History - The Heart of Scotland?
Gartincaber The following is an extract from the introduction to "Doune - The Heart of Scotland", a talk presented at the Kilmadock Society by Callum Brown in 2002.

The full document, for those with an interest and a Word viewer is available here (57Kb) by kind permission of the author.

 
There is an ancient adage in the academic world, one that few adhere to nowadays. It is that geography is about maps, history is about chaps -- implying that the two do not and perhaps should not mix. Well, things are well changed now, and I am going to enter mapland. But I am going to do it without the aid of maps, in large part because I think it highly dangerous for an historian to start getting so close to maps in a village that is a centre of modern map-making. Anyway here goes.
Some years after I came to Doune in 1985, I was told that the village was at the centre of Scotland. This was calculated, according to my informant, by the following means. You traced a map of Scotland onto a sheet of paper, pasted it to a piece of cardboard, and cut round the tracing. Then you attached a piece of cotton thread to an edge of the map, and with the map suspended by the thread you traced with a pencil a plumb line across it. Detaching the thread, you hung it from another edge, suspended the map again, and drew another plumb line. Putting the tracing back over the original map, a pin should be pushed through the cardboard at the point where the two pencil lines intersected, and there lay the centre of Scotland. If done precisely, with a very large map, I was told that the point falls on a small rise in a field at Gartincaber just under two miles west-by-south-west of Doune Cross in what used to be the old county of Perthshire. To mark the spot, there is a substantial stone folly, Gartincaber Tower, built in around 1790 by an extremely proud landowner.
I tried the experiment with a map traced from my Times Atlas of Britain, and though not done with anything like geographic precision, the centre of mainland Scotland (excluding the islands) worked out further north, at a point on the southern shores of the River Tummel. Interestingly though, Doune lay exactly - as far as I could tell - on the same latitude, only thirty-three miles to the south. However, if the Scottish islands had been added to the cardboard map (by some fiendish contraption of light-weight wire, perhaps), the centre would have been even further north and west. Other means of locating Doune geographically at the heart of Scotland also fail, though only just. Straight lines from some of the extremities of mainland Scotland pass very close to Doune: lines from Dunnet Head in the far north-east to the Mull of Galloway in the south-west, and from Ardnamurchan Point (mainland Britain's most westerly headland) and Coldstream on the Scottish Border, intersect close to Doune. Various forms of map projection give different results because they distort the earth's surface differently in order to project it onto flat paper. But none succeeds in placing Doune or Gartincaber Tower at the precise heart of Scotland.
The notion of the Gartincaber Tower as the centre of Scotland has existed almost continually in Doune over the last 210 years. It is mentioned by virtually every local guidebook from the Old Statistical Account of the mid 1790s to Young's Guide and the Bridge of Allan Tourist Guide of 1898 and the 1900s. Clearly, the absence of any known geographical calculation to support it has not deterred the promulgation of the theory.
From the very decade in which the Tower was constructed in the 1790s, there is clear evidence that a concept of Doune as lying at the centre of Scotland was under intellectual construction. I want in this talk to go further. I want to argue that insofar as such a place can exist, Doune is the quintessentially Scottish small burgh, lying on all sorts of boundaries within Scotland which mark it as a country. I want to argue that Doune should be regarded as at the heart of Scotland's culture, economy, geography, language divisions and more.

Continues in the document here...

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