Clan and Crown

Clan and Crown Scottish history for the diaspora. If you have Scottish blood, this is your story. Follow for daily history, heritage, and legend

The Picts left behind hundreds of carved stones and not one sentence anybody can read.That is the strange thing about th...
09/15/2026

The Picts left behind hundreds of carved stones and not one sentence anybody can read.

That is the strange thing about them. These were not people without a system. They cut symbols into stone with enormous care and repeated them across hundreds of miles for centuries: the crescent and V-rod, the double disc and Z-rod, the creature we call the Pictish beast that resembles nothing that has ever lived, mirrors, combs, serpents, eagles, salmon. The same shapes, in the same pairings, in the same order, over and over. Decoration does not behave like that.

We simply cannot get inside it. There is no Pictish Rosetta Stone, no bilingual inscription setting the symbols alongside a language we already know. The strongest arguments say they record personal names, or rank, or kinship, or the joining of two lines in marriage, and the way symbols so often come in pairs does look like two parties being named together. But nothing has been proved, and the honest scholars say so plainly.

So the stones are still speaking and we still cannot hear a word of it. What do you think the carvings were actually for?

On the second of September 1724 a young fishwife from Musselburgh was hanged in Edinburgh's Grassmarket in front of a cr...
09/14/2026

On the second of September 1724 a young fishwife from Musselburgh was hanged in Edinburgh's Grassmarket in front of a crowd. Her name was Margaret Dickson. She had been convicted under an old Scottish statute that treated a concealed pregnancy as proof of murder when the child did not live, which meant the court never had to prove she had harmed anyone at all.

She was left hanging, cut down, pronounced dead and put into a plain wooden coffin, and the coffin was loaded onto a cart for the road home to Musselburgh. Somewhere along that road the carter heard knocking from inside it. When they got the lid off, Maggie Dickson was alive and sitting up.

Then came the part nobody had planned for. The sentence handed down by the court had been carried out, so there was no lawful way to hang her a second time, and Scots law let her go. She went back to Musselburgh, had more children and lived on for decades under the name the whole of Edinburgh had given her, Half-Hangit Maggie. There is still a pub in the Grassmarket that carries it. Do you think the court got it right when it let her walk away?

09/14/2026

Two teams of men dug toward each other through solid rock, in the dark, blind. One was trying to bring a castle down. The other was trying to stop it.

St Andrews, 1546. The attackers cut a tunnel wide enough to lead a horse down, aiming under the tower, meaning to pack it with gunpowder and drop the wall. Inside, the defenders had nothing to go on but sound through stone. They dug down and guessed, and missed. They dug again, and missed again. On the third shaft they broke through into the enemy mine, and the whole siege was decided underground.

Both tunnels are still cut into the rock beneath St Andrews, and you can climb down into them. The chisel marks on those walls are the ones your ancestors left, working blind and in a hurry. It is the best surviving siege tunnel in Europe.


Have you been down the mine and countermine at St Andrews, and could you have kept your nerve digging toward a sound in the rock?

On the second Friday of every August, a man in South Queensferry is covered head to ankle in burdock burrs and walked se...
09/14/2026

On the second Friday of every August, a man in South Queensferry is covered head to ankle in burdock burrs and walked seven miles through his own town. 🌿

Only his eyes and his hands are left showing. He wears a hat of fresh flowers and a flag round his waist, and he rests his arms on two flower wrapped staves so the burrs cannot lock them to his sides. He does not speak. He walks from about nine in the morning until six at night collecting coins and drams, and because of the covering over his face the whisky has to go in through a straw.

Nobody is certain what it means. A guardian warding off evil, a nature spirit, a luck charm for the fishing boats, a scapegoat carrying off the town's bad year. The custom is more than three hundred years old and it has never stopped. Which explanation feels right to you?

Everyone says their family came from Scotland. Far fewer people can name the actual place.That is not a failing on anyon...
09/14/2026

Everyone says their family came from Scotland. Far fewer people can name the actual place.

That is not a failing on anyone's part. It is simply what emigration does. A family leaves a township in Sutherland or a close in Greenock, and within three generations the specific place has worn down to a country and a surname. The glen becomes the Highlands. The Highlands become Scotland. Scotland becomes a word on a form.

But the specific place is where the story actually lives. A parish register, a headstone, a ship's manifest, a name on an estate roll. Once you have the glen or the island or the street, everything else starts attaching itself to it, and the ancestors stop being a vague idea and start being people who stood somewhere.

So tell us in the comments. Not the country. The glen, the island, the town, the parish, the street. Whatever was handed down, however uncertain it is. Somebody else reading this may know the very same ground.

09/14/2026

A boat pushed off carrying a woman who could not speak and two newborn children, and rowed them out to an island in the Firth of Forth.

