Tour Scotland photographs and videos from my tours of Scotland. Photography and videography, both old and new, from beautiful Scotland, Scottish castles, seascapes, rivers, islands, landscapes, standing stones, lochs and glens.
Old photograph of buildings, shops, and people on Grahams Road in Falkirk, Scotland. Falkirk is a large town in the Central Lowlands. Historically within the county of Stirlingshire. It lies in the Forth Valley north west of Edinburgh and north east of Glasgow. The town is at the junction of the Forth and Clyde and Union Canals, a location which proved key to its growth as a centre of heavy industry during the Industrial Revolution. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Falkirk was at the centre of the iron and steel industry. The area was at the forefront of canal construction when the Forth and Clyde Canal opened in 1790. The Union Canal built in 1822 provided a link to Edinburgh and early railway development followed in the 1830s and 1840s. The Antonine Roman Wall, which stretches across the centre of Scotland, passed through the town and remnants of it can still be seen. George Forrest who was born in Falkirk on 13 March 1873, was a Scottish botanist, who became one of the first explorers of China's then remote southwestern province of Yunnan, generally regarded as the most biodiverse province in the country. Robert Dollar, also known as Captain Robert Dollar, who was born in 1844 in Bainsford, Falkirk. was a Scots American industrialist. The title Captain was honorary and he was called the Grand Old Man of the Pacific. Both were bestowed after his entry into the shipping industry. Dollar became a lumber baron, shipping magnate, philanthropist; he was also a Freemason. His biography and an extensive introduction by him is contained within the book, Men Who Are Making the West 1923. Thomas Clement Douglas was born in Falkirk on 20 October 1904. He was a Canadian social democratic politician and Baptist minister. He was elected to the Canadian House of Commons in 1935 as a member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. He left federal politics to become the Saskatchewan CCF's leader and then the seventh Premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961. His government was the first social democratic government in North America, and it introduced the continent's first single payer, universal health care program. Robert D. Wilson was born in Falkirk on February 3, 1839. He was an American farmer and politician. Wilson emigrated to the United States in 1854 and settled in the Town of Melrose, Jackson County, Wisconsin. Wilson was a farmer who served in the Wisconsin State Assembly in 1880 and was a Republican. Blog post of interest to folks with ancestry, genealogy or Scottish Family Roots in Scotland who may wish to travel and visit one day.
All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.
Old photograph of the Royal Marine Hotel in Nairn, Moray, Scotland. Lieutenant Colonel James Augustus Grant was born on 11 April 1827 in Nairn, where his father was the parish minister, and educated at Nairn Academy, Aberdeen Grammar School and Marischal College, Aberdeen. In 1846 he joined the Indian army. He saw active service in the Sikh War and served throughout the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and was wounded in the operations for the relief of Lucknow. He returned to England in 1858, and in 1860 joined John Hanning Speke in the memorable expedition which solved the problem of the Nile sources. The expedition left Zanzibar in October 1860 and reached Gondokoro, where the travellers were again in touch with what they regarded as civilization, in February 1863. Speke was the leader, but Grant carried out several investigations independently and made valuable botanical collections. He married in 1865 and settled down at Nairn, where he died in 1892. He was buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral in London, England. Grant's gazelle, one of the largest and handsomest of that family in Africa, was named in his honour.
All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.
