Scotland As An Addiction, Part 2

The Stacks of Yesnaby, Orkney

There is the music of course. You think it's all flutes, drums, chanters, and bagpipes? The Scots have a shite pile of musicians and artists out of a population of five million (spread over 30,000 square miles). The Dutch have maybe ten whole bands with their seventeen million piled into 16,000 square.

And there's the food. If you have an open mind, you'll love the haggis – good peasant food and protein for a people who seldom had it. But if you have any sense, you'll hate the skirlie—a paste made of half-cracked oatmeal groats that sit as dry as the Gobi in your mouth and needs a pint of gravy to choke down. You'll find some of the best seafood in the world, delivered to the local fishmonger daily. You'll know the fishmonger's name, her husband, all her children, and you'll copy out a recipe for the kelp that the crabs come nestled in—the only kelp recipe you'll ever have.

The softies from down South didn't always run things. The Scots were their own people until bankruptcy, where they spent a third of the country's capital on their own malaria-stricken colony in Panama. But it's what they did with their newfound poverty that makes the story—they became the brains and the cattle merchants of the Union, even if England forced Union down their throats with an army on the border. Scotland produced rabble-rouser Hugh Miller, the first electric light, philosopher David Hume, the first insurance companies (for the widows to bury their dead), the economist Adam Smith, the premier geologist James Hutton, the first viable steam engine, the anatomist Alexander Monro Secundus, five universities compared to England's two, Joseph Black (Dr. CO₂), the Encyclopedia Britannica, and our own Rabbie Burns. Even Thomas Carlyle came out of the Scottish Enlightenment, and Voltaire was a paid-up subscriber to the local newsletters.

More on Scotland Next Week

Neist Lighthouse