The king wanted to know what language a child speaks when nobody teaches it one. James the Fourth spoke seven languages himself, and he called the one he was hunting the language of the gods. So he sent food, and a nurse who could not pass on a single word, and he waited. Some said the children came out speaking Hebrew. Walter Scott thought they came out sounding like the sheep.

Here is the honest part your ancestors deserve. One man wrote this down, Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, almost a hundred years later, and a king who kept careful records of everything left almost nothing for this. The island is still out there, and on a clear day you can see it from the shore.


Do you think James actually did it, or is this one a tall tale that has simply outlived the truth?

There are eighteen lost houses under Loch Tay, and you can sail straight over the top of them without noticing a thing.T...
09/14/2026

There are eighteen lost houses under Loch Tay, and you can sail straight over the top of them without noticing a thing.

They are crannogs, dwellings built out in the water on a forest of oak piles driven into the loch bed and reached by a narrow plank gangway from the shore. At Oakbank, near Fearnan, divers have been excavating one of them since 1980. The structural timbers put its building somewhere between 520 and 465 BC. A roundhouse about 15 metres across stood on a platform above the water with a walkway running the whole way round it.

Here is why Oakbank matters more than almost any Iron Age site on dry land. Cold water and no oxygen means nothing rotted. The divers have brought up not only posts and planks but the soft things that normally vanish completely: seeds, leaves, ferns still green, wooden dishes, a wooden whistle, and what may be the bridge from a stringed instrument. Somebody was making music out on that water two and a half thousand years ago.

The reconstructed crannog that stood on the loch for a quarter of a century burned down in about six minutes in June 2021. The collection survived it, and a new centre has opened on the other side of the water. Why do you think they built out on the loch instead of the shore?

In early 1883 the British government sent a Royal Navy gunboat to a crofting township on the west side of Skye. The ship...
09/14/2026

In early 1883 the British government sent a Royal Navy gunboat to a crofting township on the west side of Skye. The ship was HMS Jackal, and it landed marines at Meanish Pier in Glendale to arrest men who had put their beasts back onto grazing land that had been taken away from them.

John Macpherson of Milovaig was one of those men. Rather than let the whole township be occupied on his account, he and three others agreed to go and stand trial. In March 1883 they were sentenced to two months in Edinburgh's Calton Jail for breach of interdict. When they were let out in May there was a crowd of around a thousand people waiting at the prison door with two pipers at the front, and they were marched through the city like men coming home from a war.

That is usually where the telling stops, and it should not. The noise Glendale made helped force the Napier Commission into existence, and out of that came the Crofters Act of 1886 and security of tenure for every crofting family in the north. In 1904 the government bought the Glendale estate outright so the tenants could buy their own ground, the first arrangement of its kind in Scotland. Four men went to jail and the land finished up in the hands of the people who worked it. What do you think gave them the nerve to walk onto that boat?

09/14/2026

A knight lay in a stone pit in Liddesdale, catching grain that fell through the floorboards above him. He lived on it for seventeen days.

His name was Sir Alexander Ramsay, and in 1342 he was the finest soldier your ancestors had. He took a border castle back from the English and was made sheriff of Teviotdale for it. That post had belonged to Sir William Douglas of Liddesdale, and Douglas did not take his grievance to the king. He rode to Hawick, walked into the courtroom while Ramsay sat in judgement, and took him.

Hermitage Castle still stands, black and square and alone in an empty valley, and you can stand in the room above the pit. Douglas was pardoned for it. Eleven years later his own godson killed him.


Have you ever stood inside Hermitage, and did that valley feel as empty to you as it looks in photographs?

There is a bare hill in West Lothian where people came to bury their dead for the better part of three thousand years, a...
09/14/2026

There is a bare hill in West Lothian where people came to bury their dead for the better part of three thousand years, and hardly anybody goes to see it.

Cairnpapple sits about 300 metres up between Bathgate and Torphichen. On a clear day you can see the Bass Rock away to the east and the mountains of Arran to the west, the edge of the Highlands to the north and the Lammermuirs to the south. From one spot you are looking across the whole waist of Scotland. That is almost certainly why it was chosen.

Stuart Piggott stripped the summit in 1947 and 1948 and found layer stacked on layer. First a late Neolithic setting of stones with a cremation cemetery. Then a henge, a ring of standing stones inside a ditch with the bank thrown up on the outside, which is the arrangement you get when the ditch was never meant to keep anyone out. Then a cairn with stone cists built into it. Then a far bigger cairn heaped over the top of that, holding cremations in upturned urns. Then, centuries later again, plain graves laid out east to west in the Christian manner.

Different peoples, different gods, different languages, all of them climbing the same hill for the same reason: because the ones before them had. Is there a place like that near where your family comes from?

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