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06/18/2026

On this day 18th June 1815 The Battle of Waterloo Napoleon Bonaparte suffered defeat at the hands of the Duke of Wellington, bringing an end to the Napoleonic era of European history.

The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815, near Waterloo in present-day Belgium, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. A French army under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by two of the armies of the Seventh Coalition: an Anglo-led Allied army under the command of the Duke of Wellington, and a Prussian army under the command of Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, Prince of Wahlstatt. The battle resulted in the end of Bonaparte's reign and of the First French Empire, and set a chronological milestone between serial European wars and decades of relative peace.

Painting of, Scotland Forever by Lady Elizabeth Butler, depicting the famed, fatal charge of the British heavy cavalry, Scots Greys, during the battle of Waterloo, courtesy of Wikipedia.

•Here's a good article about the Battle of Waterloo: http://www.britishbattles.com/waterloo/waterloo-june-1815.htm

06/18/2026

✝️ There is a small island in the Firth of Forth that contains the best-preserved medieval monastic complex in Scotland — better preserved than Iona, better than Lindisfarne, its cloister walks still roofed, its chapter house still complete, its buildings still telling the story of an Augustinian community that lived and prayed here for three hundred years before the Reformation ended that particular form of continuous sacred habitation. Most people in Edinburgh have never been there. It is twenty minutes by boat from the city centre.

Inchcolm — the island of Columba, named for the saint to whom its earliest oratory was dedicated — appears in the historical record in 1123, when Alexander I of Scotland was storm-driven to the island and sheltered with the hermit who lived there, subsequently founding the Augustinian priory in gratitude for the shelter. The priory grew over the following centuries into a full abbey, its buildings accumulated by successive generations of Augustinian canons who balanced the practical demands of island life — fishing, farming, keeping a boat, maintaining the ferry crossing that connected them to the mainland — with the liturgical round of prayer and scholarship that was the purpose of their community.

The island's position in the firth made it simultaneously attractive and vulnerable — the Augustinians had to defend their island against English raids in the fourteenth century and against the disruptions of the Wars of Independence, and the fortifications visible at the island's perimeter reflect a monastic community that understood very well that their sanctity did not automatically protect them from the practical violence of the world around them.

The buildings that remain are extraordinary in their completeness and variety — the round tower that may predate the Augustinian foundation, the octagonal chapter house that is unique in Scotland, the cloister whose covered walks are among the most intact in the country.

An island in the Forth. Still whole. Twenty minutes from the city. Waiting.

06/18/2026

06/08/2026

By the end of October 1914, Scotland had already lost more men than most people know.

The Scottish regiments went to France and Belgium in August of that year as part of the British Expeditionary Force — the Black Watch, the Cameronians, the Gordons, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the Seaforths, and others. They were professional soldiers and reservists who had trained for conventional warfare and found something entirely different waiting for them. The retreat from Mons. The battles along the Marne and the Aisne. The race to the Channel. By the time the front stabilised into trenches in October and November, the original BEF had been cut to pieces. Some Scottish battalions had lost more than half their strength in the first three months alone.

What the soldiers carried with them into those first months was not only equipment. They carried photographs. Letters. Small objects from home. A tradition existed in many Highland and Lowland communities of giving a departing soldier something to carry — a folded piece of cloth, a coin, a strand of heather. Not magical thinking in most cases, but a physical form of continuity. Evidence that something waited somewhere, that a person existed beyond the uniform.

Letters from home arrived in bundles when postal arrangements allowed, sometimes weeks delayed, sometimes read in conditions that made the Scotland described in them feel like a country from another age. Men writing back chose their words carefully, knowing what their families could bear and what they could not. What was not written in those letters is as significant as what was. Silence as a form of care.

Scotland's losses in the First World War were proportionally among the highest of any nation involved. Around 26 percent of Scottish men who served were killed — a figure significantly above the United Kingdom average. The communities left behind — the towns, the villages, the islands — felt those absences for generations.

05/30/2026

Awesome talent

05/30/2026