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Living in Scotland, one is conscious of the Holyrood Parliament and its significance in this 21st century.  Devolution has been a long time coming.

For example:

Crown Estates, Scotland

Devolution

The Crown Estate is working closely with both the Scottish and UK Governments to enable the transfer of The Crown Estate’s management duties in Scotland to Scottish Government, as recommended by the Smith Commission and reflected in the Scotland Act 2016. We will work to inform the process to ensure a swift and smooth transfer. We have a clear commitment to protect the interests of our staff, tenants, customers and the communities with whom we work throughout the process.

 
But looking back at how laws were made in Britain since the Roman occupation, it certainly has been a top down process. I’ve picked out some key historical precedents which the population had placed upon them by those ‘who must be obeyed’. These laws were often allowed to be applied even long after their relevance should have consigned them to a historical waste basket.

Ref:
http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/originsofparliament/birthofparliament/keydates/1215to1399

Magna Carta (1215) to Henry IV (1399)

1215 

King John agreed to Magna Carta which stated the right of the barons to consult with and advise the king in his Great Council

1236

Earliest use of the term Parliament, referring to the Great Council

1254 

Sheriffs were instructed to send elected representatives of the counties (knights of the shire) to consult with the king on taxation

1258 

At a Parliament at Oxford, the nobles drafted the “Provisions of Oxford” which calls for regular Parliaments with representatives from the counties

1265 

Simon de Montfort, in rebellion against Henry III, summoned a Parliament which included for the first time representatives of both the counties and towns

1278 

The Clerk of the Parliaments began to compile the Rolls of Parliament, the records of proceedings, particularly the petitions and acts passed

1295 

Model Parliament was made up of nobles and bishops, and two representatives for each county and for each town – the model for future Parliaments

1327 

From this date representatives of the counties (knights of the shire) and of the towns (burgesses) were always summoned together to Parliament

1332 

Knights of the shire and burgesses met together and were called the Commons

1341 

The Commons met separately from the Upper House for the first time

1352 

The Commons began to meet in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey

1362 

A statute established that Parliament must approve of all taxation

1376 

In the Good Parliament the Commons, led for the first time by an elected Speaker, prosecuted, or impeached, before the lords some of the king’s advisors

1397 

Commons moved from Chapter House of Westminster Abbey to its Refectory

1399 

Parliament deposed Richard II and Henry IV’s reign started

To

Reformation Parliament

Henry VIII’s Reformation Parliament, which sat from 1529 to 1536, fundamentally changed the nature of Parliament and of English government. The King summoned it in order to settle what was called his ‘great matter’, his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, which the Papacy in Rome was blocking.

Power shift 

In only a few short years, Parliament – under the direction and impetus of the King – made laws affecting all aspects of national life, especially in religious practice and doctrine, which had previously been under the authority of the Church alone. With the ground-breaking statutes of the 1530s Parliament became omnicompetent, that is, no area involved in the government of the realm was outside its authority.

Pope to the English Crown

It passed laws which transferred religious authority from the Pope to the English Crown, gave the Crown control over the wealth and buildings of the old Church, settled official religious doctrine, altered the succession by declaring various of the King’s children illegitimate, and inaugurated a wider programme of social, religious and economic reform. Henry VIII’s successors all equally used Parliament to pass their own legislation changing the nature, doctrine and authority of the Church in England.

Constitutional change

The Reformation Parliament thus asserted the supreme authority, or sovereignty, of Parliament in making statute, or more precisely the sovereignty of Crown-in-Parliament, the royal authority embodied in law passed by the monarch, Lords and Commons. As Henry VIII himself told the Parliament: “We be informed by our judges that we at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of parliament”. He realised that royal power was at its strongest when it was expressed through parliamentary statute.

Crown and Parliament

Parliament still existed only by the monarch’s will, but Henry VIII and his immediate successors knew that they could best effect their will through the assent of Parliament in statute. A century later the country was thrown into turmoil when the co-operation between the King and the other two parts of Parliament catastrophically broke down.

