department. The town was to be situated north of the mine and smelter operations adjacent the railway, about 1.5km distant. It took its name from the nearby Selwyn Ranges which were named, during Burke's expedition, after the Victorian Government Geologist, A.R. Selwyn. The town has also been known by the name of Mount Elliott, after the nearby mines and smelter.

 

Many of the residents either worked at the Mount Elliott Mine and Smelter or worked in the service industries which grew around the mining and smelting operations. Little documentation exists about the everyday life of the town's residents. Surrounding sheep and cattle stations, however, meant that meat was available cheaply and vegetables grown in the area were delivered to the township by horse and cart. Imported commodities were, however, expensive.

 

By 1910 the town had four hotels. There was also an aerated water manufacturer, three stores, four fruiterers, a butcher, baker, saddler, garage, police, hospital, banks, post office (officially from 1906 to 1928, then unofficially until 1975) and a railway station. There was even an orchestra of ten players in 1912. The population of Selwyn rose from 1000 in 1911 to 1500 in 1918, before gradually declining.

 

Source: Queensland Heritage Register.

The River Moriston is a river in Inverness-shire, Scotland. It flows broadly east-north-east from the outfall of the dam at Loch Cluanie to Loch Ness. Its waters and those of its tributaries have been harnessed to generate hydro-electric power.

 

The River Moriston begins just below the dam at the eastern end of Loch Cluanie. Flow in the river is maintained by releasing compensation water from the loch. The A887 road from Kyle of Lochalsh to Loch Ness closely follows the course of the river for much of its length, and is on the north bank at this point. A small river, the Allt nam Peathrain, flows southwards to pass under the road and join the channel on its left bank. At Bun Loyne, a bridge carries the A87 road over the river, as it heads southwards to Glen Garry and the River Garry. Below the bridge, the River Loyne joins on the right bank. This is largely compensation water released from the dam at the eastern end of Loch Loyne. The A887 road crosses to the south bank at Ceannacroc Bridge. The road formerly crossed the old bridge, constructed by Thomas Telford in 1808-1811, and located a little further downstream. It consists of a main span of 50 feet (15 m) for the river and a flood arch of 36 feet (11 m).

 

The river sweeps round in a large bend, where it is joined by the waters of the River Doe and its tributary the Allt Bhuruisgidh, both of which are dammed further upstream. The main channel continues in an east-north-easterly direction, past the hamlet of Tomchrasky on its northern bank. There is a hatchery on the right bank, and then the A887 crosses to the left bank at Torgoyle Bridge. A bridge was constructed here in 1811 by Telford, but in 1818 was destroyed by a flood. A temporary wooden bridge was put in place to maintain the route, and the present three-arched structure was completed in 1823, to the design of Joseph Mitchell, who was Telford's principal inspector. The outside two arches span 48 feet (15 m) while the centre one, which is wider and higher, spans 55 feet (17 m). The is extensive forest on both banks of the river, which gradually widens as it becomes part of Dundreggan Reservoir. A dam impounds the water at its eastern end, and a hydro-electric power station is located on the south bank close to the dam.

 

The river narrows again, as it is fed with compensation water from the dam, and is joined by Allt Bhlaraidh, flowing southwards from three lochs and a reservoir, all of which are dammed. The river finally turns towards the south-east as it approached Invermoriston, the main settlement on its course. The A82 road which runs along the bank of Loch Ness used to cross the river on a two-arched bridge, with another arch on the right bank of the river and a three-arched clapper bridge in the approach on the left bank. It is in line with Telford's road built for the Commission for Highland Roads and Bridges in 1808-1811, but is thought to date from the mid-18th century. A replacement bridge was built in 1933, slightly further downstream. It consists of a single 90-foot (27 m) concrete span with a small flood arch, and was designed by Mears and Carcus-Wilson. Below the newer bridge is a nine-sided gazebo, perched on a rocky outcrop overlooking the river. It dates from the early 19th century. Shortly afterwards, the river discharges into Loch Ness.

 

Invermoriston is a small village 11 kilometres (7 miles) north of Fort Augustus, Highland, Scotland. The village is on the A82 road, at a junction with the A887.

 

The village's most visited attraction is the Thomas Telford bridge, built in 1813, which crosses the spectacular River Moriston falls. This bridge used to form part of the main road between Drumnadrochit and Fort Augustus but was replaced in the 1930s with the new bridge used today. Invermoriston's attractions include a hotel, called Glenmoriston Arms, village shop, clog and craft shop as well as a coffee shop/restaurant. From the top of the hill above the village, Sròn Na Muic (Scottish Gaelic for "The Nose of the Pig"), one can admire the finest views of the Great Glen.

 

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

 

The sparrow project is an attempt to improve my bird story telling along with honing eye hand/AF coordination skills using a common subject readily available. The subjects must be in motion as a prerequisite since shooting ducks in a barrel is just no sport at all.

 

I was spurred into the project due to my complete dissatisfaction of prior attempts while on a trip to Tanzania. Learning the delicate balance between shutter speed, proper long lens techniques, iso settings and AF modes is a challenge for something just slightly slower than a speeding bullet.

 

This will be ongoing to support my next African adventure later this year.

 

See me also at instagram.com/charlesgyoung/

This piece of art will be lost on most people of Dundee

 

A truism is a claim that is so obvious or self-evident as to be hardly worth mentioning, except as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device.

   

a little knowledge can go a long way

 

a lot of professionals are crackpots

 

a man can't know what it is to be a mother

 

a name means a lot just by itself

 

a positive attitude means all the difference in the world

 

a relaxed man is not necessarily a better man

 

a sense of timing is the mark of genius

 

a sincere effort is all you can ask

 

a single event can have infinitely many interpretations

 

a solid home base builds a sense of self

 

a strong sense of duty imprisons you

 

absolute submission can be a form of freedom

 

abstraction is a type of decadence

 

abuse of power comes as no surprise

 

action causes more trouble than thought

 

alienation produces eccentrics or revolutionaries

 

all things are delicately interconnected

 

ambition is just as dangerous as complacency

 

ambivalence can ruin your life

 

an elite is inevitable

 

anger or hate can be a useful motivating force

 

animalism is perfectly healthy

 

any surplus is immoral

 

anything is a legitimate area of investigation

 

artificial desires are despoiling the earth

 

at times inactivity is preferable to mindless functioning

 

at times your unconsciousness is truer than your conscious mind

 

automation is deadly

 

awful punishment awaits really bad people

 

bad intentions can yield good results

 

being alone with yourself is increasingly unpopular

 

being happy is more important than anything else

 

being judgmental is a sign of life

 

being sure of yourself means you're a fool

 

believing in rebirth is the same as admitting defeat

 

boredom makes you do crazy things

 

calm is more conductive to creativity than is anxiety

 

categorizing fear is calming

 

change is valuable when the oppressed become tyrants

 

chasing the new is dangerous to society

 

children are the most cruel of all

 

children are the hope of the future

 

class action is a nice idea with no substance

 

class structure is as artificial as plastic

 

confusing yourself is a way to stay honest

 

crime against property is relatively unimportant

 

decadence can be an end in itself

 

decency is a relative thing

 

dependence can be a meal ticket

 

description is more important than metaphor

 

deviants are sacrificed to increase group solidarity

 

disgust is the appropriate response to most situations

 

disorganization is a kind of anesthesia

 

don't place to much trust in experts

 

drama often obscures the real issues

 

dreaming while awake is a frightening contradiction

 

dying and coming back gives you considerable perspective

 

dying should be as easy as falling off a log

 

eating too much is criminal

 

elaboration is a form of pollution

 

emotional responses ar as valuable as intellectual responses

 

enjoy yourself because you can't change anything anyway

 

ensure that your life stays in flux

 

even your family can betray you

 

every achievement requires a sacrifice

 

everyone's work is equally important

 

everything that's interesting is new

 

exceptional people deserve special concessions

 

expiring for love is beautiful but stupid

 

expressing anger is necessary

 

extreme behavior has its basis in pathological psychology

 

extreme self-consciousness leads to perversion

 

faithfulness is a social not a biological law

 

fake or real indifference is a powerful personal weapon

 

fathers often use too much force

 

fear is the greatest incapacitator

 

freedom is a luxury not a necessity

 

giving free rein to your emotions is an honest way to live

 

go all out in romance and let the chips fall where they may

 

going with the flow is soothing but risky

 

good deeds eventually are rewarded

 

government is a burden on the people

 

grass roots agitation is the only hope

 

guilt and self-laceration are indulgences

 

habitual contempt doesn't reflect a finer sensibility

 

hiding your emotions is despicable

 

holding back protects your vital energies

 

humanism is obsolete

 

humor is a release

 

ideals are replaced by conventional goals at a certain age

 

if you aren't political your personal life should be exemplary

 

if you can't leave your mark give up

 

if you have many desires your life will be interesting

 

if you live simply there is nothing to worry about

 

ignoring enemies is the best way to fight

 

illness is a state of mind

 

imposing order is man's vocation for chaos is hell

 

in some instances it's better to die than to continue

 

inheritance must be abolished

 

it can be helpful to keep going no matter what

 

it is heroic to try to stop time

 

it is man's fate to outsmart himself

 

it is a gift to the world not to have babies

 

it's better to be a good person than a famous person

 

it's better to be lonely than to be with inferior people

 

it's better to be naive than jaded

 

it's better to study the living fact than to analyze history

 

it's crucial to have an active fantasy life

 

it's good to give extra money to charity

 

it's important to stay clean on all levels

 

it's just an accident that your parents are your parents

 

it's not good to hold too many absolutes

 

it's not good to operate on credit

 

it's vital to live in harmony with nature

 

just believing something can make it happen

 

keep something in reserve for emergencies

 

killing is unavoidable but nothing to be proud of

 

knowing yourself lets you understand others

 

knowledge should be advanced at all costs

 

labor is a life-destroying activity

 

lack of charisma can be fatal

 

leisure time is a gigantic smoke screen

 

listen when your body talks

 

looking back is the first sign of aging and decay

 

loving animals is a substitute activity

 

low expectations are good protection

 

manual labor can be refreshing and wholesome

 

men are not monogamous by nature

 

moderation kills the spirit

 

money creates taste

 

monomania is a prerequisite of success

 

morals are for little people

 

most people are not fit to rule themselves

 

