Tayside Quotes

“The Gask Ridge sits like an old frog in a boggy pond edged by hills and mountains. South and east lie the Ochils with their pre-Roman vitrified forts, Gleneagles and, beyond, the Allan Water, which flows away from the Tay through the gap in the hills at Dunblane and into the Forth. To the south and west, due to the sweeping curve of the Highland Line, you look back on the high peaks of the mountains of the Trossachs and into the southern Highlands. Westwards, then to the north, the Perthshire hills with the snow-capped Grampians beyond - their name an erroneously medieval transcription from the Battle o Mons Graupius, which Tacitus describes as the crucial victory of the Roman general Agricola over the united tribes of Caledonia. Led by Calgacus, the first named Scot, Tacitus has him declare in a speech that the invaders 'create desolation and call it peace'. The road, forts and signal towers, and a further large fort at Dalginross, south of Comrie, are integral parts of that Pax Romana, but despite two further incursions into Tayside in the reigns of the emperors Antoninus (AD 142) and Septimius Severus (208), it was over a thousand years before southern influence began to alter this landscape.”
― Robin A. Crawford, The Sound of Many Waters: A Journey along the River Tay

“For the majority of Scots and people living along the Tay, the rich visual culture of religious art, though once an integral part of Scotland's spiritual and cultural life, has been almost totally lost because of its destruction by the hardline Calvinist zealots who directed Scotland's reformation in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shrines and sculptures, holy wells, crosses like that on the Forteviot arch, or McDuff's, paintings and alterpieces - all were destroyed by religious fundamentalism on a par with Isis in Syria and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Yet like the flower that survives the inferno, a tiny bloom, if a bloodied one can still be found. Inside the medieval church at Fowlis Easter, between the Sidlaws and the Tay, are unique artworks from before the Reformation: a carved fleur-de-lis decorates the 'women's entrance' in the north wall and has a 'stoup' for holy water; an octagonal font sculpted with the baptism of Christ; a sixteenth-century painting on copper of the dove of peace, with Noah's ark grounded in the background; and, amazingly, a remnant of a large Crucifixion that has survived from c.1450.

Measuring thirteen feet by five feet, and painted in tempera on eighteen oak panels, it survived only because it was overpainted with whitewash. Now cleaned, t is a unique survivor from a different past.”
― Robin A. Crawford, The Sound of Many Waters: A Journey along the River Tay