To

Elizabethan Parliaments

There are several ways of approaching our understanding of Parliament during its development in the 16th century, and there have been many debates between historians, especially concerning the Parliaments of Elizabeth I.

Free discussions

Peter Wentworth became a famous Member of Parliament in the reign of Elizabeth I after he was arrested on three separate occasions for arguing that the Commons should have the freedom to discuss whatever it wished, especially on the controversial topic of religion, without fear of reprisal from the Queen.

Some historians have been fascinated by characters such as Wentworth and see in them an indication of a rise in importance of the House of Commons which was maturing, becoming more self-confident and developing an organised oppositional stance to the Crown.

Interpretations and debates

Other historians have detected in this view of the 16th century Parliament a tendency to read history backwards from the 17th century conflict between King and Parliament, an outcome already known but still with murky origins. These historians have looked more carefully at the daily business of Parliament and do not see it full of opposition, organisation or ideology. Parliament, even under Elizabeth I, was summoned by the monarch and was a branch of royal government, and it would have been failing in its duty if there were constant disagreement with the monarch.

The high road to civil war?

While it is certainly incorrect to ignore Wentworth and the oppositional voices he and others like him represented, it needs to be remembered that throughout the 16th century and for most of the following century, Members of Parliament saw themselves as the monarch’s servants and Parliament as a place to deal with local matters and to pass necessary legislation.

It was not primarily a debating chamber where great issues of politics and ideology were to be talked over. Nor were the 16th and early 17th century Parliaments on a “high road to Civil War”. That cataclysmic event had its own more immediate causes, largely depending on the character and actions of the King, Charles I, and on extreme religious elements among members.

 Press Gangs :  Navy and Army

Press gangs were well known for the physical force they used in recruiting men into the Royal Navy during the 17th and 18th centuries. It was, however, a practice which Parliament had first sanctioned several centuries earlier.  

In time of war impressment – as the practice was known – was also a tactic employed by the Army to acquire extra men, usually when the non-violent methods of the recruiting sergeants failed to enlist sufficient numbers.   

Naval impressment

The Crown claimed a permanent right to seize men of seafaring experience for the Royal Navy, and the practice was at various times given parliamentary authority. Impressment was vigorously enforced during the naval wars of the 18th century by Acts passed in 1703, 1705, 1740 and 1779.  

The men pressed into service were usually sailors in the merchant fleets, but might just as often be ordinary apprentices and labourers. During the wars with France from 1793 to 1815, an impress service operated in British coastal towns. 

Although further laws passed in 1835 upheld the power to impress, in practice it fell into disuse after 1815.  

Army recruiting

During the 18th century, public perception of standing armies as instruments of despotic government obliged Parliament to keep Britain’s peacetime forces as small as possible.  

There were times, however, when involvement in continental and colonial wars made it necessary for Parliament to legislate hastily for the speedy recruitment of vast additional forces. 

These extra men were raised either through voluntary enlistment or by compulsion. Recruiting Acts were passed annually during the periods 1703-11, 1743-44, 1756-57, 1778-79, and in 1783, while the British army was engaged in major wars in Europe and elsewhere.  

The Acts offered a financial bounty or reward to men who enlisted for limited periods – in 1757 the sum was £3. They also gave powers to magistrates to press unemployed, but otherwise able-bodied men.

 Taxes the 18th Century Way

Today income tax is a ‘direct’ tax paid by almost every working adult in the UK. There are also ‘indirect’ taxes on a wide range of commodities and consumables.

The Land Tax

In the 18th century, however, the structure of taxation was quite different. Direct tax was only paid by the owners of land or property according to the size of their landholdings.

This tax – the ‘Land Tax’ – was paid by the more prosperous sections of society, from the wealthiest duke to the owners of business premises such as tradesmen, shopkeepers and innkeepers. The rate of tax was set by Parliament each year in a ‘Land Tax Act’ and was usually between two and four shillings in the pound, based on the value of each individual’s land or property.

