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 travel Blog photograph of houses by the golf course in Girvan in South Ayrshire, Scotland. Girvan Golf Course was designed by James Braid who was born in Earlsferry, Fife, He won The Open Championship in 1901, 1905, 1906, 1908 and 1910. He then developed a very successful career in golf course design. Girvan is stituated on the east coast of the Firth of Clyde, 21 miles South of Ayr, and 29 miles North of Stranraer, and is the main ferry port from Scotland to Northern Ireland. The opening of the railways, initially with the Maybole and Girvan Railway at the end of the 1850s, encouraged the development of Girvan as a seaside resort with beaches and cliffs. Most of the streets in the south east of Girvan are named after trees, examples are Maple Drive, Elder Avenue, Pine Quadrant, etc.
All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.
Old travel Blog photograph of tourists waiting for a ferry on the pier at Inveraray, a town in Argyll and Bute, Scotland. This a town on the western shore of Loch Fyne, near its head, and on the A83 road. It is a former royal burgh, the traditional county town of Argyll, and ancestral home to the Duke of Argyll at Inveraray Castle. In 1744 the third Duke of Argyll decided to demolish the existing castle and start from scratch with a new building. The castle was 40 years in construction, and the work was largely supervised by the Adam family, still renowned to this day as gifted architects and designers. Over the years the castle has played host to numerous luminaries; Queen Victoria visited it in 1874, and the Royal connection was further cemented when her daughter, Princess Louise, married the heir to the Campbell chieftainship, the Marquess of Lorne, in 1871.
All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.
Old travel Blog photograph of vintage cars and shops on the High Street in Biggar, South Lanarkshire, Scotland. In the 14th century, the Fleming family were given lands in this area by Robert the Bruce, whose cause they had supported. This Scottish town is situated in the Southern Uplands, near the River Clyde, around thirty miles from Edinburgh along the A702. The closest towns are Lanark and Peebles. Biggar was the birthplace of Thomas Gladstones, the grandfather of William Ewart Gladstone. Hugh MacDiarmid spent his later years at Brownsbank, near the town. Ian Hamilton Finlay's home and garden at Little Sparta is nearby in the Pentland Hills. The fictional Midculter, which features in Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles novels, is set here. The town hosts an annual arts festival, the Biggar Little Festival. The town has traditionally held a huge bonfire at Hogmanay.
All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.
Old travel Blog photograph of Robert Tannahill's thatched cottage in Paisley by Glasgow, Scotland. Robert Tannahill was born at Castle Street in Paisley on 3 June 1774, the fourth son in a family of seven. His mother was Janet Pollock from Boghall Farm near Beith and his father was James Tannahill from Kilmarnock. Soon after his birth the family moved to a newly built cottage in nearby Queen Street, which became both family home and weaving shop. Robert had a delicate constitution and a limp, due to a slight deformity in his right leg. On leaving school at age twelve, he was apprenticed to his father as a handloom weaver. It was during this time that Tannahill began to show an interest in poetry. With his apprenticeship completed, Tannahill left the town but, after two years working in Bolton, Lancashire, England from late 1799 to late 1801, he returned home to support the family. His father died soon after and his mother was infirm. As he reported in a letter to a friend, " My brother Hugh and I are all that remain at home, with our old mother, bending under age and frailty; and but seven years back, nine of us used to sit down at dinner together. " Then Hugh married and Robert was left the sole support, making a resolution which he records in a touching but substandard poem in English, "The Filial Vow". As things fell out, however, his mother was to outlive him by thirteen years. In the years which followed, his interest in poetry and music blossomed after becoming acquainted with the composer Robert Archibald Smith, who set some of his songs in the Scots language to music. While taking part in the literary life of the town, he helped found the Paisley Burns Club and became its secretary. His work now began to appear in periodicals such as The Scots Magazine and in 1807 he published a small collection of poems and songs in an edition of 900 copies which sold out in a few weeks. Out on a walk some time later, he heard a girl in a field singing his "We'll meet beside the dusky glen on yon burnside" and was greatly encouraged. But in 1810, following the rejection of an augmented collection of his work by publishers in Greenock and Edinburgh, he fell into a despondency aggravated by fears for his own health. Eventually he burned all his manuscripts and drowned himself on May 17, 1810, in a culverted stream under the Paisley Canal, where he was found because he had left his jacket at the mouth of the tunnel.
All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.
Old travel Blog photograph of vintage cars outside St John's Kirk in Perth, Perthshire, Scotland. The burgh of Perth was important in medieval times due to its position as the lowest safe crossing point on the River Tay and its proximity to Scone, the Coronation site for Scottish kings. St John’s, the burgh church, stood at its centre giving Perth its alternative name St John’s Town, a name which lives on in that of the local football team, St Johnstone. Earliest written record of St John’s is 1128 when King David I ceded its revenue to the Abbey of Dunfermline in Fife, in return for which the Abbey provided a priest.
All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.
