Alba Historical

 A place of pilgrimage Glasgow Cathedral has evolved since the 12th century as the magnificent housing for the shrine of one of Scotland's native patron saints, Kentigern. This is the best preserved large Medieval church in Scotland, specifically designed to enable the veneration of the relics. Nowhere else is it possible for the modern visitor to so easily replicate providing best the experience of the Medieval pilgrim. Glasgow shares an important feature in common with the reliquary churches of two other important native saints, at Whithorn and Iona, in possessing an under church or crypt – providing best-preserved a highly atmospheric, semi-subterranean setting for the climax of the pilgrimage. It is believed that Kentigern served as bishop for early Christian communities in Strathclyde, and had also been active as far south as Cumbria. Certainly, the devotees to his later Medieval cult came from these areas. There is a tradition that Kentigern had developed a church or monaster

 The early Thinkers (The Scots College ( Latin : Collegium Scoticum; French : Collège des Écossais) was a college of the University of Paris , France , founded by an Act of the Parliament of Paris on 8 July 1333.) Scotland's relations with Europe were transformed in the 15th century, when three universities were founded here. St Andrews had the earliest, around 1411, followed by Glasgow 40 years later, and then by one in Aberdeen in 1495. This last one was set up after a plea to Pope Alexander, a member of the notorious Borgia family, but that is another story! The new seat of learning in Aberdeen was called St Mary's first of all, and later named King's College, in honour of James IV. Such matters apart, the important thing is that, within a very short period, Scots were teaching Scots in Scotland at the highest level available anywhere. And even before those universities, there were the great abbeys, where men of high intellectual calibre were to be found. For example,

 King Malcolm IV They called him the Maiden King – a touch unfairly, perhaps – because he was perceived to be more of a monk than a monarch. He was also Scotland's first child king, taking up the throne at the age of 13 and dying at 24 before he had a chance to prove his manhood. Nevertheless, the reign of Malcolm IV, from 1153 to 1165, earned good contemporary reviews after its relatively seamless continuation of policies and outlook of his grandfather and predecessor David I Malcolm's father, David I's son Earl Henry, had died tragically and suddenly in his thirties in 1152 while he had been proving himself an equally able successor to his father. In 1139 Henry had married Ada de Warenne, the daughter of the Earl of Surrey, a leading Anglo-Norman baron. As soon as Earl Henry was dead, David saw to it that Henry's oldest son, Malcolm, then aged 12, was the new king-designate. He handed the boy over to Earl Duncan MacDuff of Fife, the foremost Scottish earl, who, at the

 MacBeth The real story of the man is far from Shakespeare's celebrated version. Indeed, MacBeth's 17-year reign was a prosperous and generous one, and he was to be fondly remembered as the last great Celtic king of Scots. The single most important fact we know about MacBeth is enshrined in a line borrowed from a Latin poem composed within a generation of his death. It says: "In his time there were productive seasons" - fertile tempus erat. Or, as Andrew Wyntoun, the 15th Century Scottish chronicler put it: "All his tyme was gret plenté/Aboundand baith in land and sé." Scots in MacBeth's time still believed in vestiges of sacral kingship, which meant that if calamity came upon the land in such disasters as war, famine, pestilence or atrocious weather, the solution was to sacrifice the king. MacBeth could thus have earned no higher praise. According to an Irish poem, he actually radiated the prosperity for which he was so famous - he was 'ruddy-faced,

 Scotland's Ancient Woodlands The scale of Scotland's great Medieval forest is hinted at by the Victorian writer J.E Harting in his British  extinct Animals. “We can scarcely overestimate the wildness that everywhere prevailed,” he wrote, "In the south, a vast forest filled the intervening space between Chillingham and Hamilton, a distance,  as the crow flies of about 80 miles, including within it Ettrick and numerous other forests, and further north the great Caledonian wood, known even at Rome, covered the greater part of both the Lowlands and the Highlands, its recesses affording shelter to bears, wolves, wild boars, and wild white cattle." In Medieval times, people travelled inland fearfully. The forests were nature's place, the habitat of the forces of darkness, treacherous to the superstitious. Harting achieved a knee-knocking portrait of a wolf-infested wilderness. "The time of James V... a great part of Ross, Inverness, almost the whole of Cromarty, a

 Pilgrimage With more than its share of patron saints, Scotland was a magnet for pilgrims from abroad. Scots also took to the holy routes, which were often long, arduous, and dangerous. Pilgrimage and the cults of saints were as popular with the Pictish, Irish, Norse and Scots peoples of Scotland as with any others in Christendom. With major shrines at the heart of important reliquary churches at Iona, St Andrews, Kirkwall, Whithorn, Glasgow, Dunkeld, Dunfermline and Tain, Scotland had more than its fair share of patron saints, ranging from Andrew – an apostle of Christ - through national, indigenous saints such as Ninian, Columba and Kentigern, to a multiplicity of lesser holy men and martyrs. From the earliest times, Scots were recognised on the pilgrimage of the early missionaries  were elected saints, with some, such as Columba of lona, who died in 597, regarded as saints even during their own lifetime. These places of burial became renowned.  Possibly the oldest shrine of all was

 The first Gaelic King to rule over the Picts He is Scotland's Alfred the Great, our forgotten hero king who repelled the Viking invaders, founded the kingdom of Alba, and fought off England's first attempt at conquest. He is Constantine II, known in Gaelic as Constantin MacAed, one of Scotland's greatest Medieval kings. He reigned from 900 to 943 and his achievements may even outstrip those of Robert the Bruce. Yet he is little known today, probably because he has never attracted the attention of a great storyteller like Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson. But Constantine can be seen, in many ways, as the founder of the Scottish nation. King Constantine II was the grandson of Kenneth MacAlpin, the first Gaelic king to rule over the Picts. Kenneth died at Forteviot in 858 and his brother Domnall took over the kingship. It was Domnall who introduced Gaelic Law to the Pictish kingdom. Domnall died in 862 and was succeeded by his nephew, Kenneth's son, Constantine. Thi