An unusual feature of the tax was that it was administered not by government officials, but by unpaid local ‘commissioners’, gentry who were nominated by Parliament and whose names were included in the annual Land Tax Acts. Those who collected the tax were usually local men of modest means, such as farmers or tradesmen.

Indirect tax

The commonest indirect taxes paid by most people in the 18th century were excise duties. These were levied by Parliament on basic commodities – household essentials such as salt, candles, leather, beer, soap, and starch.

Duties on ‘luxury’ items, such as wine, silks, gold and silver thread, silver plate, horses, coaches and hats were aimed at wealthier consumers. Parliament raised or lowered duties, as well as adding new items or dropping others, depending on the needs of the time. In practice, however, consumers were largely unaware of these impositions as it was the traders who actually paid.

There were also ‘Assessed Taxes’, of which the best known is the Window Duty. This was first levied by Parliament in 1696 in support of William III’s war with France. House owners paid two shillings on properties with up to ten windows, and four shillings for between 10 and 20 windows. From 1778 the rate was made a variable one depending on the value of the property.

16 years before Adam was born, The Acts of Union took effect in 1707, uniting the separate Parliaments and crowns of England and Scotland and forming the single Kingdom of Great Britain. Queen Anne (already Queen of both England and Scotland) became formally the first occupant of the unified British throne, with Scotland sending forty-five Members to join all existing Members from the parliament of England in the new House of Commons of Great Britain, as well as 16 representative peers to join all existing peers from the parliament of England in the new House of Lords.

The year Adam Smith was born, attempts were made to increase wealth through agricultural reform:

After the union with England in 1707, there was a conscious attempt among the gentry and nobility to improve agriculture in Scotland. The Society of Improvers was founded in 1723, including in its 300 members dukes, earls, lairds and landlords.[5]In the first half of the century these changes were limited to tenanted farms in East Lothian and the estates of a few enthusiasts, such as John Cockburn and Archibald Grant. Not all were successful, with Cockburn driving himself into bankruptcy, but the ethos of improvement spread among the landed classes.[6]

Scottish Education in the 18th Century

In the Scottish Highlands, popular education was challenged by problems of distance and physical isolation, as well as teachers’ and ministers’ limited knowledge of Scottish Gaelic, the primary local language. Here the Kirk’s parish schools were supplemented by those established from 1709 by the Scottish Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Its aim in the Highlands was to teach English language and end the attachment to Roman Catholicism associated with rebellious Jacobitism. Though the SSPCK schools eventually taught in Gaelic, the overall effect contributed to the erosion of Highland culture.[11] Literacy rates were lower in the Highlands than in comparable Lowland rural society, and despite these efforts illiteracy remained prevalent into the nineteenth century.[12]

In the eighteenth century Scotland’s universities went from being small and parochial institutions, largely for the training of clergy and lawyers, to major intellectual centres at the forefront of Scottish identity and life, seen as fundamental to democratic principles and the opportunity for social advancement for the talented.[16] Chairs of medicine were founded at Marsichial College (1700), Glasgow (1713), St. Andrews (1722) and a chair of chemistry and medicine at Edinburgh (1713). It was Edinburgh’s medical school, founded in 1732 that came to dominate. By the 1740s it had displaced Leiden as the major centre of medicine in Europe and was a leading centre in the Atlantic world.[17] The universities still had their difficulties. The economic down turn in the mid-century forced the closure of St Leonard’s College in St Andrews, whose properties and staff were merged into St Salvator’s College to form the United College of St Salvator and St Leonard.[18]

In the eighteenth century Scotland’s universities went from being small and parochial institutions, largely for the training of clergy and lawyers, to major intellectual centres at the forefront of Scottish identity and life, seen as fundamental to democratic principles and the opportunity for social advancement for the talented.[16] Chairs of medicine were founded at Marsichial College (1700), Glasgow (1713), St. Andrews (1722) and a chair of chemistry and medicine at Edinburgh (1713). It was Edinburgh’s medical school, founded in 1732 that came to dominate. By the 1740s it had displaced Leiden as the major centre of medicine in Europe and was a leading centre in the Atlantic world.[17] The universities still had their difficulties. The economic down turn in the mid-century forced the closure of St Leonard’s College in St Andrews, whose properties and staff were merged into St Salvator’s College to form the United College of St Salvator and St Leonard.[18]