mostly you should mind your own business

 

mothers shouldn't make too many sacrifices

 

much was decided before you were born

 

murder has its sexual side

 

myth can make reality more intelligible

 

noise can be hostile

 

nothing upsets the balance of good and evil

 

occasionally principles are more valuable than people

 

offer very little information about yourself

 

often you should act like you are sexless

 

old friends are better left in the past

 

opacity is an irresistible challenge

 

pain can be a very positive thing

 

people are boring unless they are extremists

 

people are nuts if they think they are important

 

people are responsible for what they do unless they are insane

 

people who don't work with their hands are parasites

 

people who go crazy are too sensitive

 

people won't behave if they have nothing to lose

 

physical culture is second best

 

planning for the future is escapism

 

playing it safe can cause a lot of damage in the long run

 

politics is used for personal gain

 

potential counts for nothing until it's realized

 

private property created crime

 

pursuing pleasure for the sake of pleasure will ruin you

 

push yourself to the limit as often as possible

 

raise boys and girls the same way

 

random mating is good for debunking sex myths

 

rechanneling destructive impulses is a sign of maturity

 

recluses always get weak

 

redistributing wealth is imperative

 

relativity is no boon to mankind

 

religion causes as many problems as it solves

 

remember you always have freedom of choice

 

repetition is the best way to learn

 

resolutions serve to ease our conscience

 

revolution begins with changes in the individual

 

romantic love was invented to manipulate women

 

routine is a link with the past

 

routine small excesses are worse than then the occasional debauch

 

sacrificing yourself for a bad cause is not a moral act

 

salvation can't be bought and sold

 

self-awareness can be crippling

 

self-contempt can do more harm than good

 

selfishness is the most basic motivation

 

selflessness is the highest achievement

 

separatism is the way to a new beginning

 

sex differences are here to stay

 

sin is a means of social control

 

slipping into madness is good for the sake of comparison

 

sloppy thinking gets worse over time

 

solitude is enriching

 

sometimes science advances faster than it should

 

sometimes things seem to happen of their own accord

 

spending too much time on self-improvement is antisocial

 

starvation is nature's way

 

stasis is a dream state

 

sterilization is a weapon of the rulers

 

strong emotional attachment stems from basic insecurity

 

stupid people shouldn't breed

 

survival of the fittest applies to men and animals

 

symbols are more meaningful than things themselves

 

taking a strong stand publicizes the opposite position

 

talking is used to hide one's inability to act

 

teasing people sexually can have ugly consequences

 

technology will make or break us

 

the cruelest disappointment is when you let yourself down

 

the desire to reproduce is a death wish

 

the family is living on borrowed time

 

the idea of revolution is an adolescent fantasy

 

the idea of transcendence is used to obscure oppression

 

the idiosyncratic has lost its authority

 

the most profound things are inexpressible

 

the mundane is to be cherished

 

the new is nothing but a restatement of the old

 

the only way to be pure is to stay by yourself

 

the sum of your actions determines what you are

 

the unattainable is invariable attractive

 

the world operates according to discoverable laws

 

there are too few immutable truths today

 

there's nothing except what you sense

 

there's nothing redeeming in toil

 

thinking too much can only cause problems

 

threatening someone sexually is a horrible act

 

timidity is laughable

 

to disagree presupposes moral integrity

 

to volunteer is reactionary

 

torture is barbaric

 

trading a life for a life is fair enough

 

true freedom is frightful

 

unique things must be the most valuable

 

unquestioning love demonstrates largesse of spirit

 

using force to stop force is absurd

 

violence is permissible even desirable occasionally

 

war is a purification rite

 

we must make sacrifices to maintain our quality of life

 

when something terrible happens people wake up

 

wishing things away is not effective

 

with perseverance you can discover any truth

 

words tend to be inadequate

 

worrying can help you prepare

 

you are a victim of the rules you live by

 

you are guileless in your dreams

 

you are responsible for constituting the meaning of things

 

you are the past present and future

 

you can live on through your descendants

 

you can't expect people to be something they're not

 

you can't fool others if you're fooling yourself

 

you don't know what's what until you support yourself

 

you have to hurt others to be extraordinary

 

you must be intimate with a token few

 

you must disagree with authority figures

 

you must have one grand passion

 

you must know where you stop and the world begins

 

you can understand someone of your sex only

 

you owe the world not the other way around

 

you should study as much as possible

 

your actions ae pointless if no one notices

 

your oldest fears are the worst ones

  

I saw this lovely painting online on the website of La Vista Church of Christ. I wonder who is the painter?

 

Chag Pesach Samaeach v'Kasher1 !חג שמח

Passover is my favorite Holiday!!

 

Passover is approaching rapidly. It's a lot of effort to get rid of all food products from the house and cars containing any leavening at all, such as yeast, baking powder, and baking soda. Grain too. Then buying enough food for eight days that contain no leavening and have not been in contact with grains that may have fermented in the rain.

 

All pots, pans, dishes, and utensils are replaced too. It is a really big job. I have finished. It's a good feeling...

 

I should add, pretending that we are leaving Egypt under duress, and preparing to traverse very dangerous desert regions while roughing it for eight days is unimaginably wonderful and exciting. It is marvelously spiritually renewing.

 

I spend a lot of the year wishing for it. I absolutely love it. It is definitely my favorite Holiday!!! (Hag) I always leave Pesach reluctantly and sadly. But right now I can be happy, I have eight days of great freedom and such fun. It is like camping out with a nice clean bathroom (;-)

 

So, חג שמח Hag Sameach v Kasher to all People of the Covenant with HaShem, Am Yisroel...

 

We have a commandment to be happy... And to my many Christian friends, These are tidings of great cheer to you and yours too. Enjoy them greatly. You are definitely part of my journey, for it is a prerequisite for your own freedom!! Yeshua of Natzeret brings the message of freedom to people who did not receive the Torah at Mount Sinai. So, please be as happy as HaShem wants you to be.

(further information and pictures are available by clicking on the link at the end of section and of page!)

Synagogue St. Pölten

Exterior of the former St. Pölten Synagogue

The St. Pölten Synagogue was up to the November pogroms in 1938 the main synagogue of the Jewish Community of St. Pölten. The In the years 1912 to 1913 by the architects Theodor Schreier and Viktor Postelberg built Art Nouveau synagogue is located in the Dr. Karl Renner Promenade in St. Pölten and is now the headquarters of the Institute for Jewish History in Austria.

History

The old synagogue, which was demolished in favor of the new one

The first prayer rooms of in 1863 founded Jewish Community of St. Pölten were located in the premises of the former Kattunmanufaktur (cotton manufactory), the later Gasser factory at school ring. A building of this factory was adapted between 1885 and 1890 as a synagogue. This adaptation was associated with considerable effort, which is why the members of the Jewish community already since 1888 endeavoured to get a new building, until 1903 but this was rejected by the township. At this time, a redesign of the promenade was planned, which was only possible by demolition of the in the street course standing synagogue. After lengthy preparations, a preparatory committee was elected in April 1907, which in addition to building site and plans the necessary financing should provide.

1911, a building committee was chosen and agreed with the community a real estate exchange. At the architectural competition, which was tendered in the same year, participated among others Jacob Modern, Jacob Gartner, Ignaz Reiser and Theodor Schreier. The latter was together with his partner Viktor Postelberg by the Committee commissioned another project for a temple with room for 220 men and 150 women to submitt, which was then realized. The conditions for the planning work developed Rudolf Frass. The necessary funds were raised through collections and appeals for donations throughout the country, so that could be started with the construction in June 1912. The gilding works were carried out by Ferdinand Andri. After little more than a year of construction and 141 390 crowns total investment, the synagoge on 17 August 1913 was solemnly consecrated.

Destruction

On the night of 9th to the 10th November 1938 invaded several SS and SA members the rooms of the synagogue, smashed windows and set fire. The that night caused damage was limited, as the fire could be extinguished relatively quickly. On the following morning 300 to 400 people gathered, some in civilian clothes, in front of the building. They moved with the singing of political songs in the sacred spaces and destroyed them completely. The windows were broken, Torah scrolls, Torah shrine, benches and images burned. Even water pipes and door posts were torn from the walls. The books of the extensive library were largely thrown on the road and burned. Some people climbed the dome and tore the Star of David of the roof .

Almost all of the movable property of the Jewish community was destroyed or stolen . A limited set of books were placed in the city archives, the City Museum there's still a donation box and a painting of Emperor Franz Josef, which hung in the entrance area. A single prayer book is since 1998 owned again by the Jewish Community.

In the following years the side rooms of the building of the SA were used as an office, the interior was used among other things as furniture warehouse. 1942, the synagogue became the property of the city of St. Pölten, which used it as a detention center for Russian forced laborers. In last fightings and bombings in 1945 the building was further damaged.

1945

The Red Army used the former synagogue as a grain storage until it was in 1947 returned to the city. The application of restitution was recognized in 1952 by the city council, which then returned the synagogue to the Jewish Community Vienna. In the following years, the former house of God continued to decay as after the Holocaust no Jewish community in St. Pölten could establish. The domed roof showed severe damage, individual components were threatening to collapse completely and through the boarded windows came rain and snow into the by dovecotes populated house.

In 1975, the Jewish Community Vienna (IKG - Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien) offered the city of St. Pölten to purchase the synagogue, which did not accept the offer due to lack of uses. Then the Jewish Community Vienna wanted to initiate the demolition, but this was prevented by the fact that the Federal Monuments Office the building put under monument protection. Then it was renovated from 1980 to 1984. Here, for example, many wall paintings were recovered, on the other hand, some structural changes were made (especially removal of water basins for the ritual washing of the hands), since it was clear from the beginning that the building would not be used as a synagogue, but as an event center.

Since 1988 in the premises of the former synagogue the Institute for Jewish History of Austria is located, further regular events are realized. The original function the synagoge never could fulfill again, as too few Jews returned after the Holocaust to St. Pölten.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the synagogue the City Museum in St. Pölten 2013/14 the building dedicates its own special exhibition. In doing so there is also shown a recently found photo of the interior before the destruction. It is also pointed out that the synagogue due to lack of funding already again is abandoned to a certain decay.

