Summary of Neil Oliver's A History Of Scotland , livre ebook

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51 pages

English

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Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The first people are made of the stone, and the rock itself has been shaping and testing Scotland for billions of years. It is not enough to start with the people who used the stone; the correct place to begin is with the rock itself.
#2 The Earth was shaped after the moon-making collision, and as it cooled, concentric layers formed and a thin crust hardened. The material beneath remained liquid and as the heat circulated, rising to the surface and then sinking back down towards the interior, the currents and flows kept the outer shell in perpetual motion.
#3 The oldest rocks beneath the feet of Scots are the Lewisian gneisses, which form the basement bedrock of Lewis, the rest of the Western Isles, the Inner Hebrides, and some parts of the seaboard of the north-west. They were formed deep beneath earth’s crust three billion or more years ago.
#4 The emergence of a nation, Scotland, was never inevitable. The rocks of Scotland were never destined to be together, as they were once part of several different landmasses. They came together by chance, a whim of pressure and time.

Sujets

Social History

Histoire

History

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Publié par	Everest Media LLC
Date de parution	18 juillet 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9798822544543
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Insights on Neil Oliver's A History Of Scotland
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The first people are made of the stone, and the rock itself has been shaping and testing Scotland for billions of years. It is not enough to start with the people who used the stone; the correct place to begin is with the rock itself.

#2

The Earth was shaped after the moon-making collision, and as it cooled, concentric layers formed and a thin crust hardened. The material beneath remained liquid and as the heat circulated, rising to the surface and then sinking back down towards the interior, the currents and flows kept the outer shell in perpetual motion.

#3

The oldest rocks beneath the feet of Scots are the Lewisian gneisses, which form the basement bedrock of Lewis, the rest of the Western Isles, the Inner Hebrides, and some parts of the seaboard of the north-west. They were formed deep beneath earth’s crust three billion or more years ago.

#4

The emergence of a nation, Scotland, was never inevitable. The rocks of Scotland were never destined to be together, as they were once part of several different landmasses. They came together by chance, a whim of pressure and time.

#5

The first evidence of the presence of modern humans in the British Isles is from Kents Cavern in Devon, dating to around 30,000 years ago. They are the sole survivor of their time, and despite the thousands of years between them and us, we are still one and the same.

#6

The last glacial period was around 16,000 years ago. The ice sheet reached as far south as Wales and the midlands of England, and all traces of human habitation were wiped from the land. From that time onwards, temperatures began to rise.

#7

The land of Scotland was split in two by the glaciers that cut across the country. The thin, acid soils that formed in the valleys and rugged slopes of the north and west were only suitable for the least demanding of domesticated animals. South and east of the Great Glen formed the much richer soils that were eventually turned into a breadbasket of arable farming.

#8

After the ice retreated, the land began to rise and life returned to the northern lands. However, it was still unclear when the first people reached Scotland after the ice, as there are no traces of human habitation from that time.

#9

The island of Rum is located off the north-west coast port of Mallaig. It is 8 miles north to south and 10,000 hectares in size, and it is almost entirely mountainous and barren. It was inhabited by people as early as 9,000 years ago.

#10

The people who lived on and exploited the land before Scotland, 10,000 and more years ago, were the same as us in every way. Their circumstances differed from ours only by time.

#11

The first people to arrive in Scotland after the ice were probably slightly smaller in stature than today’s average. They would have worn well-made, neatly fitting clothes and footwear of animal skin and fur, fastened by buttons and toggles of bone, horn, wood or stone.

#12

The first people to live in Scotland were the hunter-gatherers who came from across Europe. They would have visited the islands off the west coast, which were particularly attractive because they were so accessible.

#13

The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is one that demands large amounts of territory for each small group of people. New arrivals from the south and east would be greeted cautiously, and invited to keep heading north and west.

#14

The first inhabitants of Scotland were hunter-gatherers, and their way of life was pursued for thousands of years. It was difficult to imagine why people would ever swap such a lifestyle for a regime of daily toil.

#15

The switch to farming was not done quickly or as part of a uniform process. Archaeological evidence from the fertile crescent of the Near East shows that farming was established there by around 9000 BC. It then took all of 3,500 years to reach the Mediterranean and British Isles.

#16

The first farmers, Romans, Anglo-Saxon colonists, Viking raiders, Norman conquerors, or anybody else, never came in numbers sufficient to alter the bloodstock of the resident population. We are mostly the same people we have always been.