Access

Access to Scottish universities was probably more open than in contemporary England, Germany or France. Attendance was less expensive and the student body more representative of society as a whole.[19] Humbler students were aided by a system of bursaries established to aid in the training of the clergy. In this period residence became divorced from the colleges and students were able to live much more cheaply and largely unsupervised, at home, with friends or in lodgings the university towns. The system was flexible and the curriculum became a modern philosophical and scientific one, in keeping with contemporary needs for improvement and progress.[16] Scotland reaped the intellectual benefits of this system in its contribution to the European Enlightenment.[20

Achievements

Hugh Blair, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh

Many of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment were university professors, who developed their ideas in university lectures.[16] The first major philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment was Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), who held the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Glasgowfrom 1729 to 1746. A moral philosopher who produced alternatives to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, one of his major contributions to world thought was the utilitarian and consequentialistprinciple that virtue is that which provides, in his words, “the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers”. Much of what is incorporated in the scientific method (the nature of knowledge, evidence, experience, and causation) and some modern attitudes towards the relationship between science and religion were developed by his protégés David Hume (1711–76) and Adam Smith (1723–90).[21] Hugh Blair (1718–1800) was a minister of the Church of Scotland and held the Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh. He produced an edition of the works of Shakespeare and is best known for Sermons (1777–1801), a five-volume endorsement of practical Christian morality, and Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), an essay on literary composition, which was to have a major impact on the work of Adam Smith. He was also one of the figures who first drew attention to the Ossian cycle of James Macpherson to public attention.[22]

Hume became a major figure in the sceptical philosophical and empiricist traditions of philosophy. His scepticism prevented him from obtaining chairs at Glasgow and Edinburgh. He and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed what he called a ‘science of man’,[23] which was expressed historically in works by authors including James Burnett, Adam Ferguson, John Millar and William Robertson, all of whom merged a scientific study of how humans behave in ancient and primitive cultures with a strong awareness of the determining forces of modernity. Indeed, modern sociology largely originated from this movement.[24] Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) is considered to be the first work of modern economics. It had an immediate impact on British economic policy and still frames twenty-first century discussions on globalisation and tariffs.[25] The focus of the Scottish Enlightenment ranged from intellectual and economic matters to the specifically scientific as in the work of William Cullen, physician and chemist, James Anderson, an agronomist, Joseph Black, physicist and chemist, and James Hutton, the first modern geologist.[21][26]

In Part II I look at the history in the previous centuries before he was born and the couple of decades after his birth.  I have concluded, in so doing, that our lives are shaped by ancestral experience.  This first political economist, Adam Smith, was a product of a turbulent European history.  He thought very deeply about the need to generate income with a sure footing.  He cared about his own country of Scotland and it’s long suffering people’s. Very often, over time, other thinkers take up the baton and think they can apply the ideas of those who have gone before.  This can result in misapplication with often disastrous consequences.
Before Adam Smith was born in Kirkaldy, Fife, Scotland (Central Lowland area) huge turmoil had taken place in this predominantly Catholic country to bow to european influence and rid itself of Catholicism and the Gaelic language associated with it.

So let us set the scene. About 160 years before Adam was born, the Scottish Reformation had took placeand battles for the  of Britain had resulted in the last Catholic King being defeated by a Protestant, in Ireland, at the Battle of the Boyne, and his rule had huge consequences for Catholics in Ireland and Scotland.  

Many of us can trace our ancestors back 160 years, and may even know their religion and occupation.  In Fife, it was known some wealthy landowners plotted to assassinate the Catholic Cardinal at St Andrews. The conspirators were from Fife and may have been connected to Smith’s own wealthy landowning family, and military family members too.