The St. Pölten rabbi

Interior of the synagogue with part of the dome ceiling, in the center of the former shrine

Name Period of office

Moritz Tintner 1863-1869

Adolf Kurrein 1873-1876

Samuel Marcus 1876-1878

Adolf Hahn 1878-1882

Jacob Reiss 1882-1889

Bernhard Zimmels 1889-1891

Leopold Weinsberg 1891-1897

Adolf Schächter 1897-1934

Arnold Frankfurt 1934-1936

Manfred Papo 1936-1938

Building description

Outside

The dominant element of the synagogue is the octagonal, completed by a large dome main building, to which the eastern and western side wings are attached. Connected to the synagogue is the former school building in Lederergasse 12.

Main tract

The main tract houses the former sanctuary. The facade is divided into a low ground floor, high upper floor and the dome. At the facade facing the street can be found in the two storeys each three windows, that are executed on the ground floor as low segmental arch windows with above running continuously cordon cornice. The windows on the upper floor, however, are high, rectangular windows, the space between them is divided by pilasters. The original stained glass windows were destroyed from 1938, today, clear glass can be found in the windows. Directly under the dome there is a large segment gable with representations of the Tablets of the Law, set in floral vines. Beneath it is written in Hebrew the text of Psalm 118, verse 19.

" פתחו לי שערי צדק אבא בם אודה יה "

"Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will enter and give thanks to God".

- Inscription under the law boards.

On the short, lateral oblique walls of the main building on the ground floor there are side entrances, in the transition to the dome there are embedded large oval windows.

Side wings

To the eastern side wing, which in comparison to the western tract is designed very narrowly, connects the former school building and was once home to the shrine. At the by segment gable and barrel roof completed tract can be found on the northern front in the upper floor a tall, rectangular window of the same type as that of the main wing. At the eastern side a round window is embedded, in the ground floor begins a connecting room to the school building.

The western side wing is identical to the east in the basic form, but it is significantly wider. In addition, in front of it there are entrance buildings. Both at the road side and on the opposite side between the main wing and the western annex are wide projecting semi-circular staircases, next to it can be found till half the height of the first upper floor each a buttress with two low windows. Road side, this buttress is preceded by a walk-in porch, which on three sides is open round-arched. The with triangular gable completed building ends in a concave enclosure, where a commemorative plaque is attached today. The west facade repeats the design of the main building, it can be found on the ground floor low segmental arch windows with above running continuously, jagged cordon cornice. On the first floor the windows are, however, significantly lower than in the main wing.

Former school building

The former school building has its main facade towards Lederergasse and there has the number 12. The road-side main facade of the two-storey building is divided into four axes. The window on the ground floor are round-arched disigned, the ones on the upper floor rectangularly. Between side wing of the synagogue and the main wing of the school building there is a tower-like, curved stairwell risalit up to the attic.

Gallery

Wall lamp

Wall ornament

Wall ornament

Wall ornament

de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synagoge_St._P%C3%B6lten

(further information is available by clicking on the link at the end of page!)

 

History of the City St. Pölten

In order to present concise history of the Lower Austrian capital is in the shop of the city museum a richly illustrated full version on CD-ROM.

Tip

On the occasion of the commemoration of the pogroms of November 1938, the Institute for Jewish History of Austria its virtual Memorbuch (Memory book) for the destroyed St. Pölten Jewish community since 10th November 2012 is putting online.

Prehistory

The time from which there is no written record is named after the main materials used for tools and weapons: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. Using the latest technologies, archaeologists from archaeological finds and aerial photographs can trace a fairly detailed picture of life at that time. Especially for the time from the settling down of the People (New Stone Age), now practicing agriculture and animal husbandry, in the territory of St. Pölten lively settlement activity can be proved. In particular, cemeteries are important for the research, because the dead were laid in the grave everyday objects and jewelry, the forms of burial changing over time - which in turn gives the archeology valuable clues for the temporal determination. At the same time, prehistory of Sankt Pölten would not be half as good documented without the construction of the expressway S33 and other large buildings, where millions of cubic meters of earth were moved - under the watchful eyes of the Federal Monuments Office!

A final primeval chapter characterized the Celts, who settled about 450 BC our area and in addition to a new culture and religion also brought with them the potter's wheel. The kingdom of Noricum influenced till the penetration of the Romans the development in our area.

Roman period, migrations

The Romans conquered in 15 BC the Celtic Empire and established hereinafter the Roman province of Noricum. Borders were protected by military camp (forts), in the hinterland emerged civilian cities, almost all systematically laid out according to the same plan. The civil and commercial city Aelium Cetium, as St. Pölten was called (city law 121/122), consisted in the 4th Century already of heated stone houses, trade and craft originated thriving urban life, before the Romans in the first third of the 5th Century retreated to Italy.

The subsequent period went down as the Migration Period in official historiography, for which the settlement of the Sankt Pöltner downtown can not be proved. Cemeteries witness the residence of the Lombards in our area, later it was the Avars, extending their empire to the Enns.

The recent archaeological excavations on the Cathedral Square 2010/2011, in fact, the previous knowledge of St.Pölten colonization not have turned upside down but enriched by many details, whose full analysis and publication are expected in the near future.

Middle Ages

With the submission of the Avars by Charlemagne around 800 AD Christianity was gaining a foothold, the Bavarian Benedictine monastery of Tegernsee establishing a daughter house here - as founder are mentioned the brothers Adalbert and Ottokar - equipped with the relics of St. Hippolytus. The name St. Ypolit over the centuries should turn into Sankt Pölten. After the Hungarian wars and the resettlement of the monastery as Canons Regular of St. Augustine under the influence of Passau St. Pölten received mid-11th Century market rights.

In the second half of the 20th century historians stated that records in which the rights of citizens were held were to be qualified as Town Charters. Vienna is indeed already in 1137 as a city ("civitas") mentioned in a document, but the oldest Viennese city charter dates only from the year 1221, while the Bishop of Passau, Konrad, already in 1159 the St. Pöltnern secured:

A St. Pöltner citizen who has to answer to the court, has the right to make use of an "advocate".

He must not be forced to rid himself of the accusation by a judgment of God.

A St. Pöltner citizen may be convicted only by statements of fellow citizens, not by strangers.

From the 13th Century exercised a city judge appointed by the lord of the city the high and low jurisdiction as chairman of the council meetings and the Municipal Court, Inner and Outer Council supported him during the finding of justice. Venue for the public verdict was the in the 13th Century created new marketplace, the "Broad Market", now the town hall square. Originally square-shaped, it was only later to a rectangle reduced. Around it arose the market district, which together with the monastery district, the wood district and the Ledererviertel (quarter of the leather goods manufacturer) was protected by a double city wall.

The dependence of St. Pölten of the bishop of Passau is shown in the municipal coat of arms and the city seal. Based on the emblem of the heraldic animal of the Lord of the city, so the Bishop of Passau, it shows an upright standing wolf holding a crosier in its paw.

Modern Times

In the course of the armed conflict between the Emperor Frederick III . and King Matthias of Hungary pledged the Bishop of Passau the town on the Hungarian king. From 1485 stood Lower Austria as a whole under Hungarian rule. The most important document of this period is the awarding of the city coat of arms by King Matthias Corvinus in the year 1487. After the death of the opponents 1490 and 1493 could Frederick's son Maximilian reconquer Lower Austria. He considered St. Pölten as spoils of war and had no intention of returning it to the diocese of Passau. The city government has often been leased subsequently, for instance, to the family Wellenstein, and later to the families Trautson and Auersperg.

That St. Pölten now was a princely city, found its expression in the coat of arms letter of the King Ferdinand I. from 1538: From now on, the wolf had no crosier anymore, and the from the viewer's point of view left half showed the reverse Austrian shield, so silver-red-silver.

To the 16th Century also goes back the construction of St. Pöltner City Hall. The 1503 by judge and council acquired house was subsequently expanded, rebuilt, extended and provided with a tower.

A for the urban history research important picture, painted in 1623, has captured scenes of the peasant uprising of 1597, but also allows a view to the city and lets the viewer read some of the details of the then state of construction. The economic inconveniences of that time were only exacerbated by the Thirty Years War, at the end of which a fifth of the houses were uninhabited and the citizenry was impoverished.

Baroque

After the successful defense against the Turks in 1683, the economy started to recover and a significant building boom began. Lower Austria turned into the land of the baroque abbeys and monasteries, as it is familiar to us today.

In St. Pölten, the change of the cityscape is closely connected to the Baroque architect Jakob Prandtauer. In addition to the Baroquisation of the interior of the cathedral, a number of buildings in St. Pölten go to his account, so the reconstruction of the castle Ochsenburg, the erection of the Schwaighof and of the core building of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Englische Fräuleins - English Maidens) - from 1706 the seat of the first school order of St.Pölten - as well as of several bourgeois houses.

Joseph Munggenast, nephew and co-worker of Prandtauer, completed the Baroquisation of the cathedral, he baroquised the facade of the town hall (1727) and numerous bourgeois houses and designed a bridge over the Traisen which existed until 1907. In the decoration of the church buildings were throughout Tyroleans collaborating, which Jakob Prandtauer had brought along from his homeland (Tyrol) to St. Pölten, for example, Paul Troger and Peter Widerin.

Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II: Their reforms in the city of the 18th Century also left a significant mark. School foundings as a result of compulsory education, the dissolution of the monasteries and hereinafter - from 1785 - the new role of St. Pölten as a bishop's seat are consequences of their policies.

1785 was also the year of a fundamental alteration of the old Council Constitution: The city judge was replaced by one magistrate consisting of five persons, at the head was a mayor. For the first mayor the painter Josef Hackl was chosen.

The 19th century

Despite the Napoleonic Wars - St. Pölten in 1805 and 1809 was occupied by the French - and despite the state bankruptcy of 1811, increased the number of businesses constantly, although the economic importance of the city for the time being did not go beyond the near vicinity.

Against the background of monitoring by the state secret police, which prevented any political commitment between the Congress of Vienna and the 1848 revolution, the citizens withdrew into private life. Sense of family, fostering of domestic music, prominent salon societies in which even a Franz Schubert socialized, or the construction of the city theater were visible signs of this attitude.

