Blethering Skite

Site Name: Cinn Trolla Alternative Name: Kintradwell

Country: Scotland County: Sutherland Type: Broch or Nuraghe

Nearest Town: Loth

Map Ref: NC92930807

Latitude: 58.048774N  Longitude: 3.815623W

Condition: 3 Ambience: no data Access: no data Accuracy: 5

OP: @[email protected]

Here's  yer Scotstober prompts! Have at it, an a that.

The Picts? Think of the confederation of tribes that came together to oppose the Romans, then occupied the central and eastern parts of Scotland north of the Forth-Clyde line for several hundred years after the Romans' departure. They were converted to Christianity in the century following a visit by St Columba in 565.

After about 850 the Picts were slowly incorporated into the Scots Kingdom of Alba under King Kenneth MacAlpin, and over time their separate identity was lost to that of the Scots. Find out more from our Historical Timeline.

We know most about the Picts from the carvings they left from the period between the completion of their conversion in about 650 to their eventual assimilation into Alba. These can be seen dotted spectacularly across much of the eastern side of Scotland north of the River Forth.

One of the largest collections of Pictish carved stones in Scotland is gathered together in the museum in the old schoolhouse in the village of Meigle, in Perthshire.

This is an expanded version of a piece I wrote for The National a few days ago. I’m reposting it here with some additions in the light of Marr’s apology for his insulting and ignorant comments about the Gaelic language and its place in Scottish culture.

Wait until he finds out that Waverley station is named in Gaelic too. Gaelic for Waverley is Waverley.

Seacliff is a little known corner of East Lothian five miles east of North Berwick and immediately to the south-east of Tantallon Castle, of which it offers some of the finest views available. It comprises an estate including the sad ruin of a once great house; a beautiful beach looking north towards Bass Rock; a remarkable, tiny harbour; and the almost hidden ruins of a castle. Truly a wonderful slice of Undiscovered Scotland!

The Aberdeen University professor has worked tirelessly to promote and encourage a revival in Doric and is proud of the results.

Tom McKean tells the story of how he once approached the BBC in Aberdeen, offering to provide a news bulletin in Doric on a daily basis.

As the director of the Elphinstone Institute, which was set up in the city in 1995 to celebrate, research and promote the traditions of the north-east and north of Scotland, he believed it would be another positive way of preserving the region’s rich language.

Whatever critics might argue, matters have changed for the better since the grim days of the 1950s when school pupils were threatened with the belt if they used the same vocabulary in the classroom which was part and parcel of their lives at home.

How To Spin Yarn Using A Drop Spindle

The musical Lifeline tells the story of Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of antibiotics, as these revolutionary drugs continue to lose their efficacy

The medications that doctors use to treat bacterial, fungal and other microbial infections are becoming less and less effective around the world as microbes evolve to survive exposure to the drugs. In 2021 antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections killed 1.14 million people and played a role in the deaths of an estimated 3.57 million others. The best estimates, released just this month, show that 39 million people will die of such infections between 2025 and 2050.

Today’s dire situation is the result of the overuse or improper use of these microbe-killing compounds in both medicine and in agriculture. As Lifeline dramatizes, Fleming saw this coming as far back as 1945, the year he shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery. “The greatest possibility of evil ... is the use of too-small doses, so that, instead of clearing up the infection, the microbes are educated to resist penicillin,”

In 2016 Meghan Perry, an infectious diseases clinician at the University of Edinburgh, had an idea: to teach kids about antibiotic resistance with a musical. So she suggested it to composer and theater company co-founder Robin Hiley, the spouse of one of her colleagues.

“I was initially perhaps a bit skeptical about this being a good topic for a musical,” Hiley says. “But she was persistent, as clinician scientists are.” The earliest iteration of the musical was a children’s play called The Mould That Changed the World, with students playing singing and dancing bacteria and telling the story of Fleming’s discovery of penicillin.

Over time, Hiley, the show’s composer and lyricist, found himself drawn to Fleming’s life story. The Scottish physician treated soldiers during World War I, when the frontline treatment for infected wounds were harsh antiseptics that often did more harm than good. His discovery of bacteria-killing compounds later turned the once-shy scientist into an international celebrity.

Vatersay has been the most southerly inhabited island in the Western Isles since 1912, when Mingulay was abandoned. Man has lived here for thousands of years, but Vatersay only really began to feature on the map as a result of land reform. By 1906 the island had been owned for many years by Lady Gordon Cathcart, who had visited it just once during the period. Her tenants farmed the whole island as a single holding.