Cardinal Beaton assassination

Relations became strained between James V and his uncle, Henry VIII of England, who sought to detach Scotland from its allegiance to the Holy See and bring it into subjection to himself. Henry sent two successive embassies to Scotland to urge James to follow his example in renouncing the authority of the Pope in his dominions. King James declined to be drawn into Henry’s plans and refused to leave his kingdom for a meeting with Henry. Hostilities broke out between the two kingdoms in 1542. The Cardinal was blamed by many for the war with England that led to the defeat at Solway Moss in November 1542……..

St. Andrews Castle

Plots against Cardinal Beaton had begun circulating as early as 1544. The conspirators were led by Norman Leslie, master of Rothes, and William Kirkcaldy of Grange. The Leslies had suffered from the expansion of Beaton’s interest in Fife. Kirkcaldy’s uncle, James Kirkcaldy of Grange, held Protestant sympathies and had been removed in 1543 as treasurer of the realm, through Beaton’s influence. They were joined by John Leslie of Parkhill, one of the Fife lairds angered at the execution of Wishart.[6] Leslie and Kirkcaldy managed to obtain admission to St Andrews Castle at daybreak of 29 May 1546, killing the porter in the process. They then murdered the Cardinal, mutilating the corpse and hanging it from a castle window.[7] At the time it was widely believed that his death was in the interests of Henry VIII of England, who regarded Beaton as the chief obstacle to his policy in Scotland; the Cardinal’s murder was certainly a significant point in the eventual triumph of Protestantism north of the Border.

At the time of his death, David Cardinal Beaton was Lord Chancellor of Scotland, Archbishop of St Andrews, and Cardinal Legate in Scotland.[8]

It was another complication that those who thought they should be monarch often thought the ‘Divine Right’ applied to their ruling of these lands. But even this  delusion was erased after the reign of James I of England and V of Scotland.

 From Brittanica:

Divine right of kings, political doctrine in defense of monarchical absolutism, which asserted that kings derived their authority from God and could not therefore be held accountable for their actions by any earthly authority such as a parliament. Originating in Europe, the divine-right theory can be traced to the medieval conception of God’s award of temporal power to the political ruler, paralleling the award of spiritual power to the church. By the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the new national monarchs were asserting their authority in matters of both church and state. King James I of England (reigned 1603–25) was the foremost exponent of the divine right of kings, but the doctrine virtually disappeared from English politics after the Glorious Revolution (1688–89).

Outlawing Catholicism: 

The Scottish Reformation

That Protestantism became Scotland’s main religion was in part due to committed preachers like George Wishart and John Knox, who actively recruited and enthused the most influential and powerful sections of Scottish society to the Protestant cause. It was also down to a failure of the Catholic Church to see the threat that Protestantism posed in Scotland, and to recognise its own shortcomings and internal problems. It was equally a political rebellion as much as a spiritual one, and the nobility who led the rebellion against Mary of Guise, Queen Mary’s mother and regent of Scotland in the late 1550s, were keen to move Scotland’s diplomatic axis away from Scotland’s age-old relationship with Catholic France. By the 1550s, this relationship was threatening to annex Scotland through the young queen (who was herself descended from the French aristocratic household of Guise-Lorraine and who was married to the Crown Prince of France, Francois) and move it towards Protestant England.That Protestantism became Scotland’s main religion was in part due to committed preachers like George Wishart and John Knox, who actively recruited and enthused the most influential and powerful sections of Scottish society to the Protestant cause. It was also down to a failure of the Catholic Church to see the threat that Protestantism posed in Scotland, and to recognise its own shortcomings and internal problems. It was equally a political rebellion as much as a spiritual one, and the nobility who led the rebellion against Mary of Guise, Queen Mary’s mother and regent of Scotland in the late 1550s, were keen to move Scotland’s diplomatic axis away from Scotland’s age-old relationship with Catholic France. By the 1550s, this relationship was threatening to annex Scotland through the young queen (who was herself descended from the French aristocratic household of Guise-Lorraine and who was married to the Crown Prince of France, Francois) and move it towards Protestant England.