The economic upswing of the city did not begin until after the revolution of the year 1848. A prerequisite for this was the construction of the Empress Elisabeth Western Railway, moving Vienna, Linz, soon Salzburg, too, in a reachable distance. The city walls were pulled down, St. Pölten could unfold. The convenient traffic situation favored factory start-ups, and so arose a lace factory, a revolver factory, a soap factory or, for example, as a precursor of a future large-scale enterprise, the braid, ribbon and Strickgarnerzeugung (knitting yarn production) of Matthias Salcher in Harland.

In other areas, too, the Gründerzeit (years of rapid industrial expansion in Germany - and Austria) in Sankt Pölten was honouring its name: The city got schools, a hospital, gas lanterns, canalization, hot springs and summer bath.

The 20th century

At the beginning of the 20th Century the city experienced another burst of development, initiated by the construction of the power station in 1903, because electricity was the prerequisite for the settlement of large companies. In particular, the companies Voith and Glanzstoff and the main workshop of the Federal Railways attracted many workers. New Traisen bridge, tram, Mariazell Railway and other infrastructure buildings were erected; St. Pölten obtained a synagogue. The Art Nouveau made it repeatedly into the urban architecture - just think of the Olbrich House - and inspired also the painting, as exponents worth to be mentioned are Ernst Stöhr or Ferdinand Andri.

What the outbreak of the First World War in broad outlines meant for the monarchy, on a smaller scale also St. Pölten has felt. The city was heavily impacted by the deployment of army units, a POW camp, a military hospital and a sick bay. Industrial enterprises were partly converted into war production, partly closed. Unemployment, housing emergency and food shortages long after the war still were felt painfully.

The 1919 to mayor elected Social Democrat Hubert Schnofl after the war tried to raise the standard of living of the people by improving the social welfare and health care. The founding of a housing cooperative (Wohnungsgenossenschaft), the construction of the water line and the establishment of new factories were further attempts to stimulate the stiffening economy whose descent could not be stopped until 1932.

After the National Socialist regime had stirred false hopes and plunged the world into war, St. Pölten was no longer the city as it has been before. Not only the ten devastating bombings of the last year of the war had left its marks, also the restrictive persecution of Jews and political dissidents had torn holes in the structure of the population. Ten years of Russian occupation subsequently did the rest to traumatize the population, but at this time arose from the ruins a more modern St. Pölten, with the new Traisen bridge, district heating, schools.

This trend continued, an era of recovery and modernization made the economic miracle palpable. Already in 1972 was - even if largely as a result of incorporations - exceeded the 50.000-inhabitant-limit.

Elevation to capital status (capital of Lower Austria), 10 July 1986: No other event in this dimension could have become the booster detonation of an up to now ongoing development thrust. Since then in a big way new residential and commercial areas were opened up, built infrastructure constructions, schools and universities brought into being to enrich the educational landscape. East of the Old Town arose the governmental and cultural district, and the list of architects wears sonorous names such as Ernst Hoffmann (NÖ (Lower Austria) Landhaus; Klangturm), Klaus Kada (Festspielhaus), Hans Hollein (Shedhalle and Lower Austrian Provincial Museum), Karin Bily, Paul Katzberger and Michael Loudon ( NÖ State Library and NÖ State Archive).

European Diploma, European flag, badge of honor, Europe Price: Between 1996 and 2001, received St. Pölten numerous appreciations of its EU commitment - as a sort of recognition of the Council of Europe for the dissemination of the EU-idea through international town twinnings, a major Europe exhibition or, for example, the establishment and chair of the "Network of European medium-sized cities".

On the way into the 21st century

Just now happened and already history: What the St. Pöltnern as just experienced sticks in their minds, travelers and newcomers within a short time should be told. The theater and the hospital handing over to the province of Lower Austria, a new mayor always on the go, who was able to earn since 2004 already numerous laurels (Tags: polytechnic, downtown enhancement, building lease scheme, bus concept) - all the recent changes are just now condensed into spoken and written language in order to make, from now on, the history of the young provincial capital in the 3rd millennium nachlesbar (checkable).

www.st-poelten.gv.at/Content.Node/freizeit-kultur/kultur/...

Loch Earn is a freshwater loch in the southern highlands of Scotland, in the districts of Perth and Kinross and Stirling.

 

The name is thought to mean "Loch of Ireland", and it has been suggested that this might derive from the time when the Gaels were expanding their kingdom of Dál Riata eastwards into Pictland.

 

It is a long narrow loch, 10 miles (16 km) west of Crieff and is approximately 7 miles (11 km) long, 3⁄4 mile (1.2 km) at its widest point (56.38N, 4.22W) and at its deepest point (approximately halfway along) about 285 feet (87 metres). Lochearnhead village is situated at the western end of the loch and St. Fillans village at the eastern end. From here, the River Earn flows eastwards from the loch, through Strathearn, and eventually joins the Firth of Tay some 50 miles (80 km) away. Lochearnhead is the centre for the water sports activities on the loch; water skiing, canoeing and sailing. The loch is also stocked regularly with brown and rainbow trout and fishing, by permit, is possible from the shore and by boat.

 

To the south of the loch lies Ben Vorlich, a steep sided pyramid shaped peak. At 3,232 feet (985 metres), this is a popular climb and the views from the top are spectacular. Just east of Lochearnhead, on the south side of the loch, is Edinample Castle, built by 'Black' Duncan Campbell of Glenorchy in 1584. Further east is Ardvorlich House, home to the Stewarts of Ardvorlich from 1580 (rebuilt in 1790).

 

Loch Earn is unusual in that it has its own apparent 'tidal system', or seiche, caused by the action of the prevailing wind blowing along the loch. This wind pressure on the surface causes the water level to build up at one end of the loch. As with all damped mechanical systems, applied pressure can result in an oscillation, and the water will return to the opposite end of the loch over time. In the case of Loch Earn, this has a period of 16 hours and the effect can be measured, but is difficult to observe. The resulting currents can create complex turbulence patterns, as higher layers of warmer waters mix with the lower lying colder waters of the loch.

 

Other bodies of fresh water which experience this seiche effect include Lake Geneva, Lake Garda, the Great Lakes and Lake Baikal.

 

Notable visitors

In August 1906, Edith Holden visited the Loch and while cycling along the North side observed "the finest Larches she had ever seen".

 

In October 1964, The Beatles stayed at The Four Seasons Hotel at St Fillans. They stayed in two of the chalets overlooking Loch Earn and also went boating on the loch.

 

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

The sparrow project is an attempt to improve my bird story telling along with honing eye hand/AF coordination skills using a common subject readily available. The subjects must be in motion as a prerequisite since shooting ducks in a barrel is just no sport at all.

 

I was spurred into the project due to my complete dissatisfaction of prior attempts while on a trip to Tanzania. Learning the delicate balance between shutter speed, proper long lens techniques, iso settings and AF modes is a challenge for something just slightly slower than a speeding bullet.

 

This will be ongoing to support my next African adventure later this year.

 

See me also at instagram.com/charlesgyoung/

The sparrow project is an attempt to improve my bird story telling along with honing eye hand/AF coordination skills using a common subject readily available. The subjects must be in motion as a prerequisite since shooting ducks in a barrel is just no sport at all.

 

I was spurred into the project due to my complete dissatisfaction of prior attempts while on a trip to Tanzania. Learning the delicate balance between shutter speed, proper long lens techniques, iso settings and AF modes is a challenge for something just slightly slower than a speeding bullet.

 

This will be ongoing to support my next African adventure later this year.

 

See me also at instagram.com/charlesgyoung/

Avram Noam Chomsky

 

Portrait of Noam Chomsky painted in admiration for Justice and Liberty of his Wisdom

 

www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1273830809738507&set=a.1...

 

“Freedom without opportunity is a devil's gift.”

― Noam Chomsky

 

Language and Freedom

Noam Chomsky

 

chomsky.info/language-and-freedom/

 

Excerpted from For Reasons of State, New York: Pantheon Books, 1973.

When I was invited to speak on the topic “Language and freedom”, I was puzzled and intrigued. Most of my professional life has been devoted to the study of language. There would be no great difficulty in finding a topic to discuss in that domain. And there is much to say about the problems of freedom and liberation as they pose themselves to us and to others in the mid-twentieth century. What is troublesome in the title of this lecture is the conjunction. In what way are language and freedom to be interconnected?

 

As a preliminary, let me say just a word about the contemporary study of language, as I see it. There are many aspects of language and language use that raise intriguing questions, but – in my judgement – only a few have so far led to productive theoretical work. In particular, our deepest insights are in the area of formal grammatical structure. A person who knows a language has acquired a system of rules and principles – a “generative grammar,” in technical terms – that associates sound and meaning in some specific fashion. There are many reasonably well-founded and, I think, rather enlightening hypotheses as to the character of such grammars, for quite a number of languages. Furthermore, there has been a renewal of interest in “universal grammar”, interpreted now as the theory that tries to specify the general properties of those languages that can be learned in the normal way by humans. Here, too, significant progress has been achieved.

 

The subject is of particular importance. It is appropriate to regard universal grammar as the study of one of the essential faculties of mind. It is, therefore, extremely interesting to discover, as I believe we do, that the principles of universal grammar are rich, abstract, and restrictive, and can be used to construct principled explanations for a variety of phenomena. At the present stage of our understanding, if language is to provide a springboard for the investigation of other problems of human nature, it is these aspects of language to which we will have to turn our attention, for the simple reason that it is only these aspects that are reasonably well understood. In another sense, the study of formal properties of language reveals something of the nature of humans in a negative way: it underscores, with great clarity, the limits of our understanding of those qualities of mind that are apparently unique to humans and that must enter into their cultural achievements in an intimate, if still quite obscure, manner.

 

In searching for a point of departure, one turns naturally to a period in the history of Western thought when it was possible to believe that “the thought of making freedom the sum and substance of philosophy has emancipated the human spirit in all its relationships, and . . . has given to science in all its parts a more powerful reorientation than any earlier revolution.” [1] The word “revolution” bears multiple association in this passage, for Schelling also proclaims that “man is born to act and not to speculate”; and when he writes that “the time has come to proclaim to a nobler humanity the freedom of the spirit, and no longer to have patience with men’s tearful regrets for their lost chains” we hear the echoes of the libertarian thought and revolutionary acts of the late eighteenth century. Schelling writes that “the beginning and end of all philosophy is – Freedom.” These words are invested with meaning and urgency at a time when people are struggling to cast off their chains, to resist authority that has lost its claim to legitimacy, to construct more humane and more democratic social institutions. It is at such a time that the philosopher may be driven to inquire into the nature of human freedom and its limits, and perhaps to conclude, with Schelling, that with respect to the human ego, “its essence is freedom”; and with respect to philosophy, “the highest dignity of Philosophy consists precisely therein, that it stakes all on human freedom.”

