It was old fashioned good luck that saved the near-derelict cottage known locally as the ‘old Davidson cottage’. Local tradition had it that in the mid-1800s it was tenanted by Alexander Davidson whose grandsons were the Davidson side of what has become the Harley-Davidson motor empire.
THE NORTH-EAST town of Montrose has a heritage and quality of municipal statuary that is arguably unmatched in Scotland. A sculpture trail throughout the town includes many figures by a son of the town who has been largely unacknowledged beyond Montrose but who is beginning to be recognised as one of the most important Scottish sculptors of the 20th century.
THE NORTH-EAST of Scotland has been a creative cradle of artists, singers, poets, laying claim even to being the wellspring of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, whose father farmed the croft of Clochnahill, near clifftop Dunnottar Castle, before seeking a new future in Ayrshire.
1940: Squadron Leader John Betty, an instructor with No.8 Flight Training School, Montrose in the raised seat of a Miles Master. At 11a.m. on 11th November 1918 the Armistice came into effect marking the end of World War One.
2013 MARKS the Centenary Year of Britain’s first operational military airfield which was established in north-east Scotland at Montrose, between Dundee and Aberdeen. The Montrose Air Station Heritage Centre (MASHC) is finalising its preparations to celebrate 100 years of military flight from 1913 – 2013.
LAST OCTOBER my wife and I took a holiday in a cottage at Dorlin, on the north side of the Ardnamurchan Peninsula.
Imagine if, in this day and age, it was a condition of a man’s employment that he was required to provide a female worker to share his duties. Two hundred years ago, in some parts of Scotland, this wasn’t just commonplace it was automatic.
PROPERTY WAS once the foundation of wealth so it tells us much about the prosperity of the area that more than one thousand castles and castle ruins are recorded in the north-east of Scotland.
MONEY, INFLUENCE and patronage were almost essential for promotion in the eighteenth century British army and, as 4th son of the 2nd Duke of Gordon, General Lord Adam Gordon had all three.