After being firmly established in Scotland for nearly a millennium, Roman Catholicism was outlawed. Scotland retained a significant pre-Reformation Roman Catholic population, including parts of Banffshire, the Hebrides, and more northern parts of the Scottish Highlands.

In 1716, Scalan seminary was established in the Highlands and rebuilt in the 1760s by Bishop John Geddes, a well-known figure in the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment period. The Catholic religion is often found in ‘The Scottish Gaeldom’ referring to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and especially the Scottish Gaelic-speaking culture of the area. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_in_Scotland.

Outlawing the Gaelic language

Gaelic originally came to Scotland circa 500 A.D. as the northern Irish kingdom of Dalriada expanded into the western Highlands and Islands of Scotland, subsequently absorbing the Pictish kingdom in Northern Scotland, the British kingdom of Strathclyde in southwestern Scotland and part of Anglian Northumbria in the southeast, forming a largely Gaelic-speaking Scottish kingdom roughly coterminous with present-day Scotland by the 11th century. From the reign of Malcolm Canmore (1054-96), Gaelic lost its pre-eminence at court, then amongst the aristocracy to Norman French, and subsequently in the Lowlands through the establishment of English-speaking burghs in eastern and central Scotland, to Scots. The Lordship of the Isles was the political focus of Gaeldom throughout most of the ensuing Middle Ages, until its defeat at Harlaw in 1411.

By the 17th century Gaelic had retreated to the Highlands and Hebrides, which still retained much of their political independence, Celtic culture and social structure. These differences came to be seen as inimical to the interests of the Scottish and the subsequent British state, and from the late 15th century into the 18th a number of acts of the Scottish and British Parliaments aimed at promoting English-language education first amongst the aristocracy and subsequently amongst the general population, at outlawing the native learned orders, and finally on disarming and breaking the clans and outlawing highland dress and music, after the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden.

Religion has been the narrative  which has driven rational people to madness since humans first tried to use it to gain power over the minds of others.  Adam Smith not only had the Scottish perspective, but the English education at Oxford to weigh against his Scottish roots.

Continued in Part III

I’ve watched the House Martins arrive with the Swallows year after year. My neighbour will not tolerate their noise and mess in the eaves of his cottage and has netted the eaves to keep them out. Another building is now unavailable to these amazing travellers from Africa. Our swallows returned to our cottage and successfully reared 7 young  

Sadly it has been an awful year for butterflies, particularly the Small Tortoiseshell. As Autumn arrives we still hope to have some decent weather which might afford some of our favourite butterflies to get a chance at nectar to revive them. This year I have recorded sightings of mostly Green Veined White, some Ringlets, a few Red Admiral and a couple of day flying moths.
 I have been been told to use poisons to kill off weeds around our cottage. These are carcinogenic and despite claims they are safe, there is no research which convinces me. I will not be using Monsanto Roundup, nor any other weed killer.  I will try the bio degradable polythene instead- though seems I can’t avoid products made from oil.

 This land is our land, this land is your land. This land was made for you and me…….not.

Sun and rain produce the rainbow and give life to the earth.

I have written about the pair of crows who reared their young, year after year in the same nest in the large ash tree by our garden.  They have been shot at and persecuted over the years, but, despite that, their courage combined with instinct to reproduce never fails them.  This year they began again. Courtship, mating, nest repair, feeding up the female, her body expanding with her eggs. She began to settle in their nest and he brought her food.  She would occasionally fly with him to chase the buzzard circling overhead.  One day, these conversational birds fell silent.  The nest was empty.  I used my binoculars to scrutinise the nest.  No sign of them. 

One morning I noticed a stranger drive up and park on the fell road, which is high on the horizon above our cottage. His vehicle was pulling a purpose built small square trailer.  My stomach tightened as I thought I knew what it contained.  He opened it up. Yes. I was right. It was a legal trap for catching crows. He carried it on to the farmer’s land, set the trap, came back to his car and drove off.  I realised it was he who had caught and killed our crows.  We successfully fought a pheasant rearer who tried to deploy cages near us.  He has since ceased his pheasant rearing hobby after we confronted him with evidence he was not using the traps humanely and had him investigated. We hoped such traps would not be used here again, but how naive we were.