 

We are living, once again, at such a time. A revolutionary ferment is sweeping the socalled Third World, awakening enormous masses from torpor and acquiescence in traditional authority. There are those who feel that the industrial societies as well are ripe for revolutionary change – and I do not refer only to representatives of the New Left. The threat of revolutionary change brings forth repression and reaction. Its signs are evident in varying forms, in France, in the Soviet Union, in the United States—not least, in the city where we are meeting. It is natural, then, that we should consider, abstractly, the problems of human freedom, and turn with interest and serious attention to the thinking of an earlier period when archaic social institutions were subjected to critical analysis and sustained attack. It is natural and appropriate, so long as we bear in mind Schellings’s admonition that man is born not merely to speculate but also to act.

 

One of the earliest and most remarkable of the eighteenth-century investigations of freedom and servitude is Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1755), in many ways a revolutionary tract. In it, he seeks to “set forth the origin and progress of inequality, the establishment and abuse of political societies, insofar as these things can be deduced from the nature of man by the light of reason alone.” His conclusions were sufficiently shocking that the judges of the prize competition of the Academy of Dijon, to whom the work was originally submitted, refused to hear the manuscript through. [2] In it, Rousseau challenges the legitimacy of virtually every social institution, as well as individual control of property and wealth. These are “usurpations . . . established only on a precarious and abusive right . . . having been acquired only by force, force could take them away without (the rich) having grounds for complaint.” Not even property acquired by personal industry is held “upon better titles”. Against such a claim, one might object: “Do you not know that a multitude of your brethren die or suffer from need of what you have in excess, and that you needed express and unanimous consent of the human race to appropriate for yourself anything from common subsistence that exceeded your own?” It is contrary to the law of nature that “a handful of men be glutted with superfluities while the starving multitude lacks necessities.”

 

Rousseau argues that civil society is hardly more than a conspiracy by the rich to guarantee their plunder. Hypocritically, the rich call upon their neighbors to “institute regulations of justice and peace to which all are obliged to conform, which make an exception of no one, and which compensate in some way for the caprices of fortune by equally subjecting the powerful and the weak to mutual duties”– those laws which, as Anatole France was to say, in their majesty deny to the rich and the poor equally the right to sleep under the bridge at night. By such arguments, the poor and weak were seduced: “All ran to meet their chains thinking they secured their freedom. . . .” Thus society and laws “gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, destroyed natural freedom for all time, established forever the law of property and inequality, changed a clever usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjected the whole human race to work, servitude and misery”. Governments inevitably tend toward arbitrary power, as “their corruption and extreme limit”. This power is “by its nature illegitimate,” and new revolutions must

 

dissolve the government altogether or bring it closer to its legitimate institutions … . The uprising that ends by strangling or dethroning a sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and goods of his subjects. Force alone maintained him, force alone overthrows him.

 

What is interesting, in the present connection, is the path that Rousseau follows to reach these conclusions “by the light of reason alone,” beginning with his ideas about human nature. He wants to see man “as nature formed him”. It is from human nature that the principles of natural right and the foundations of social existence must be deduced.

 

This same study of original man, of his true needs, and of the principles underlying his duties, is also the only good means one could use to remove those crowds of difficulties which present themselves concerning the origin of moral inequality, the true foundation of the body politic, the reciprocal rights of its members, and a thousand similar questions as important as they are ill explained.

 

To determine the nature of man, Rousseau proceeds to compare man and animal. Man is “intelligent, free . . . the sole animal endowed with reason.” Animals are “devoid of intellect and freedom.”

 

In every animal I see only an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses in order to revitalize itself and guarantee itself, to a certain point, from all that tends to destroy or upset it. I perceive precisely the same things in the human machine, with the difference that nature alone does everything in the operations of a beast, whereas man contributes to his operations by being a free agent. The former chooses or rejects by instinct and the latter by an act of freedom, so that a beast cannot de viate from the rule that is prescribed to it even when it would be advantageous for it do so, and a man deviates from it often to his detriment . . . . it is not so much understanding which constitutes the distinction of man among the animals as it is his being a free agent. Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man feels the same impetus, but he realizes that he is free to acquiesce or resist; and it is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul is shown. For physics explains in some way the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas; but in the power of willing, or rather of choosing, and in the sentiment of this power are found only purely spiritual acts about which the laws of mechanics explain nothing.

 

Thus the essence of human nature is human freedom and the consciousness of this freedom. So Rousseau can say that “the jurists, who have gravely pronounced that the child of a slave would be born a slave, have decided in other terms that a man would not be born a man.”[3]

 

Sophistic politicians and intellectuals search for ways to obscure the fact that the essential and defining property of man is his freedom: “They attribute to men a natural inclination to servitude, without thinking that it is the same for freedom as for innocence and virtue – their value is felt only as long as one enjoys them oneself and the taste for them is lost as soon as one has lost them.” In contrast, Rousseau asks rhetorically “whether, freedom being the most noble of man’s faculties, it is not degrading one’s nature, putting oneself on the level of beasts enslaved by instinct, even offending the author on one’s being, to renounce without reservation the most precious of all his gifts and subject ourselves to committing all the crimes he forbids us in order to please a ferocious or insane master” – a question that has been asked, in similar terms, by many an American draft resister in the last few years, and by many others who are beginning to recover from the catastrophe of twentieth-century Western civilization, which has so tragically confirmed Rousseau’s judgement:

 

Hence arose the national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals which make nature tremble and shock reason, and all those horrible prejudices which rank the honour of shedding human blood among the virtues. The most decent men learned to consider it one of their duties to murder their fellowmen; at length men were seen to massacre each other by the thousands without knowing why; more murders were committed on a single day of fighting and more horrors in the capture of a single city than were committed in the state of nature during whole centuries over the entire face of the earth.

 

The proof of his doctrine that the struggle for freedom is an essential human attribute, that the value of freedom is felt only as long as one enjoys it, Rousseau sees in “the marvels done by all free peoples to guard themselves from oppression.” True, those who have abandoned the life of a free man

 

do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in their chains . . . . But when I see the others sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel that it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.

 

Rather similar thoughts were expressed by Kant, forty years later. He cannot, he says, accept the proposition that certain people “are not ripe for freedom,” for example, the serfs of some landlord:

 

If one accepts this assumption, freedom will never be achieved; for one can not arrive at the maturity for freedom without having already acquired it; one must be free to learn how to make use of one’s powers freely and usefully. The first attempts will surely be brutal and will lead to a state of affairs more painful and dangerous than the former condition under the dominance but also the protection of an external authority. However, one can achieve reason only through one’s own experiences and one must be free to be able to undertake them. . . . To accept the principle that freedom is worthless for those under one’s control and that one has the right to refuse it to them forever, is an infringement on the rights of God himself, who has created man to be free. [4]

 

The remark is particularly interesting because of its context. Kant was defending the French Revolution, during the Terror, against those who claimed that it showed the masses to be unready for the privilege of freedom. Kant’s remarks have contemporary relevance. No rational person will approve of violence and terror. In particular, the terror of the postrevolutionary state, fallen into the hands of a grim autocracy, has more than once reached indescribable levels of savagery. Yet no person of understanding or humanity will too quickly condemn the violence that often occurs when long-subdued masses rise against their oppressors, or take their first steps toward liberty and social reconstruction.

 

Let me return now to Rousseau’s argument against the legitimacy of established authority, whether that of political power or of wealth. It is striking that his argument, up to this point, follows a familiar Cartesian model. Man is uniquely beyond the bounds of physical explanation; the beast, on the other hand, is merely an ingenious machine, commanded by natural law. Man’s freedom and his consciousness of this freedom distinguish him from the beast-machine. The principles of mechanical explanation are incapable of accounting for these human properties, though they can account for sensation and even the combination of ideas, in which regard “man differs from a beast only in degree.”

 

To Descartes and his followers, such as Cordemoy, the only sure sign that another organism has a mind, and hence also lies beyond the bounds of mechanical explanation, is its use of language in the normal, creative human fashion, free from control by identifiable stimuli, novel and innovative, appropriate to situations, coherent, and engendering in our minds new thoughts and ideas. [5] To the Cartesians, it is obvious by introspection that each man possesses a mind, a substance whose essence is thought; his creative use of language reflects this freedom of thought and conception. When we have evidence that another organism, too, uses language in this free and creative fashion, we are led to attribute to it as well a mind like ours. From similar assumptions regarding the intrinsic limits of mechanical explanation, its inability to account for man’s freedom and consciousness of his freedom, Rousseau proceeds to develop his critique of authoritarian institutions, which deny to man his essential attribute of freedom, in varying degree.

 

Were we to combine these speculations, we might develop an interesting connection between language and freedom. Language, in its essential properties and the manner of its use, provides the basic criterion for determining that another organism is a being with a human mind and the human capacity for free thought and self-expression, and with the essential human need for freedom from the external constraints of repressive authority. Furthermore, we might try to proceed from the detailed investigation of language and its use to a deeper and more specific understanding of the human mind. Proceeding on this model, we might further attempt to study other aspects of that human nature which, as Rousseau rightly observes, must be correctly conceived if we are to be able to develop, in theory, the foundations for a rational social order.

