Now THAT’S what you call a horrible history!
The king who fell off a cliff and triggered a 200-year war. The lone cow behind the world’s favourite beef. The doctor who created a real-life Frankenstein. A new book on Scotland has stories to astound readers
CAVES of headless children. Reanimated corpses. And the world’s most famous cow. It’s enough to make you rethink everything you thought you knew about Scotland.
Over 36 rollicking tales in Scotland’s Forgotten Past: A History of the Mislaid, Misplaced & Misunderstood, author and historian Alistair Moffat investigates the curious, the strange and the downright bizarre chapters of forgotten Scottish history.
From drunken kings to the man who changed the course of global agriculture by building a plough in his smiddy, Scotland in all its weird and wonderful glory is laid bare.
Mr Moffat said his guiding principle for the book was to elicit the response: ‘Really? I didn’t know that.’ He added: ‘We have a much more complex and much richer story hidden under all the tartan blankets for sale on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.’
Here, we look at some of the mislaid, misplaced and misunderstood episodes of Scotland’s extraordinary history. We guarantee you won’t know the half of it.
FATAL ATTRACTION
ON the night of March 18, 1286, King Alexander III of Scotland got a little tipsy and changed the course of Scottish history.
A storm was raging outside Edinburgh Castle as Alexander caroused with his friends and drank wine. After a few glasses the 44-yearold king decided that he had to see his new queen, a 21-year-old named Yolande de Dreux.
‘The only impediment,’ writes Mr Moffat, ‘all that stood in the way of the king’s wine-fuelled passion, was that Queen Yolande was not in her chamber at Edinburgh Castle. She was spending a night with her attendants on the royal manor of Kinghorn, on the far shore of the Firth of Forth.’ He insisted on riding through the dark in a storm to the ferry on the Forth, even though his barons attempted to dissuade him. Even the boatman initially refused to take him. The crossing, however, was eventually made. But on the other side, Alexander and his escort, both on horseback, were separated.
‘At Pettycur, where there is a near-sheer drop to the sea, Alexander’s horse fell, plunging him over the cliffs to his death, and plunging Scotland into two centuries of warfare with England.’
Alexander’s only heir was a three-year-old girl who lived in Norway, who was immediately betrothed to the son of Edward I of England. When she died four years later the vacancy left Scotland without a royal at its helm – and facing a war that would last 200 years.
FRANKENSTEIN
NO, not that one. But in 1818, the corpse of a freshly hanged man, a murderer named Matthew Clydesdale, was reanimated in a lecture hall at the University of Glasgow.
A professor ‘attached electrodes to the corpse that made his chest heave, his eyes open and enable him to walk a few steps,’ writes Mr Moffat. ‘The experiment was halted by Dr James Jeffrey, who plunged a scalpel into Clydesdale’s jugular vein, executing him a second time.’
Unfortunate, certainly. Yet it was also a symbol of Scotland’s Enlightenment, when the country led the world in educational standards and scientific experiments were ahead of their time. Even, briefly, cheating death.
THE BRILLIANT BLACKSMITH
NOT all advancements of the 18th century were intellectual. In Berwickshire in the 1760s, a simple blacksmith changed the world by redesigning the old Scots plough.
Frustrated at how often he had to repair ploughs that had been broken, James Small secured funding and created the forerunner to today’s modern plough, the swing plough, capable of creating deeper furrows with better drainage, slicing the ground more efficiently and able to be pulled by horses rather than the less wieldy oxen.
Manufactured at the Carron Ironworks in Falkirk, these new ploughs also led to the development of the Clydesdale horse and were used far and wide, particularly on the American prairies and in Canada.
As Mr Moffat writes: ‘The Scottish Enlightenment was not only a revolution of ideas.
‘At the same time as Adam Smith sat at his desk writing about the wealth of nations, James Small was in his smiddy increasing it.’
Tragically, however, Small did not patent his invention, which revolutionised agriculture, and died penniless, lost to obscurity in 1793.
SMARTER SCOTS
LOOK carefully on the cobbles of North Street in St Andrews and you will see the initials PH set into one of them.
Some students at the town’s university avoid stepping on it, in case doing so brings them bad luck in their exams. Why? Because almost 600 years ago, a student