To add to our cumulative woes, the farmer’s tenant, who lives a short distance from us, decided to fasten a net over the deep eaves to prevent the annual migration of house martins who come from Africa all the way to nest at that cottage. Each year I have had swarms of them overhead, happily working, breeding well and mostly their young surviving to set off south as summer draws to a close. 

Coincidentally, a car drove by our cottage and I could tell the driver was unauthorised.  I went out to meet the stranger to find out what his business was here (we often get deer hunters).  I was very pleased to find it was an 81 year old gentleman revisiting his birth place – the cottage south of ours, where he was born in 1935.  He and his father were ‘herders’ he said.  They were tenant shepherds and the same landowner owned the land to the west of us as well as the land on which we lived, (which has since changed hands twice since we came here). We knew our cottage was previously a bothy which was used by generations of shepherds.  It has an extensive, well built pen area next to it for treating sheep.  The field in front of the cottage also held sheep and had a sheep dip, using the water from the nearby burn to pump up and flush out as the ewes were treated with toxic pesticides. The man told me there were hens kept at the bothy too so the shepherd had something to eat when busy out here. I told him the owner who bought the estate east of the drover road, was an architect.  He was proud of this cottage as he had demolished the old bothy, put 5ft of insulation underneath the foundations, before constructing probably one of the best insulated stone cottages in the area.  I had landscaped the dip and field area, so now we have a mature garden to attract birds, bees and butterflies.

It was good to meet this friendly gentleman.  He agreed the house martins were a welcome sight all the years they came to his family home.  I am so sad about the loss of our pair of breeding crows and the sight of the massing house martins.  However, we are compensated by the sight of a pair of swallows deciding our cottage window was a good place to build their nest.  This is only about 10ft from the ground, and it does have me worried as we and our dogs unavoidably walk so near to it. They knew that as they built it, so they seem to trust their young will not fall out into the mouth of a dog.  They will create quite a mess as they defecate on the window, but I will try to clean up when I can without disturbing them too much.

Completed nest

The River Clyde is about 100 miles of driving from where I live, though much nearer ‘as the crow flies ‘. A recent announcement that drilling for oil may soon commence there has created a campaign by Greenpeace to stop drilling prospects for this fossil fuel. Back in the 1980s the former Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine, blocked the oil boom off the West coast for fear drilling would interfere with the nuclear submarines travelling to and fro Faslane. The SNP have clearly stated they want Trident out – do they want the oil now instead? Scotland needs revenue and, having argued that revenue from North Sea oil was squandered by the Westminster based government, this might be an opportunity to secure any revenue entirely for the benefit of the Scottish population. But this is in contradiction to the renewables message the country has boasted after the SNP embraced wind farms which now cover thousands of hectares of Scotland’s once wild and untouched landscape.

The history of oil and its power implications is therefore of interest if not crucial.

Whilst 28 year old Prussian, Frederick the Great, was waging war on Austria during 1745, Empress Elizabeth of Russia was no doubt delighted that the first oil well and refinery were built in Ukhta by Fiodor Priadunov. The refinery produced a form of kerosene which was restricted to use in churches and monasteries. The same year oil sands were mined in Merkwiller-Pechelbronn, Alsace under Louis XV direction of a specially appointed Louis Pierre Ancillon de la Sabionniére. (The first modern refinery was built in Pechelbronn in 1857. This oil field was the birthplace of companies like Antar and Schlumberger. It was exhausted in 1970). Oil in tar form was found and used since ancient times, but the concept of drilling for it was what transformed its usefulness. This happened in Pennsylvania on 27th August 1859. A bi-product of oil was kerosene, which replaced whale oil for lighting lamps, and was so abundant it was much cheaper. This boom in oil changed the balance of power in the world to those who lead in how much a country can be said to produce.