 

I will return to this problem, but first I would like to trace further Rousseau’s thinking about the matter. Rousseau diverges from the Cartesian tradition in several respects. He defines the “specific characteristic of the human species” as man’s “faculty of selfperfection,” which, “with the aid of circumstances, successively develops all the others, and resides among us as much in the species as in the individual.” The faculty of selfperfection and of perfection of the human species through cultural transmission is not, to my knowledge, discussed in any similar terms by the Cartesians. However, I think that Rousseau’s remarks might be interpreted as a development of the Cartesian tradition in an unexplored direction, rather than as a denial and rejection of it. There is no inconsistency in the notion that the restrictive attributes of mind underlie a historically evolving human nature that develops within the limits that they set; or that these attributes of mind provide the possibility of self-perfection; or that, by providing the consciousness of freedom, these essential attributes of human nature give man the opportunity to create social conditions and social forms to maximize the possibilities for freedom, diversity, and individual self-realization. To use an arithmetical analogy, the integers do not fail to be an infinite set merely because they do not exhaust the rational numbers. Analogously, it is no denial of man’s capacity for infinite “self-perfection” to hold that there are intrinsic properties of mind that constrain his development. I would like to argue that in a sense the opposite is true, that without a system of formal constraints there are no creative acts; specifically, in the absence of intrinsic and restrictive properties of mind, there can be only “shaping of behaviour” but no creative acts of self-perfection. Furthermore, Rousseau’s concern for the evolutionary character of self-perfection brings us back, from another point of view, to a concern for human language, which would appear to be a prerequisite for such evolution of society and culture, for Rousseau’s perfection of the species, beyond the most rudimentary forms.

 

Rousseau holds that “although the organ of speech is natural to man, speech itself is nonetheless not natural to him.” Again, I see no inconsistency between this observation and the typical Cartesian view that innate abilities are “dispositional,” faculties that lead us to produce ideas (specifically, innate ideas) in a particular manner under given conditions of external stimulation, but that also provide us with the ability to proceed in our thinking without such external factors. Language too, then, is natural to man only in a specific way. This is an important and, I believe, quite fundamental insight of the rationalist linguists that was disregarded, very largely, under the impact of empiricist psychology in the eighteenth century and since.[6]

 

Rousseau discusses the origin of language at some length, though he confesses himself to be unable to come to grips with the problem in a satisfactory way. Thus

 

if men needed speech in order to learn to think, they had even greater need of knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speech. . . . So that one can hardly form tenable conjectures about this art of communicating thoughts and establishing intercourse between minds; a sublime art which is now very far from its origin. . . .

 

He holds that “general ideas can come into the mind only with the aid of words, and the understanding grasps them only through propositions” – a fact which prevents animals, devoid of reason, from formulating such ideas or ever acquiring “the perfectibility which depends upon them.” Thus he cannot conceive of the means by which “our new grammarians began to extend their ideas and to generalize their words,” or to develop the means “to express all the thoughts of men”: “numbers, abstract words, aorists, and all the tenses of verbs, particles, syntax, the linking of propositions, reasoning, and the forming of all the logic of discourse.” He does speculate about later stages of the perfection of the species, “when the ideas of men began to spread and multiply, and when closer communication was established among them, [and] they sought more numerous signs and a more extensive language.” But he must, unhappily, abandon “the following difficult problem: which was most necessary, previously formed society for the institution of languages, or previously invented languages for the establishment of society?”

 

The Cartesians cut the Gordian knot by postulating the existence of a species-specific characteristic, a second substance that serves as what we might call a “creative principle” alongside the “mechanical principle” that determines totally the behaviour of animals. There was, for them, no need to explain the origin of language in the course of historical evolution. Rather, man’s nature is qualitatively distinct: there is no passage from body to mind. We might reinterpret this idea in more current terms by speculating the rather sudden and dramatic mutations might have led to qualities of intelligence that are, so far as we know, unique to humans, possession of language in the human sense being the most distinctive index of these qualities. [7] If this is correct, as at least a first approximation to the facts, the study of language might be expected to offer an entering wedge, or perhaps a model, for an investigation of human nature that would provide the grounding for a much broader theory of human nature.

 

To conclude these historical remarks, I would like to turn, as I have elsewhere, [8] to Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the most stimulating and intriguing thinkers of the period. Humboldt was, on the one hand, one of the most profound theorists of general linguistics, and on the other, an early and forceful advocate of libertarian values. The basic concept of his philosophy is Bildung, by which, as J.W. Burrow expresses it, “he meant the fullest, richest, and most harmonious development of the potentialities of the individual, the community or the human race.” [9] His own thought might serve as an exemplary case. Though he does not, to my knowledge, explicitly relate his ideas about language to his libertarian social thought, there is quite clearly a common ground from which they develop, a concept of human nature that inspires each. Mill’s essay On Liberty takes as its epigraph Humboldt’s formulation of the “leading principle” of his thought: “the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.” Humboldt concludes his critique of the authoritarian state by saying: “I have felt myself animated throughout with a sense of the deepest respect for the inherent dignity of human nature, and for freedom, which alone befits that dignity.” Briefly put, his concept of human nature is this:

 

The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the first and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes; but there is besides another essential – intimately connected with freedom, it is true – a variety of situations. [10]

 

Like Rousseau and Kant, he holds that

 

nothing promotes this ripeness for freedom so much as freedom itself. This truth, perhaps, may not be acknowledged by those who have so often used this unripeness as an excuse for continuing repression. But it seems to me to follow unquestionably from the very nature of man. The incapacity for freedom can only arise from a want of moral and intellectual power; to heighten this power is the only way to supply this want; but to do this presupposes the exercise of the power, and this exercise presupposes the freedom which awakens spontaneous activity. Only it is clear we cannot call it giving freedom, when bonds are relaxed which are not felt as such by him who wears them. But of no man on earth – however neglected by nature, and however degraded by circumstances – is this true of all the bonds which oppress him. Let us undo them one by one, as the feeling of freedom awakens in men’s hearts, and we shall hasten progress at every step.

 

Those who do not comprehend this “may justly be suspected of misunderstanding human nature, and of wishing to make men into machines.”

 

Man is fundamentally a creative, searching, self-perfecting being: “To inquire and to create – these are the centres around which all human pursuits more or less directly revolve.” But freedom of thought and enlightenment are not only for the elite. Once again echoing Rousseau, Humboldt states, “There is something degrading to human nature in the idea of refusing to any man the right to be a man.” He is, then, optimistic about the effects on all of “the diffusion of scientific knowledge by freedom and enlightenment.” But “all moral culture springs solely and immediately from the inner life of the soul, and can only be stimulated in human nature, and never produced by external and artificial contrivances.” “The cultivation of the understanding, as of any of man’s other faculties, is generally achieved by his own activity, his own ingenuity, or his own methods of using the discoveries of others. . . .” Education, then, must provide the opportunities for selffulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way. Even a language cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, but only “awakened in the mind: one can only provide the thread along which it will develop of itself.” I think that Humboldt would have found congenial much of Dewey’s thinking about education. And he might also have appreciated the recent revolutionary extension of such ideas, for example, by the radical Catholics of Latin America who are concerned with the “awakening of consciousness,” referring to “the transformation of the passive exploited lower classes into conscious and critical masters of their own destinies” [11] much in the manner of Third World revolutionaries elsewhere. He would, I am sure, have approved of their criticism of schools that are

 

more preoccupied with the transmission of knowledge than with the creation, among other values, of a critical spirit. From the social point of view, the educational systems are oriented to maintaining the existing social and economic structures instead of transforming them.[12]

 

But Humboldt’s concern for spontaneity goes well beyond educational practice in the narrow sense. It touches also the question of labour and exploitation. The remarks, just quoted, about the cultivation of understanding through spontaneous action continue as follows:

 

. . . man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a true sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits. . . . In view of this consideration, [13] it seems as if all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into artists; that is, men who love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures. And so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, thought beautiful in themselves, so often serve to degrade it. . . But, still, freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.

 

If a man acts in a purely mechanical way, reacting to external demands or instruction rather than in ways determined by his own interests and energies and power, “we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.” [14]

 

On such conceptions Humboldt grounds his ideas concerning the role of the state, which tends to “make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends, overlooking his individual purposes.” His doctrine is classical liberal, strongly opposed to all but the most minimal forms of state intervention in personal or social life.

 

Writing in the 1790s, Humboldt had no conception of the forms that industrial capitalism would take. Hence he is not overly concerned with the dangers of private power.

 

But when we reflect (still keeping theory distinct from practice) that the influence of a private person is liable to diminution and decay, from competition, dissipation of fortune, even death; and that clearly none of these contingencies can be applied to the State; we are still left with the principle that the latter is not to meddle in anything which does not refer exclusively to security. . . .

 

He speaks of the essential equality of the condition of private citizens, and of course has no idea of the ways in which the notion “private person” would come to be reinterpreted in the era of corporate capitalism. He did not foresee that “Democracy with its motto of equality of all citizens before the law and Liberalism with its right of man over his own person both [would be] wrecked on realities of capitalist economy.”15 He did not foresee that, in a predatory capitalist economy, state intervention would be an absolute necessity to preserve human existence and to prevent the destruction of the physical environment— I speak optimistically. As Karl Polanyi, for one, has pointed out, the self-adjusting market “could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.” Humboldt did not foresee the consequences of the commodity character of labour, the doctrine (in Polanyi’s words) that “it is not for the commodity to decide where is should be offered for sale, to what purpose it should be used, at what price it should be allowed to change hands, and in what manner it should be consumed or destroyed.” But the commodity, in the case, is a human life, and social protection was therefore a minimal necessity to constrain the irrational and destructive workings of the classical free market. Nor did Humboldt understand that capitalist economic relations perpetuated a form of bondage which, as early as 1767, Simon Linguet had declared to be even worse than slavery.

 

It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him. . . . What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him?. . . . He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune. The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him. But the handicraftsmen cost nothing to the rich voluptuary who employs him. . . . These men, it is said, have no master– they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence. [17]

 

If there is something degrading to human nature in the idea of bondage, then a new emancipation must be awaited, Fourier’s “third and last emancipatory phase of history,” which will transform the proletariat to free men by eliminating the commodity character of labor, ending wage slavery, and bringing the commercial, industrial, and financial institutions under democratic control. [18]

 

Perhaps Humboldt might have accepted these conclusions. He does agree that state intervention in social life is legitimate if “freedom would destroy the very conditions without which not only freedom but even existence itself would be inconceivable” – precisely the circumstances that arise in an unconstrained capitalist economy. In any event, his criticism of bureaucracy and the autocratic state stands as an eloquent forewarning of some of the most dismal aspects of modern history, and the basis of his critique is applicable to a broader range of coercive institutions than he imagined.

 

Though expressing a classical liberal doctrine, Humboldt is no primitive individualist in the style of Rousseau. Rousseau extols the savage who “lives within himself”; he has little use for “the sociable man, always outside of himself, [who] knows how to live only in the opinion of others . . . from [whose] judgement alone . . . he draws the sentiment of his own existence.”19 Humboldt’s vision is quite different:

 

. . . the whole tenor of the ideas and arguments unfolded in this essay might fairly be reduced to this, that while they would break all fetters in human society, they would attempt to find as many new social bonds as possible. The isolated man is no more able to develop than the one who is fettered.