Pressure on land throughout the Western Isles led one man to sail to the island and invoke an ancient right by erecting a thatched dwelling and lighting a fire within a single day. He was followed by others, who together became known as the Vatersay Raiders. Some were rewarded with imprisonment, but in 1909 the Government responded more positively by buying the island and divided it up into 58 crofts. Amongst the new residents was a very young Nan MacKinnon, who would late help preserve a vast wealth of traditional songs and folklore about Vatersay and Mingulay.

Oil and gas companies are regularly breaching their legal produced water permit allowances, Oceana’s report claims. Yet, in line with official government reporting requirements, these breaches are not registered as accidental oil spills. Indeed, Sea Slick counts a total of 723 permit breaching incidents in the last three-and-a-half years – that’s equivalent to 17 oil or chemical spills each month.

Currently these permit breaches aren’t counted as accidents. They’re not really counted as anything – other than permit breaches. If these unaccounted-for permit breaches are factored into official government data for accidental oil spills, Oceana estimates that the volume of oil spilling into UK seas increases by at least 43%.

The oil and gas sector are keen to reassure the public that chronic oil pollution can be quickly dispersed and poses a low risk to marine life or human health. Certainly, if incidents were rare, this might be a more persuasive argument. But they aren’t.

Getting serious about sanctions

Oceana’s research highlights that oil and gas companies have only been fined on two occasions in the last five years. One was for just £7,000.

The UK government has found more money for development costs for a nuclear power plant. Ironically, after claiming the cupboard was bare and they had to withdraw winter fuel allowance from pensioners who were expecting the money to help them get through this winter, they have decided to invest much more in nuclear power - which will increase the cost of energy bills not decrease them.

Here are three questions answered

In Orkney, out of all those aged 16+ years (18,448), 11,268 people are economically active - this number excludes students who may also be in employment. The information from Scotland's Census 2022 also records that 6,840 people are economically inactive. This means that they are not in paid employment. Of those who have retired, there are 5,001 who are economically inactive. ​

OP : @[email protected]

The oil and gas industry has been using the basin as a free disposal site for decades.

Working at that time for the environmental group Greenpeace, Marco Kaltofen was racing after a stunning realisation: that in many offshore oil and gas settings, oilfield waste is simply being dumped right into the ocean.

Fast-forward almost four decades, and an analysis by DeSmog shows that companies have been legally dumping toxic and radioactive oilfield waste into the North Sea — Europe’s arm of the North Atlantic — for decades, with largely unknown consequences for a sensitive and beloved marine environment. 

Modern oil and gas development involves the use of many toxic and potentially toxic chemicals: biocides and scale inhibitors, meant to kill bacteria and other lifeforms that can clog a well; corrosion inhibitors, which keep oilfield pipes from corroding; and a class of chemicals known as emulsion breakers or demulsifiers, whose purpose is often to break apart mineral material and lubricate fluids to keep product flowing through the piping of an oil or gas well.

Drilling also creates a particular type of toxic waste: produced water,  a naturally salty fluid laden with carcinogens, heavy metals, and naturally occurring radioactive elements, that surges to the surface during drilling. (Many wells generate more produced water than they do oil or gas).

A Stunning Amount of Waste

In 2022, the last year for which reporting is complete, oil and gas companies operating in the territorial waters of Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, and the UK have dumped 244.4 million cubic metres of produced water into the North Sea —  discharged from just over 200 of the region’s 614 oil and gas installations. That’s enough to fill the Roman Colosseum 185 times over with oilfield waste, or flood the entire city of Amsterdam waist-high each year.

The juxtaposition between Labour’s bid to ‘crack down’ on benefit cheats and the new revelations that Sir Keir Starmer accepted accommodation worth £20,000 to help his 16-year-old son study for his GCSE exams, is brutal....

Dr Jay Watts commented: “The idea that we should be suspicious of benefits claimants for ‘fleecing the system’ has been erroneously sold as fact for the past decades, with devastating effects on hearts, bodies, and minds. Ideas of moral worth get inside us. Starmer’s words are violent and dangerous.”

She’s absolutely right. Starmer has commandeered the narrative of the tabloid right.

Britain has become a country with such a narrow bandwidth of politics that the main political parties are virtually indistinguishable in policy terms and the public discourse of social policy is simply grotesque, shaped as it has been for decades by the right-wing press to the extent that this has been inculcated and normalised for millions of people.

The silence from Labour on the rise of fascism in the summer and the misdirection about the way to make real savings and strengthen the economy is a giveaway about a party hollowed-out, purged and totally captivated by their wealthy corporate supporters. Labour is as far away from its roots and origins as its ever been.

Conclusion: towards a history of the multilingual city

Early modern London was multilingual. In fact, it was much more multilingual than this article has been able to show. Not far from where Philipine Seneschal and her mother-in-law insulted each other in French and English, two men named Manteo and Wanchese were teaching their Algonquian language to Thomas Hariot. 

