Skip to main content

River Forth - Crossing Scotland

The Forth gave Stirling a key place in Scottish history. Until 1936 it was the first point from the east where the river could be crossed by road. The main traffic on Scottish roads until the late nineteenth century was the cattle brought south by drovers to be sold in the great market at Falkirk. The drovers crossed the Forth at Stirling. Where they watered the cattle in the river before the last stage of the journey to Falkirk, about 20 kilometres further on. The first railway north of Stirling also crossed the Forth There This railway brought an end to droving, because it was cheaper to load cattle on to trains than to drive them south on foot.

 For 500 years, from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth, there was a series of wars between the english and the Scots. A vocanic rock rises over 120 metres above the low-lying and marshy ground beside the river, commanding a view in all directions and with sheer cliff-faces on two sides. It was the perfect site for a fort, and from the twelfth to the seventeenth century Stirling Castle was the headquarters and palace of the Scottish kings. The Present-day castle at Stirling was mostly built between 400 and 500 years ago, but there has been a castle on the site for well over 1000 years.

The land below the castle was the scene of two famous battles in Scottish history. In 1297 Scotland's great national hero William Wallace soundly defeated an invading English army at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, catching the soldiers at a disadvantage when they were half-way across. In 1314 another famous Scots leader, Robert the Bruce, led his army to victory over the English at the Battle of Bannockburn, four kilometres away on the Forth flood plain.

Below Stirling, the Forth continues to wind through an area known as the 'Link of Forth' as far as alloa, where it begins to open out into the Firth of Forth.  The word 'firth' is used in Scotland to describe an inlet of the sea which is the mouth of a river. Other Scottish river valleys which called "firth" include the Moray Firth, the Dornoch Firth, the Firth of Cromarty and the Firth of Clyde.

Most of the old industries of the Firth of Forth, such as iron-making, coal-mining and shipbuilding, have gone. But, since the discovery of North Sea oil in the 1960s, Grangemouth and Mossmoran in Fife have become important centres for oil and petrochemicals. Petrochemicals are loaded at Grangemouth  docks and oil is exported through a specially-built terminal at Hound Point, opened in 1975.

The south bank of the Forth is dominated by Edinburgh. scotland's capital city since 1437 and now the site of the new Scottish parliament.

stirling-castle

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Does pearls reproduce by itself through time

At the request of several families he and Mrs Legge gave a home for some months to a young Dutch girl, a granddaughter of the first Dutch governor of the Straits Settlements. She had several pearls of which the Dutch residents were great collectors, got from oysters found in a river of the Malay Peninsula, when she left them she gave Mrs Legge a small box containing a large pearl the size of a pea, with a blue spot on it, and two others not so large. This box was then put away and locked up. Several weeks later he took it out and on opening it discovered more than a dozen pearls, most of them very small. Astonished at the phenomenon he called his chief servant, a Portuguese, who happened to enter the room and who expressed no surprise but declared it to be a common occurrence. On enquiry he found that many of the Dutch people had jars of pearls, large and small, which had accumulated in this way. Some years later he related the incident at dinner on board ship. The captain was a cautio

Bidmas, Bedmas, Bodmas, Pedmas And Christmas

This BBC GCSE Bitesize post says, BODMAS stands for 'brackets', 'other', 'division', 'multiplication', 'addition' and 'subtraction'. It's the order in which we carry out a calculation. But another article says, the order of operations in Maths called BIDMAS. BIDMAS stands for Brackets, Indices, Division and Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction. The difference is that the second substitute 'o' with 'i', and we can understand that teacher normally chooses easy way to explain whose pupils can understand, exponent or power or indices are out of reach of foundation students, so teachers uses 'other' instead. And in this article , 'o' actually stands for 'order', as far as my memory can go, my English teacher never teach me 'order' actually means 'Powers and Square Roots, etc.' In United States, the mnemonic fo Order of Operation is PEMDAS, because brackets are called pa

Panic or panick

There is only one spelling for panic ; the verb is inflected 'panic, panics, panicked, and panicking’. The form panick is used for progressive tense, past tense and past participle. We don't write panick today, though English speakers from a few hundred years ago might have (in the same way they might have written musick). When the alternate spelling “panick” is used for the past participle: "I panicked last night at the disco." When it’s use for progressive tense: “Invariably, when markets are panicking, they sell the stocks quickly.” It's the rule for root words ending in "c" is that you have to add “k”, so the spelling is related with the pronunciation. If we don't add the <k>, it looks as if the <c> has to be pronounced /s/. If the "k" was not there, “panicing” would look like the word which is supposed to be pronounced as if it is ended in "sing," while “paniced” would be pronounced like “panised”. The same