 

Thus he looks forward to a community of free association without coercion by the state or other authoritarian institutions, in which free men can create and inquire, and achieve the highest development of their powers – far ahead of his time, he presents an anarchist vision that is appropriate, perhaps, to the next stage of industrial society. We can perhaps look forward to a day when these various strands will be brought together within the framework of libertarian socialism, a social form that barely exists today though its elements can be perceived: in the guarantee of individual rights that has achieved its highest form – though still tragically flawed – in the Western democracies; in the Israeli kibbutzim; in the experiments with workers’ councils in Yugoslavia; in the effort to awaken popular consciousness and create a new involvement in the social process which is a fundamental element in the Third World revolutions, coexisting uneasily with indefensible authoritarian practice.

 

A similar concept of human nature underlies Humboldt’s work on language. Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation. The normal use of language and the acquisition of language depend on what Humboldt calls the fixed form of language, a system of generative processes that is rooted in the nature of the human mind and constrains but does not determine the free creations of normal intelligence or, at a higher and more original level, of the great writer or thinker. Humboldt is, on the one hand, a Platonist who insists that learning is a kind of reminiscence, in which the mind, stimulated by experience, draws from its own internal resources and follows a path that it itself determines; and he is also a romantic, attuned to cultural variety, and the endless possibilities for the spiritual contributions of the creative genius. There is no contradiction in this, any more than there is a contradiction in the insistence of aesthetic theory that individual works of genius are constrained by principle and rule. The normal, creative use of language, which to the Cartesian rationalist is the best index of the existence of another mind, presupposes a system of rules and generative principles of a sort that the rationalist grammarians attempted, with some success, to determine and make explicit.

 

The many modern critics who sense an inconsistency in the belief that free creation takes place within – presupposes, in fact – a system of constraints and governing principles are quite mistaken; unless, of course, they speak of “contradiction” in the loose and metaphoric sense of Schelling, when he writes that “without the contradiction of necessity and freedom not only philosophy but every nobler ambition of the spirit would sink to that death which is peculiar to those sciences in which that contradiction serves no function.” Without this tension between necessity and freedom, rule and choice, there can be no creativity, no communication, no meaningful acts at all.

 

I have discussed these traditional ideas at some length, not out of antiquarian interest, but because I think that they are valuable and essentially correct, and that they project a course we can follow with profit. Social action must be animated by a vision of a future society, and by explicit judgements of value concerning the character of this future society. These judgements must derive from some concept of human nature, and one may seek empirical foundations by investigating human nature as it is revealed by human behaviour and human creations, material, intellectual, and social. We have, perhaps, reached a point in history when it is possible to think seriously about a society in which freely constituted social bonds replace the fetters of autocratic institutions, rather in the sense conveyed by the remarks of Humboldt that I quoted, and elaborated more fully in the tradition of libertarian socialism in the years that followed.

 

Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century. It is incapable of meeting human needs that can be expressed only in collective terms, and its concept of competitive man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to market relationships, to exploitation and external authority, is antihuman and intolerable in the deepest sense. An autocratic state is no acceptable substitute; nor can the militarized state capitalism evolving in the United States or the bureaucratized, centralized welfare state be accepted as the goal of human existence. The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival. Modern science and technology can relieve people of the necessity for specialized, imbecile labour. They may, in principle, provide the basis for a rational social order based on free association and democratic control, if we have the will to create it.

 

A vision of a future social order is in turn based on a concept of human nature. If in fact humans are indefinitely malleable, completely plastic beings, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then they are fit subjects for the “shaping of behavior” by the state authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species will hope this is not so and will try to determine the intrinsic human characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community. In a partly analogous way, a classical tradition spoke of artistic genius acting within and in some ways challenging a framework of rule. Here we touch on matters that are little understood. It seems to me that we must break away, sharply and radically, from much of modern social and behavioral science if we are to move toward a deeper understanding of these matters.

 

Here, too, I think that the tradition I have briefly reviewed has a contribution to offer. As I have already observed, those who were concerned with human distinctiveness and potential repeatedly were led to a consideration of the properties of language. I think that the study of language can provide some glimmerings of understanding of rule-governed behavior and the possibilities for free and creative action within the framework of a system of rules that in part, at least, reflect intrinsic properties of human mental organization. It seems to me fair to regard the contemporary study of language as in some ways a return to the Humboldtian concept of the form of language: a system of generative processes rooted in innate properties of mind but permitting, in Humboldt’s phrase, an infinite use of finite means. Language cannot be described as a system of organization of behaviour. Rather, to understand how language is used, we must discover the abstract Humboldtian form of language – its generative grammar, in modern terms. To learn a language is to construct for oneself this abstract system, of course unconsciously. The linguist and pyschologist can proceed to study the use and acquistion of language only insofar as they have some grasp of the properties of the system that has been mastered by the person who knows the language. Furthermore, it seems to me that a good case can be made in support of the empirical claim that such a system can be acquired, under the given conditions of time and access, only by a mind that is endowed with certain specific properties that we can now tentatively describe in some detail. As long as we restrict ourselves, conceptually, to the investigation of behavior, its organization, its development through interaction with the environment, we are bound to miss these characteristics of language and mind. Other aspects of human psychology and culture might, in principle, be studied in a similar way.

 

Conceivably, we might in this way develop a social science based on empirically wellfounded propositions concerning human nature. Just as we study the range of humanly attainable languages, with some success, we might also try to study the forms of artistic expression or, for that matter, scientific knowledge that humans can conceive, and perhaps even the range of ethical systems and social structures in which humans can live and function, given their intrinsic capacities and needs. Perhaps one might go on to project a concept of social organization that would – under given conditions of material and spiritual culture – best encourage and accommodate the fundamental human need – if such it is – for spontaneous initiative, creative work, solidarity, pursuit of social justice.

 

I do not want to exaggerate, as I no doubt have, the role of investigation of language. Language is the product of human intelligence that is, for the moment, most accessible to study. A rich tradition held language to be a mirror of mind. To some extent, there is surely truth and useful insight in this idea.

 

I am no less puzzled by the topic “language and freedom” than when I began – and no less intrigued. In these speculative and sketchy remarks there are gaps so vast that one might question what would remain, when metaphor and unsubstantiated guess are removed. It is sobering to realize – as I believe we must – how little we have progressed in our knowledge of human beings and society, or even in formulating clearly the problems that might be seriously studied. But there are, I think, a few footholds that seem fairly firm. I like to believe that the intensive study of one aspect of human psychology – human language – may contribute to a humanistic social science that will serve, as well, as an instrument for social action. It must, needless to say, be stressed that social action cannot await a firmly established theory of human nature and society, nor can the validity of the latter be determined by our hopes and moral judgements. The two – speculation and action – must progress as best they can, looking forward to the day when theoretical inquiry will provide a firm guide to the unending, often grim, but never hopeless struggle for freedom and social justice.

  

Suggested Reading

 

[1] F W J Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, trans. and ed. James Gutmann (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1936).

 

[2] R D Masters, introduction to his edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, First and Second Discourses, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964).

 

[3] Compare Proudhon, a century later: “No long discussion is necessary to demonstrate that the power of denying a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death, and that to make a man a slave is to assassinate him.”

 

[4] Cited in A Lehning, ed., Bakunin, Etatisme et anarchie (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1967), editor’s note 50, from P Schrecker, “Kant et la révolution francaise,” Revue philosophique, September–December 1939.

 

[5] I have discussed this matter in Cartesian Linguistics (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) and Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, extended ed., 1972).

 

[6] See the references of note 5, and also my Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), chap. 1, sec. 8.

 

[7] I need hardly add that this is not the prevailing view. For discussion, see E.H. Lenneberg, Biological Foundations of Language (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967); my Language and Mind; E.A. Drewe et al., “A Comparative Review of the Results of Behavioural Research on Man and Monkey,” (London; Institute of Psychiatry, unpublished draft, 1969); P.H. Lieberman, D.H. Klatt, and W.H. Wilson, “Vocal Tract Limitations on the Vowel Repertoires of Rhesus Monkeys and other Nonhuman Primates,” Science, June 6, 1969; and P.H. Lieberman, “Primate Vocalizations and Human Linguistic Ability,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 44, no. 6 (1968).

 

[8] In the books cited above, and in Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (New York: Humanities Press, 1964).

 

[9] J W Burrow, introduction to his edition of Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), from which most of the following quotes are taken.

 

[10] Compare the remarks of Kant, quoted above. Kant’s essay appeared in 1793; Humboldt’s was written in 1791–92. Parts appeared, but it did not appear in full during his lifetime. See Burrow, introduction to Humboldt, Limits of State Action.

 

[11 ] Thomas G Sanders, “The Church in Latin America,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 48, no. 2 (1970).

 

[12] Ibid, The source is said to be the ideas of Paulo Freire. Similar criticism is widespread in the student movement in the West. See, for example, Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, eds., The New Student Left rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), chap. 3.

 

[13] Namely, that a man “only attains the most matured and graceful consummation of his activity, when his way of life is harmoniously in keeping with his character”–that is, when his actions flow from inner impulse.

 

[14] The latter quote is from Humboldt’s comments on the French Constitution, 1791–parts translated in Marianne Cowan, ed., Humanist Without Portfolio: An Anthology (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963).

 

[15] Rudolf Rocker, “Anarchism and Anarcho-syndicalism,” in Paul Eltzbacher, Anarchism (London: Freedom Press, 1960). In his book Nationalism and Culture (London: Freedom Press, 1937), Rocker describes Humboldt as “the most prominent representative in Germany” of the doctrine of natural rights and of the opposition to the authoritarian state. Rousseau he regards as a precursor of authoritarian doctrine, but he considers only the Social Contract, not the far more libertarian Discourse on Inequality. Burrow observes that Humboldt’s essay anticipates “much nineteenth century political theory of a populist, anarchist and syndicalist kind” and notes the hints of the early Marx. See also my Cartesian Linguistics, n. 51, for some comments.

 

[16] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).

