Not many railway stations owe their existence to the determination of just one man, but Corrour Station on Rannoch Moor simply wouldn’t be where it is today if it hadn’t been for Sir John Stirling-Maxwell, 10th Baronet of Pollok. Back in 1891, Sir John purchased the Corrour Estate with the intention of using it very […]
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Nocturne #2 Review
DVD: GREAT BRITISH RAILWAY JOURNEYS: SERIES 6 starring Michael Portillo amazon.co.uk: £24:29 Michael Portillo continues to chart the great British romance with the railways as, armed with his copy of George Bradshaw’s famous handbook, he retraces four journeys that were first documented in the Victorian monthly guide. In this sixth series Portillo travels from Ayr […]
This Side of Paradise
As the human race of the 21st century faces cultural and sociological division, ecological disaster, and a seemingly uncertain future, can the real world hope to achieve Roddenberry’s utopian vision of a future Earth – and what will it take to get there? Words: Paul F Cockburn. “Even though it is set in the 24th […]
Life-Changing Moments
Edinburgh-based crime writer Doug Johnstone is preparing to Crash Land – but he’s set to take off in America. Scotland is home to numerous successful crime fiction writers, but Arbroath-born Doug Johnstone is surely the only one who has a PhD in nuclear physics. “I quit a high-paying engineering job and became a freelance music […]
Accidental Pioneers of the Passivhaus
When John and Jeanette Fenwick were looking to enjoy an early retirement in the north of Scotland, they didn’t initially plan on utilising a new style of housing. “We’d sold up down south, we had the money in the bank, and we thought we’d be able to pick and choose property and have the money […]
Crime Scene #4 Reviews
First published in Crime Scene #4 TIME OF TORMENT BY JOHN CONNOLLY (Hodder & Stoughton). Out Now Fourteen novels and one novella on, John Connolly’s supernaturally tinged private investigator Charlie Parker – forever helping lost souls at the risk of his own – this time comes up against the Cut, an isolated and inbred community […]
Scots at the Somme
The dawn of 1 July 1916 “came with great beauty,” according to Philip Gibbs, a Special Correspondent for The Glasgow Herald and Daily Chronicle, who was “attached with the British Armies in the Field” near the Somme River in France . “There was a pale blue sky flecked with white wisps of cloud,” he wrote. […]
