Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 36 on 14/12/2007.

This article is 7 months old and some information provided may be time sensitive. Please check all details of events, tours, opening times and other information before travelling or making arrangements.

50 Things You Never Knew about Scotland

ED PEARCE ENLIGHTENS US ALL

1. Aberdeen has won the ‘Britain in Bloom’ competition 11 times and the overall ‘Scotland in Bloom’ competition an unprecedented 39 times in a row. At one point after winning a period of nine years straight, Aberdeen was banned from the Britain in Bloom competition in order to give another city a chance.

2. Auld Lang Syne was sung more than 150 years before Robert Burns discovered it. He transcribed it from “an old man singing” and added at least two new verses. He sent it to his friend James Johnson, the publisher of Scots Musical Museum, as an old Scottish song but Johnson delayed publishing it until after Burns’ death. The American bandleader Guy Lombardo popularised the association of the song with the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve in the early 1930s.

3. It was the Romans who brought the first bagpipes to Britain. By 1500 the bagpipe had displaced the harp as the instrument of choice in the Scottish Highlands. The use of the bagpipes as a military instrument inspired the Highlanders in their fight so much that after the 1746 Battle of Culloden, the English banned them. During this period carrying a bagpipe was considered to be as much a crime as carrying arms as it was classified an “instrument of war”.

4. John Logie Baird, (1888- 1946) the inventor of the television was an inventor from a young age. As a boy in his hometown of Helensburgh, Baird installed not only a telephone exchange in his father’s manse but also a system of electric lighting, even entanglin.....

To read the rest of this article you can buy this issue or subscribe to Scotland Magazine to have every issue delivered direct to your door.

By Ed Pearce

Section : Scotland Trivia

Page number : 26