 

[17] Cited by Paul Mattick, “Workers’ Control,” in Priscilla Long, ed., The New Left (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969), p. 377.

 

[18] Cited in Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958). p. 19

 

CHOMSKY.INFO

 

The sparrow project is an attempt to improve my bird story telling along with honing eye hand/AF coordination skills using a common subject readily available. The subjects must be in motion as a prerequisite since shooting ducks in a barrel is just no sport at all.

 

I was spurred into the project due to my complete dissatisfaction of prior attempts while on a trip to Tanzania. Learning the delicate balance between shutter speed, proper long lens techniques, iso settings and AF modes is a challenge for something just slightly slower than a speeding bullet.

 

This will be ongoing to support my next African adventure later this year.

 

See me also at instagram.com/charlesgyoung/

The Mount Elliott Mining Complex is an aggregation of the remnants of copper mining and smelting operations from the early 20th century and the associated former mining township of Selwyn. The earliest copper mining at Mount Elliott was in 1906 with smelting operations commencing shortly after. Significant upgrades to the mining and smelting operations occurred under the management of W.R. Corbould during 1909 - 1910. Following these upgrades and increases in production, the Selwyn Township grew quickly and had 1500 residents by 1918. The Mount Elliott Company took over other companies on the Cloncurry field in the 1920s, including the Mount Cuthbert and Kuridala smelters. Mount Elliott operations were taken over by Mount Isa Mines in 1943 to ensure the supply of copper during World War Two. The Mount Elliott Company was eventually liquidated in 1953.

 

The Mount Elliott Smelter:

 

The existence of copper in the Leichhardt River area of north western Queensland had been known since Ernest Henry discovered the Great Australia Mine in 1867 at Cloncurry. In 1899 James Elliott discovered copper on the conical hill that became Mount Elliott, but having no capital to develop the mine, he sold an interest to James Morphett, a pastoralist of Fort Constantine station near Cloncurry. Morphett, being drought stricken, in turn sold out to John Moffat of Irvinebank, the most successful mining promoter in Queensland at the time.

 

Plentiful capital and cheap transport were prerequisites for developing the Cloncurry field, which had stagnated for forty years. Without capital it was impossible to explore and prove ore-bodies; without proof of large reserves of wealth it was futile to build a railway; and without a railway it was hazardous to invest capital in finding large reserves of ore. The mining investor or the railway builder had to break the impasse.

 

In 1906 - 1907 copper averaged £87 a ton on the London market, the highest price for thirty years, and the Cloncurry field grew. The railway was extended west of Richmond in 1905 - 1906 by the Government and mines were floated on the Melbourne Stock Exchange. At Mount Elliott a prospecting shaft had been sunk and on the 1st of August 1906 a Cornish boiler and winding plant were installed on the site.

 

Mount Elliott Limited was floated in Melbourne on the 13th of July 1906. In 1907 it was taken over by British and French interests and restructured. Combining with its competitor, Hampden Cloncurry Copper Mines Limited, Mount Elliott formed a special company to finance and construct the railway from Cloncurry to Malbon, Kuridala (then Friezeland) and Mount Elliott (later Selwyn). This new company then entered into an agreement with the Queensland Railways Department in July 1908.

 

The railway, which was known as the 'Syndicate Railway', aroused opposition in 1908 from the trade unions and Labor movement generally, who contended that railways should be State-owned. However, the Hampden-Mount Elliott Railway Bill was passed by the Queensland Parliament and assented to on the 21st of April 1908; construction finished in December 1910. The railway terminated at the Mount Elliott smelter.

 

By 1907 the main underlie shaft had been sunk and construction of the smelters was underway using a second-hand water-jacket blast furnace and converters. At this time, W.H. Corbould was appointed general manager of Mount Elliott Limited.

 

The second-hand blast furnace and converters were commissioned or 'blown in' in May 1909, but were problematic causing hold-ups. Corbould referred to the equipment in use as being the 'worst collection of worn-out junk he had ever come across'. Corbould soon convinced his directors to scrap the plant and let him design new works.

 

Corbould was a metallurgist and geologist as well as mine/smelter manager. He foresaw a need to obtain control and thereby ensure a reliable supply of ore from a cross-section of mines in the region. He also saw a need to implement an effective strategy to manage the economies of smelting low-grade ore. Smelting operations in the region were made difficult by the technical and economic problems posed by the deterioration in the grade of ore. Corbould resolved the issue by a process of blending ores with different chemical properties, increasing the throughput capacity of the smelter and by championing the unification of smelting operations in the region. In 1912, Corbould acquired Hampden Consols Mine at Kuridala for Mount Elliott Limited, followed with the purchases of other small mines in the district.

 

Walkers Limited of Maryborough was commissioned to manufacture a new 200 ton water jacket furnace for the smelters. An air compressor and blower for the smelters were constructed in the powerhouse and an electric motor and dynamo provided power for the crane and lighting for the smelter and mine.

 

The new smelter was blown in September 1910, a month after the first train arrived, and it ran well, producing 2040 tons of blister copper by the end of the year. The new smelting plant made it possible to cope with low-grade sulphide ores at Mount Elliott. The use of 1000 tons of low-grade sulphide ores bought from the Hampden Consols Mine in 1911 made it clear that if a supply of higher sulphur ore could be obtained and blended, performance, and economy would improve. Accordingly, the company bought a number of smaller mines in the district in 1912.

 

Corbould mined with cut and fill stoping but a young Mines Inspector condemned the system, ordered it dismantled and replaced with square set timbering. In 1911, after gradual movement in stopes on the No. 3 level, the smelter was closed for two months. Nevertheless, 5447 tons of blister copper was produced in 1911, rising to 6690 tons in 1912 - the company's best year. Many of the surviving structures at the site were built at this time.

 

Troubles for Mount Elliott started in 1913. In February, a fire at the Consols Mine closed it for months. In June, a thirteen week strike closed the whole operation, severely depleting the workforce. The year 1913 was also bad for industrial accidents in the area, possibly due to inexperienced people replacing the strikers. Nevertheless, the company paid generous dividends that year.

 

At the end of 1914 smelting ceased for more than a year due to shortage of ore. Although 3200 tons of blister copper was produced in 1913, production fell to 1840 tons in 1914 and the workforce dwindled to only 40 men. For the second half of 1915 and early 1916 the smelter treated ore railed south from Mount Cuthbert. At the end of July 1916 the smelting plant at Selwyn was dismantled except for the flue chambers and stacks. A new furnace with a capacity of 500 tons per day was built, a large amount of second-hand equipment was obtained and the converters were increased in size.

 

After the enlarged furnace was commissioned in June 1917, continuing industrial unrest retarded production which amounted to only 1000 tons of copper that year. The point of contention was the efficiency of the new smelter which processed twice as much ore while employing fewer men. The company decided to close down the smelter in October and reduce the size of the furnace, the largest in Australia, from 6.5m to 5.5m. In the meantime the price of copper had almost doubled from 1916 due to wartime consumption of munitions.

 

The new furnace commenced on the 16th of January 1918 and 77,482 tons of ore were smelted yielding 3580 tons of blister copper which were sent to the Bowen refinery before export to Britain. Local coal and coke supply was a problem and materials were being sourced from the distant Bowen Colliery. The smelter had a good run for almost a year except for a strike in July and another in December, which caused Corbould to close down the plant until New Year. In 1919, following relaxation of wartime controls by the British Metal Corporation, the copper price plunged from about £110 per ton at the start of the year to £75 per ton in April, dashing the company's optimism regarding treatment of low grade ores. The smelter finally closed after two months operation and most employees were laid off.

 

For much of the period 1919 to 1922, Corbould was in England trying to raise capital to reorganise the company's operations but he failed and resigned from the company in 1922. The Mount Elliott Company took over the assets of the other companies on the Cloncurry field in the 1920s - Mount Cuthbert in 1925 and Kuridala in 1926. Mount Isa Mines bought the Mount Elliott plant and machinery, including the three smelters, in 1943 for £2,300, enabling them to start copper production in the middle of the Second World War. The Mount Elliott Company was finally liquidated in 1953.

 

In 1950 A.E. Powell took up the Mount Elliott Reward Claim at Selwyn and worked close to the old smelter buildings. An open cut mine commenced at Starra, south of Mount Elliott and Selwyn, in 1988 and is Australia's third largest copper producer producing copper-gold concentrates from flotation and gold bullion from carbon-in-leach processing.

 

Profitable copper-gold ore bodies were recently proved at depth beneath the Mount Elliott smelter and old underground workings by Cyprus Gold Australia Pty Ltd. These deposits were subsequently acquired by Arimco Mining Pty Ltd for underground development which commenced in July 1993. A decline tunnel portal, ore and overburden dumps now occupy a large area of the Maggie Creek valley south-west of the smelter which was formerly the site of early miner's camps.

 

The Old Selwyn Township:

 

In 1907, the first hotel, run by H. Williams, was opened at the site. The township was surveyed later, around 1910, by the Mines Department. The town was to be situated north of the mine and smelter operations adjacent the railway, about 1.5km distant. It took its name from the nearby Selwyn Ranges which were named, during Burke's expedition, after the Victorian Government Geologist, A.R. Selwyn. The town has also been known by the name of Mount Elliott, after the nearby mines and smelter.

 

Many of the residents either worked at the Mount Elliott Mine and Smelter or worked in the service industries which grew around the mining and smelting operations. Little documentation exists about the everyday life of the town's residents. Surrounding sheep and cattle stations, however, meant that meat was available cheaply and vegetables grown in the area were delivered to the township by horse and cart. Imported commodities were, however, expensive.

 

By 1910 the town had four hotels. There was also an aerated water manufacturer, three stores, four fruiterers, a butcher, baker, saddler, garage, police, hospital, banks, post office (officially from 1906 to 1928, then unofficially until 1975) and a railway station. There was even an orchestra of ten players in 1912. The population of Selwyn rose from 1000 in 1911 to 1500 in 1918, before gradually declining.

 

Source: Queensland Heritage Register.

First light of the day brightens a workaday Gerberstrasse seen from Hotel Sankt Florian.

Travel specialist to the GDR in London 'Berolina' offered three days at the Sankt Florian to meet my itinerary requirements as prerequisite to the issue of a visa.

An initial placing offer at Berga-Kelbra was rejected as too distant from the narrow gauge railway centres.

2nd April 1989