#17

The first farmers in Scotland built houses for their dead, and they left the bodies of the dead exposed in the open long enough for scavengers to pick off the flesh. The remains were then placed in a purpose-built structure.

#18

The village of Skara Brae, on the west coast of Mainland Orkney, was occupied from 3100 BC to 3300 BC. It was built close to the Bay of Skaill, and the residents dug tunnels and excavated house-sized chambers. They lined these tunnels with elegantly constructed dry-stone walls built of the Orkney flagstones.

#19

The first farmers began to pressure the land, and by around 2500 BC, the landscape was dotted with new kinds of monuments - henge monuments, which were circular banks and deep ditches built to enclose areas and conceal rituals from prying eyes.

#20

By the middle of the third millennium BC, a new alchemy was abroad in the land: the ability to make jewelry, tools, and weapons of metal. Bronze, the metal in question, is an alloy of copper and tin. Because tin had to be acquired from hundreds of miles away, those wanting it had to be in the business of making and maintaining trading links over large distances.

#21

The first millennium BC saw the population increase as farmers moved into the uplands and began to claim the territory, which had been overlooked in favor of the lowlands. The move into the harder terrain was undertaken while the climate was continuing to worsen.

#22

By the first millennium BC, those living in the northern third of Britain were under a fair amount of pressure. The land could not comfortably support more people than were already living on it, and yet the population was continuing to grow.

#23

The land before Scotland was a sophisticated world of inter-related yet largely autonomous tribes and clans. It was a going concern, and no one was waiting for outsiders to tell them how to live or think.

#24

The first-century inhabitants of the far north of Britain were not primitive, and they were not cut off from the rest of the world. They were aware of the existence of Rome and her empire, and they would have remembered the stories of the last time the Romans had made landfall on the British side of the English Channel.

#25

The first forays by Roman soldiers into Scotland were not the arrival of Martians for a one-sided war of worlds, but a clash of two civilisations. By the time the Romans arrived in about AD 82, the people of the north had already seen many invaders come and go.

#26

The Romans were able to conquer the southern tribes of Scotland, but north of the two great rivers that narrowed the land to a strip of solid flatland between mountain and mire, the Romans encountered a stubbornness on the part of the locals that they never were able to overcome.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The first named Scott was Calgacus, a man of outstanding valor and nobility, who summoned the masses who were already thirsting for battle. He addressed them and said, We, the last men on earth, the last of the free, have been shielded before today by the very remoteness and seclusion for which we are famed.

#2

The first Scot, Calgacus, was said to have fought the Romans at Mons Graupius. However, historians debate whether there was a climactic battle between the Caledonians and Romans. Regardless, Agricola was soon summoned back to Rome and treated to a triumph.

#3

The words of Calgacus have exerted a powerful influence on the national imagination since they were first committed to parchment nearly 2,000 years ago. However, they are not the words of a Scottish man from the first century AD. They are the words of Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, writing twenty years later in hope of delivering a timeless message about the morality of Rome.

#4

The Romans made several attempts to conquer the tribes of Caledonia, but they were never successful. The Romans even blamed the tribes’ forest for their inability to conquer them. The Romans called the tribes of Scotland the Caledonians.

#5

The Picts were the first bands of hunter-gatherers to colonize these lands after the retreat of the ice 12,000 years ago. They had a rich and complex culture, but they have left no traces of themselves in history.

#6

The Scottish Trust for Underwater Archaeology has built a full-size replica of the kind of crannog that would have been commonplace in the Pictish kingdom. It is a spacious and surprisingly comfortable dwelling, and it is easy to imagine how small items would have gotten lost in the tangle every day, only to be found centuries later by archaeologists.

#7

The Romans abandoned Britain, and the people they called Picts were a long-established and distinct presence in the north and east of the country. The most powerful of their men styled themselves as kings, and they controlled enough of the surplus from fertile farmland in the eastern part of their domains to commission jewellery, weapons, and artworks from specialised craftsmen.

#8

The Gaels had put down deep roots on and around the western seaboard by the beginning of the sixth century. They had a gentle, artistic side that was revealed when they were found melting gold, silver, and bronze in crucibles.

#9

The Life of Saint Columba, written around a century after his death, credits Columba with the single-handed conversion of the tribes to Christianity. But most of what we know