Happy Valentine’s Day, Sir James!
The first Valentine’s Day thoughts, as we know them weren’t sent until hundreds of years after the death of the Good Sir James. Nonetheless, it seemed a good title for a piece on how James spent...
View ArticleThe Not Quite Battle of Irvine
Throughout history, the story of the American colonists’ fight for freedom has been repeated: small and weak countries fighting against those bigger and larger. The Scottish Wars of Independence are...
View ArticleThis Day in Scottish History: The Abdication of John Balliol
Once again, we have a winner! An e-mail has been sent out to the winner of the Freedom Hop. ~~ July 10 is a date that was to have great impact on the Scottish Wars of Independence. Before Robert...
View ArticleA Kingdom Without Castles
It was a hot and muggy July in 1314 at Stirling Castle on the eastern coast of Scotland. Good King Robert, the Bruce, had just won a great victory at Blàr Allt a’ Bhonnaich or the Battle of...
View ArticleIain The Pict on Scottish Heroes
Please welcome today my friend Ian Colville. In a virtual case of It’s a Small World, I ‘met’ Ian, as best as I can remember (Ian will hopefully correct me if I’m wrong), when he stopped by my blog or...
View ArticleBraveheart: William Wallace by Eliza Knight
Many years ago, tired of the oppression upon his country, a man rose up from the shadows, one without a well-known name, seemingly from nowhere, and led his country in the Scottish Wars for...
View ArticleTarah Scott on the MacGregors and the Highland Clearances
How does a woman tell her betrothed that she murdered her first husband? Elise Kingston is a wanted woman. Nothing, not even Highlander Marcus MacGregor, will stop her from returning home to...
View ArticleSt. Fillan’s Heavenly Help
The medieval mind saw things rather differently than many people today. It was a world, I believe, where the physical and the supernatural, or spiritual, lived in…dare I say…communion? No pun...
View ArticlePart Two: St. Fillan and the Bruce
So now we’ve laid some of the ground work, the background to Bruce’s Heavenly Help. Bruce is at perhaps the lowest point of his life, not merely personally, but in the outlook for his country in its...
View ArticleMore on St. Fillan and the Bruce
We started the story… …of Inchaffray Abbey, and Bruce’s endowment to it in PART ONE, I talked about Bruce’s decision to give an endowment for a chapel to St. Fillan and a brief history of the early,...
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