In 2014 the Grangemouth Refinery, on the East coast of Scotland, owned by Ineos, was threatened with closure due to a dispute with unions over pay and conditions. This is the only refinery in Scotland.  It has used the vital North Sea gas in the process of refining the oil as it arrived onshore. As the gas ran low in supply, Ineos sought new supplies and purchased it from the results of fracking in the USA. This added to the expense of refining and it was running at a loss.  The only choice was to threaten to close the refinery, killing Scotland’s vital supply.  The First Minister held last minute talks with Ineos.  The next we heard was Ineos were going to invest millions in a new gas storage terminal and had obtained a license to secure gas through fracking on the land they owned around the refinery. This caused an uproar amongst anti fossil, particularly anti frackers, in Scotland.

I appreciate historically oil became the new gold.  All my life I have consumed food packaged in plastic protections, used and cast to waste thousands of plastic items, this keyboard on which I write is plastic as is the casing of the computer I am using. I am unable to imagine my life without plastic. Renewables such as solar panels and turbines, all use plastic to create their durable forms. Humans are dependent on oil, even the Bedouin Wahhabi,  who must use technology if wishing to network with other Wahhabi (as seems to be the case as war rages in the world today).

Oil products surround me, from the clothes I wear to the carpets I walk on to most items I use on a daily basis.  I am trapped by my dependence on products made from oil.  The Rockefeller family made their wealth from buying up failed leases from oil businesses.  By 1877 John D. Rockefeller owned some 90% of American oil businesses, his company became Standard Oil, which gave rise to Exxon, Amoco and Chevron. In 2014, his heirs to his vast fortune withdrew funds from fossil fuel investment as a symbolic gesture ahead of the United Nations summit on climate change, and 800 global investors followed suit. Now investment is directed at renewables. The Rockefeller Fund now aids those anti fracking groups and those fighting the destructive Keystone XL pipeline. They no longer fund tar sand oil extraction. But all that seems ironic to me.  Nothing has replaced oil with something which could then be said to be ecologically sound yet equally so incredible in its many applications. Unless something does replace it, we will continue to depend on it.  Our planet will become uninhabitable as a result, sooner rather than later.

Polymers such as acrylic, polystyrene, polyester – I thought them miracles of science as they developed over my lifetime.  Now we realise they are indestructible and end up in our oceans, ingested by ocean life which dies as a result, tipping the ecosystem into the end game. The plastics I have seen become pervasive over my 68 years have found their way into the oceans and we now see the heartbreaking results.  New plastics will degrade, but these older plastics may take 100 years to finally decompose through abrasion, oxidative degradation and other chemical and biochemical processes. If a mussel eats plastic it will be retained in its gut and is likely to be taken up in the food chain, the plastic then in the gut of another creature, which may have more than one plastic eating creature ingested.

Like many bits of plastic detritus they will be recycled into a new life as part of another product, but, like the recycled plastic which is used to make up the material that forms turbine blades for windmills, that is likely to be the last time they will be recycled.  Multiple plastics, combined to create a solid mass, become too complex to recycle again.  The end destined for many, such as turbine blades, is – horror of horrors – landfill.

TICK, TOCK

Cold easterly wind today, but not the violent winds which blew in from the Atlantic recently, courtesy of the Jetstream.  As I write, the sun is trying to break through, but it is on its way to sinking in the west.

A male spider has climbed the wall in front of me, seeking a partner.

Frogspawn appeared in the ditch near our cottage exactly as it has year after year, on March 10th.

The Equinox will occur on the 20th March, but an amazing lining up of the earth, moon and sun will also take place and we may see the eclipse from our cottage.

The garden is now maturing after 6 years working hard to transform it from a muddy field used by sheep.  It is a joy to watch, season by season, as the variety of trees, shrubs, plants develop and spread themselves.

This short piece is for me to acquaint myself with the process of using a HUDL and a cheap keyboard to get my blog going again.

View from the cottage door