London's migrants spoke Welsh and Scots and Portuguese as well as French and Dutch.

One commentator described the city as England's ‘third universitie’, where you could learn Chaldean, Syriac and Arabic, as well as Polish, Persian and Russian, among ‘divers other Languages fit for Embassadors and Orators, and Agents for Marchants, and for Travaylors, and necessarie for all Commerce or Negotiation whatsoever’.

The stranger churches’ records testify to the presence in London of Turks and Swedes, Spaniards, Germans and Greeks. The voices of the city's small but growing African population no doubt brought new languages to London's streets, even if we lack the detailed and linguistically rich archives of their experiences which we are lucky to have for other groups of strangers.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/transactions-of-the-royal-historical-society/article/migrant-voices-in-multilingual-london-15601600/FD8DBD9E4236084E7386FF9A7124CF47

An autocratic wave has crept up on us in the U.S. and over the world in the last decade. Democracy and autocracy were once seen as two separate and distant worlds with little in common, and that the triumph of one weakened the other. Now, however, autocrats across the globe, in poor and wealthy nations, in established and nascent democracies, and from the right and left, are using the same tactics to dismantle democracies from within.

To answer these questions, we first need to identify how the new breed of autocrats attains and retains power: their hallmark strategy is deception. How does a roll call of modern autocrats, and wannabe autocrats, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, India’s Narendra Modi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro implement this modus operandi for the latest model of autocracy? They twist information and create confusion within a façade of democracy as they seize power. They do not overthrow democracy through military coups d'état but by undoing core democratic principles, weakening the rule of law, and eliminating checks and balances between branches of government.

In Scotland, the government distinguishes between "accessible-rural" and "remote-rural" regions, the latter being considerably more isolated from urban hubs. This distinction is more than theoretical—it has implications for infrastructure, most notably transport, food availability, and now, broadband connectivity, which remains alarmingly inadequate in many remote-rural areas.

The research highlights that over 80% of businesses in Scotland's remote regions are small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), many of which cannot operate effectively nor efficiently because they lack access to basic services those in urban regions take for granted.

In this study, the team urges policymakers to adopt a more nuanced understanding of remote-rural areas when considering infrastructure investments. By addressing the challenges faced by such communities, governments might create conditions that enable businesses not just to survive, but to thrive, and so preclude the exodus of SMEs to the cities.

"The feeling of being strapped to a political entity in permanent decline is amplified when you realise that in 'defeating the Tories' you've replaced Sunak's economics with Osborne's. Labour is a replicant of the Conservative Party circa 2010"

We are stuck in a place that looks and feels utterly different from 2014, yet is still mired in the same issues and questions. While the Unionist camp is in gleeful mode after the last general election, you are also struck by the extent to which little has changed. Writing in The Scotsman Joyce McMillan notes (‘Why cock-a-hoop Scottish unionists are actually LOSING the argument‘) : “…what is striking about the Scottish unionist cause, as it marks the tenth anniversary of its victory, is how little it has moved on, in these ten years, from the wholly negative “project fear” approach that delivered that result, but also drove much larger numbers than ever before into the independence camp. There is, after all, something profoundly wrong and reactionary about a Union which can only survive by constantly telling the people of Scotland how broken and dependent on handouts the place is, how useless they and their elected government are, and what fools they were ever to vote for it.”

On 22nd of September 1692 the last eight people were hanged for witchcraft in the US. Nineteen were hanged overall, with six other deaths during the Salem witch trials.

Between February 1692 and May 1693 more than 200 people were accused of witchcraft in  colonial Massachusetts . Thirty were found guilty.

The last person in Scotland  to be tried and executed for witchcraft was Janet Horne. In 1727 she and her daughter were arrested and jailed in Dornoch.

The stone that marks the site of Janet Horne’s burning can still be seen in Littletown, although the date on the stone — 1722 — is wrong, it should read 1727. Nine years after her death the Witchcraft Acts were repealed in Scotland and England and it became unlawful to execute anyone for alleged witchcraft.

Craigmillar Castle lies just three miles south-east of the centre of Edinburgh. Yet while the city features in the distant views from the castle's walls, step inside them and you could be in a different time and place. Craigmillar Castle is simply one of the most completely preserved medieval castles in Scotland.

Craigmillar began life as the tower house that still forms the core of the castle. This was constructed around 1400, probably by Sir George Preston, one of a line of Prestons who played a large part in civic life in Edinburgh over several hundred years.

What makes Craigmillar special is the extent to which its underlying structure survives. The inner courtyard may now be home to two very impressive trees that were certainly not there in the Prestons' time in the castle. But the walls of almost all the structures of the castle survive, together with all the vaulted floors. This means access is possible up to roof level in the tower house and first floor level in large parts of the rest of the building. There is also a complete wall walk around two sides of the curtain wall.

