Billiards Room On Visit To Kinloch Castle On island Of Rum Inner Hebrides Scotland

Tour Scotland travel video, with Scottish music, of the billiards room on visit to Kinloch Castle on the Island of Rum one of the Small Isles of the Inner Hebrides. Billiards has a long and rich history stretching from its inception in the 15th century, to the wrapping of the body of Mary, Queen of Scots, in her billiard table cover in 1586, through its many mentions in the works of Shakespeare, including the famous line " let's to billiards " in Antony and Cleopatra, and through the many famous enthusiasts of the sport such as: Mozart, Louis XIV of France, Marie Antoinette, Immanuel Kant, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, George Washington, French president Jules Grévy, Charles Dickens, George Armstrong Custer, Theodore Roosevelt, Lewis Carroll, W.C. Fields, Babe Ruth, Bob Hope, and Jackie Gleason. Cue sports, also known as billiard sports, are a wide variety of games of skill generally played with a cue stick, which is used to strike billiard balls and thereby cause them to move around a cloth covered billiards table bounded by elastic bumpers known as cushions. Historically, the umbrella term was billiards. While that familiar name is still employed by some as a generic label for all such games, the word's usage has splintered into more exclusive competing meanings in various parts of the world. For example, in British and Australian English, billiards usually refers exclusively to the game of English billiards, while in American and Canadian English it is sometimes used to refer to a particular game or class of games, or to all cue games in general, depending upon dialect and context. In colloquial usage, the term billiards may be used to refer to games such as pool, snooker, or Russian pyramid. Kinloch Castle, Scottish Gaelic: Caisteal Cheann Locha, is a late Victorian mansion which was built as a private residence for Sir George Bullough, a textile tycoon from Lancashire, England, whose father bought Rùm as his summer residence and shooting estate. Construction began in 1897, and was completed in 1900. The galleried main hall contains stags heads, tiger skins and Eastern antiques are mixed with full length portraits and luxuriant soft furnishings. It is lit by three full height mullioned and transomed stained glass bay windows. Rùm was owned by Alexander Maclean of Coll in the early 19th century. At that time, during the Napoleonic Wars, kelp from the Scottish islands was a valuable commodity, being used to produce soda ash for use in explosives. After the war, prices collapsed and Maclean was forced to lease the island to a relative, Lachlan Maclean, for sheep farming. As a result, the entire population, which counted 443 people in 1795, were cleared from the island by 1828, only for new tenants to be brought in from Skye and Muck to service the sheep farm. All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.

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