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Historic visitors took dim view of Scotland and Scots
WITH its breathtaking scenery, castles, lochs and fascinating history, it comes as no surprise that Scotland gets rave reviews from around the world.
But that was not always the case, with some historical write-ups being less than generous.
A new book has compiled the most unflattering observations from visitors in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
Charles Maciejewski, 65, a retired Highland policeman, spent four years researching ancient journals and tourism guides for critiques of Scotland’s places, people and pastimes.
He discovered comments from writers including Daniel Defoe, Dorothy Wordsworth and 19th-century English poet laureate Robert Southey.
They are included in Mr Maciejewski’s Scotland the Worst: A Derogatory Guide to the Worst Places to Visit in Times Gone By.
It describes Inverness as a ‘small, dirty, poor place’, while Aberfeldy in Perthshire ‘might properly be called Aberfilthy, for marvellously foul it is’.
In C Bede’s Tour in TartanLand, printed in London in 1863, he says: ‘If the citizens are as saturated with the Darwin theory as they are with the odour of whisky, we might almost expect that, in the course of time, they would be transmuted into whisky bottles.’
A review of Edinburgh in 1805, meanwhile, said it ‘delights the eye’ but was ‘most powerfully offensive to the nostrils’.
An 1860 visitor to Aberdeen described its fishwives as ‘a race of mighty ruddy-cheeked women, any one of whom would be a match in tongue, and muscle, for three ordinary city-bred men’.
The Rev James Hall, in his 1807 book, wrote: ‘The great faults of the common people in the Highlands are laziness and an inordinate attachment to whisky, a strong spirituous liquor.
‘They rather choose to lounge about idle, and half-starved, than work and be well fed.’
English traveller Henry Skrine said of Dundee in 1795: ‘We found it… an irregular and unpleasant place, in which all the ill smells in the universe seemed contending for a superiority; while its inhabitants, unusually coarse both in their manners and figures, were huddled together in every street.’
Mr Maciejewski’s compendium will be launched on Thursday. He said: ‘As a proud Scot, it’s nice to read complimentary things about our country and ourselves, but it’s also good to be able to have a giggle at ourselves.
‘Scotland is a world-class tourism destination now, but what were we like when tourism was a fledgling industry?’