The 19,001 pensioners across the Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire will be among 58,817 in the north of Scotland to lose the winter fuel payment this year – a drop of 88 per cent.

Numbers from the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) reveal the scale of the problem for many – In the Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire seat of 21,123 pensioners just 2,122 now qualify while 19,001 lose out.

In Caithness Sutherland and Easter Ross all 20,320 pensioners will lose the winter fuel payment, just 2,616 on pension credit now qualify. And Finally in Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey 19,496 people will lose the benefit and just 2,034 will get it.

At the end of July Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced only those on pension credit would receive the payment, the Scottish Government followed suit saying it had no other choice amid an estimated loss of £160 million.

Politicians from across the political divide have been almost unanimous in warning that the loss of the Pension Age Winter Heating Payment in the north will be felt more deeply because fuel poverty rates are already higher than the rest of the UK.

The home of two of Scotland's most important artists has been reassembled in the Hunterian Art Gallery. 

Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald were both members of The Four, a quartet from Glasgow that included Margaret’s sister Frances and her husband James Herbert MacNair. The Four met at the Glasgow School of Art when they studied there at the end of the 19th century. The men were architecture students who incorporated Art Nouveau into their designs, leading to a distinctive Glasgow Style. The Mackintoshes lived in a house at 6 Florentine Terrace, in the Hillhead neighborhood, close to the current location of the Hunterian Art Gallery.

Ironically, many buildings including the Mackintosh home were demolished to make way for new buildings of the University of Glasgow, which runs the Hunterian. When 6 Florentine Terrace was demolished in the 1960s, the legacy of the late Mackintoshes was already well-established, so it was decided that the furnishings of most of the house would be preserved and documented as best as possible.

In truth Better Together of 2014 was more of a jump scare than a referendum campaign. My favourite piece of Unionist propaganda was when Defence Secretary Philip Hammond suggested that Scotland would be more vulnerable to attack by aliens if we were to become independent.

The No campaign veered between love bombing from Trinny and Susannah to routine threats of harm. As many noted, it was like being in a coercive relationship.

As I wrote last month – the attacks on devolution – Labour’s proposed direct rule means that “Labour are abandoning the institution they created, an institution that was supported by 74% of Scots who voted for a devolved parliament to take control of Scottish affairs. They are breaking the Sewell Convention, The Smith Commission, and the Scotland Act of 2012.”

The challenges and context of 2014 is completely different to what we face today. England, Britain, Europe and global geopolitics have morphed into new and darker forms.

Yes needs massively updated, overthrown, re-imagined and re-conceived.

The litany of lies and broken promises by Better Together can laid out before us like a shroud. But the Yes movement needs an overhaul that’s more radical than anyone is talking about (yet).

New research exploring the effects of the Low Emission Zone (LEZ) in Glasgow has found that while traffic flow has remained largely unchanged since the Zone was enforced, air quality has improved.

The study found a statistically significant reduction in traffic flow on High Street during weekdays resulting in notable decreases in normalized NO2 levels of between 25% and 27% on weekdays. A 35% drop of NO2 on weekends was also observed.

In contrast, traffic patterns on Hope Street remained stable, yet statistically significant decreases in NO2 levels of between 9% and 13% on weekdays were still observed, suggesting the establishment of the LEZ discourages high emission vehicles in the city center and helps improve air quality.

Study Results:-

https://findingspress.org/article/123382-did-the-implementation-of-low-emission-zone-in-glasgow-change-the-traffic-flow-and-air-quality

It is against this backdrop that Cold War Scotland explores the stories of Scots at the centre of this global conflict. The National Museum of Scotland exhibition showcases how the impact of that war still lingers in Scottish politics, culture and memory.

The exhibition starts with a series of short films depicting how Scotland became a cold war battleground. The geographic position of Scotland between the US and the USSR, and direct access to the Atlantic meant Scotland would play a vital role for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (Nato) defences. Faslane, on the banks of Gare Loch, is the site of the UK’s only nuclear submarine base. The show demonstrates how nuclear power and nuclear weapons came to dominate peoples’ minds – and how Scottish communities were explicitly told they were nuclear targets.

Cold war on display

There are dozens of objects on display to “trigger” the sensitive gen Xer’s consciousness, including secret intelligence documents and a map of central Scotland marked to highlight targets under threat of nuclear attack.

The giant twin steel-making boilers of Ravenscraig in Motherwell were always visible from my bedroom in Hamilton. Our neighbour worked there. “That’s the first place The Russians will hit around here son,” he told me, muscly iron ore arms folded. He was right. It is on the map. As is Faslane, close to where I currently live.