I found this drawing in the Glasgow Mechanics Magazine of 1824 and challenged Twitterfolk to guess its purpose.
Guesses included: haggis-catcher, tattie picker, horse dung collector, strawbaler, and I quote “A musical instrument for the separation of confused pine martens in the wild into groups for strip the willow“.
Alas, it is *just* an early snow plow..
In 1888, landless crofters at Aignish demanded a tenant farmer vacate so they could divide his land up for crofts. The Riot Act was partially translated into Gaelic and 11 men were arrested. The marines, police, and the Royal Scots were sent to quell the riot.
It really was fixed-bayonets vs. cas chroms. The arrested men all got sentences of about a year. Aignish Farm wasn’t broken up into crofts until 1905. A memorial statue now stands at the site of the riot.
It would seem that many of the London papers were on the side of the crofters, judging from the positive language used to discuss the riot. For context, the Illustrated London News published these sketches of Lewis:
Aignish Memorial. Am Baile https://www.ambaile.org.uk/detail/en/21987/1/EN21987-aignish-memorial-isle-of-lewis.htm
Illustrated London News. 21st January 1888, pg. 1.
Illustrated London News, 28th January 1888, pg. 13
Penny Illustrated Paper. 4th February 1888, pg. 1.
Since 1812, a minute in Crimond, Aberdeenshire has been about 2 seconds shorter than the rest of the world’s. The church clock keeps 61 minutes in an hour. The face and mechanism was corrected in 1948, but angry locals soon had their own time zone reinstated.
The clock was paid for and donated to Crimond by James Laing of Haddo, a slave owner, who made his money in the West Indies.
Skye crofter, Jonathan MacLeod (d.1874) was shot in the leg at Waterloo and lived with the bullet in his calf for ~60 years. When his son Angus was interred with him at Kilmartin, his grandchildren found the bullet in the earth, 72 years after it had been shot.
Dundee Evening Telegraph. 24th March 1887. pg. 2
1887 MACLEOD, ANGUS (Statutory registers Deaths 112/2 7)
In 1898, the Dundee Courier reported a man’s skeleton was found inside a hayrick on the outskirts of Newport. As it was the previous year’s hayrick, it’s thought he fell asleep and was accidentally smothered by the others building the stack.
Dundee Courier. 12th November 1898. pg. 6.
In October 1833, a dead 83ft fin whale washed ashore at Rosyth. Locals built a roof and walls around it and charged admission to buy coal and meal for the parish poor.
For comparison, the average Atlantic fin whale is 65ft. The longest ever recorded was 85ft.
Perthshire Courier. 10th October 1833. pg. 2.
Though the stocks as a punishment was far less common in Scotland than in England and “disgracing punishments” were considered old-fashioned by the 1790s… ..the last person to made a “laughing stock” in Fordoun was in July 1841, during the Paldy Fair.
After a rainstorm in December 1916, South Uist awoke to find their white cattle turned completely black. The rains had coated everything on the island with “a strange black dust like burnt gunpowder”.
The press gave no explanation at the time as to what the source of the strange “burnt gunpowder”. Suggestions from Twitter followers were industrial pollution from the Central Belt and battle dust from the fighting in France. The winds were strong from the Southeast that night so both ideas are plausible.
It must’ve been gey blowy out in Strathspey in December 1879…
In Jan 1881 after mistaking a satirical article for news, a Free Church minister on Skye warned that Britain was at war with Russia and that Gladstone had been arrested as a spy. Fishermen kept off the sea for fear of Russian warships. The rest of Skye laughed.
Though their name was kept out the papers, enough hints were dropped that I think the minister was Joseph Lamont, whose congregation was at Snizort.
