easy to pledge other peoples money. The one thing councils are good at. Why couldnt private corporations sponsor this. How about RBS the 6th largest bank in the world ?

THE biggest gathering of the clans for almost 200 years was given the go-ahead today after securing vital enterprise, tourism and council backing.

Three organisations - Edinburgh City Council, Scottish Enterprise Edinburgh and Lothian and EventScotland - have pledged £300,000 in financial support for The Gathering, the largest get-together of its kind in Scotland since 1822.

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OH MY DOG

Change the name CLANS to TRIBES and you have AFRICA.

A gathering of the TRIBES of Scotland !!!!

WOW do they carry machetes.

And why didn't the RBS provide that £300,000 . The RBS make £9 billion last year .

Does HYPOCRISY come to mind here .

Or is the SNP that stupid (SlezeNationalParty).

I await ur boring RANTS.

GC

I wonder when the last gathering of the remnants of the tribes of america took place, just befor ethey were raped, shot, killed, and displaced by Scots and others who went to make a new home ............

A bit anachronistic - but what the hell - you can't always be cynical. This should be good for Scotland's economy and gives folks a chance to come see how well we're doing now that we've dumped labour.

Wonder if the polis will be frisking them for Skean dhus ?
3 - good point, but if it hadn't been for our philanthropic (according to revisionist M. Fry) landowners flinging said Scots off their own land the Indians wouldn't have been displaced and murdered by said Scots.
No excuse for said Scots behaviour though.

3 & 5 - Aye - it's a big bad wuruld an folks ur no very nice. Lighten up for Chrst sake - this is a good news story.

#3 SiR

I see the self-hating Scots are out bright and early this morning.

Why not give it a rest, eh?

Go and hate yourself and your race somewhere else, OK?

The Scots in North America were more likely to marry into the native tribal structure than the English colonists. Some becoming native chieftians fighting for their rights in Washington and against white settlers. It was the Scottish influence in Canada that checked many of the excesses. Both native American and Scots tribes suffered proscription and ridicule of their culture vis; language, music, dress and their chief's sons being forced to be educated in their conqueror's schools and learn English.

Both had their traitors, Quislings, cringers and native scouts, auxiliary regiments and police.

Hey Daleks -"They are annihiilated!'

#6: scunnert: I've no problem with this clan fantasy - so long as it's seen as fantasy with little - or no - root in reality. If it pulls in more $s, £s and euro's - all to the good.

10 - That's the entrepreneurial spirit, but where's your sense of romance. This could be fun. A coming out if you will.

A clan parade up the High Street?? I'm all for it ... but I do see a few questions needing answered.

1) Would the MacGregors be allowed to take part? If so, why?
2) What about the possibility of a running battle the length of the Royal Mile between the Campbells and the MacDonalds?
3) Will the MacLeods still be protected by the Faery Flag of Dunvegan?
4) Will the Crann Tara be seen carried along the ridge of the Pentlands and up to light an eternal flame mounted on Arthurs Seat?
5) Will only clan tartans be allowed, or all those fakes for companies and clubs and places?
6) Will the ban on knives and swords to be lifted for the Highland Dancing? And obligatory bloody battle between competition winners and losers?

I have more questions, but I'll hold them for another day. All in all, I'm quite looking forward to it! :D

Jack has still not relocated to Malawi, it may be time to dust off the black leather number!

If it pulls in the cash - take it. Can't be worse than the Festival of 'Arts' surely.

hey hey the Pipes are calling ,Must have been the beans i ate this morning,

Typical Scots mentality, the same people who believe the tory and labour tripe of we couldnt make it on our own the same people who voted Labour/tory because their dads did and their dads dads,aye the same folk who cant think for themselves,this is good for Scotland and will put money into the economy,stop whining ya bunch of losers,we cannae this we cannae that boo hoo f,n hoo

What has the 250th anniversary of Lowlander Burns got to do with Clans anyway?

Is this another event that will bring in foreign money in exactly the same way as Edinburgh's Hogmanay does ? i.e. at Edinburgh council tax payers expense.

ill be in scotland in 2009, might just time it to be there sounds good

My God how the unionists hate this sort of thing.
The most recognisable culture in the World, gathering to celebrate their existence, wonderful.

It's this kind of event where young Scots get their first taste of national identity, especially if they live in a unionist household. Labour will not like this kind of 2CElebration of our SCOTTISH identity. Much much more of the same please.

No.2 keep taking the medicine !
It is unusual to link Burns with the Highlands. In C18th Scotland many lowland scots regarded the Highlanders as verging on subhuman - with many of the post 45 atrocites being undertaken by Scots regiments. Since this time, many of the Clan Chiefs have become as anglisised as possible, following on from post 1707.
Who exactly will be there ?
ps
1822 was a tartan calvalcade orgainised by Sir Walter Scott to welcome George IV, whose grandfather had tried to exterminate Highlanders and their way of life - now thats irony!

They should have a gay Campbells convention - they have plenty of bufties. Would attract thousands.

#24. Genius ... you HAVE to be a MacDonald!!! :)

#24 I thought that should be the gay Gordons.....

the "gay" Gordons will have a smile on their faces. they are always coming...
oot the cuboard

These Clan Chiefs are so Anglised that they should stay away from any Gathering until they at least learn to speak Gaelic or send their children onto Gaelic-medium schools.

To say they are a disgrace to our country and our culture is an under-estimation of the damage they did when they were needed during the Clearances and after Culloden etc.
Anyone who gives them any standing whatsoever either don't know the history or are simply ignorant.

I just don't get it!! I am a Scot (born & lived there until the age of 21) I have lived in the US for 25 years and I just do not get this attitude!! Why do so many Scots seem to hate themselves and their heritage? Scotland has an amazing history, a tiny piece of land that has literally changed the world! (see book "How the Scots Shaped the World"). I am PROUD of my heritage and I will make the trip to see this gathering because it will be good for Scotland AND it's people.

Embro, hub of Highland culture!

It souds great.

But if we can ask for speacial treatment can the natives of the North Bank of Loch Rannoch have it back.

Or could some one at least remove the sign saying before the 1750's that the glen was filled with theives and robbers.

Well done Edinburgh! So the Council will spent £300,000, so what? Edinburgh is the best place to live in Britain, you know. They can afford it, after all, the income generated will be way more than that.

Anyway, I'd rather they have all those yanks down there than up here.

There are native American POW-WOW's all over America every year, and just like the highland games all over the world, the main ingrediant is meeting family and friends, after that it is like all the other gatherings all over the world---- how much can I sell for as much as possible

It's our country, lets enjoy it.

12 Boy Wonder, Excellent Questions

Nothing fake should be present.
Authenticity compulsory.
That should separate the barley from the husks !
and be a well needed knife in the side of the 'Gold Bros'

28 d.j. Yeah.

#10
As usual if the Scots make money that is all that is needed from any event, little else counts.
There is much more to life than making loads of money.

Great, more Yanks coming over here and butchering OUR history. They'll claim they're "coming home". What a load of tosh, just because they don't have much history they've to b******ise ours.

#28, d.j.

You write:

"To say they [modern clan chiefs] are a disgrace to our country and our culture is an under-estimation of the damage they did when they were needed during the Clearances and after Culloden etc."

Dinnae fash yersel' so, laddie. That was then and this is now (262 years after Culloden, someone should remind you). Also, regardless of the then and now, your reference to "our country and our culture" is over broad, to say the least. It is quite erroneous to infer that the highland Gaelic culture is--or ever has been--synonymous with the greater reality of the nation/state of Scotland. The Highlands are a part of Scotland, yes, and certainly a romantically appealing part, to be sure, but have never been close to the center of gravity of the country, politically, economically, or demographically.

With your purist's concept of the clan system, you would probably have an apoplectic fit if you attended any of the almost innumerable Highland Games in the US. Probably the most accurate way to describe such games is a cross between Brigadoon and Disneyland. They do indeed tend to the anachronistic, the romantic, and sometimes, they even degenerate to caricature. Nontheless, I go to enjoy the pipe bands, the Scottish fiddling, dancing, sheep dog trails, the athletic field events and general celebration of things Scottush, and just ignore the more over wrought fanciful parts.

So, I would say to you while you are busy handing out patents of Highland Scottishness, take what you can get and be glad to get it. Anglicised or not, Scottish clan chiefs, the associated tartanry, and what they represent today are better than no Scottish chiefs at all when trying to perpetuate the memory of the singular way of life of a minority of Scots who had been an anachronism at least since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

If you were less critical perhaps you could see that Highland culture (

#29 It's not their heritage they hate - it's the phoney tartan Lauderesque trash that is palmed off on them to obscure their true heritage.

#29. Isabella, Chicago, Illinois

The mutants that invoke your disbelief do not hate themselves they have morphed into homogenised Britishers they hate us for having sufficient self-respect to retain some of our own identity.

That there is no English equivalent of their species has escaped their attention.

They are our version of your, afro-American "Uncle Toms" or the native American "Scouts" who assisted the US Cavalry in the destruction of their own people and culture.

#38. BK, Cyberspace

I take your point but it is Unionists who tend to portray the Brigadoon nonsense as "Scottish" and everything from indoor plumbing through sliced bread and on to the internet as "British".

A consequence of 300yrs of our culture stagnating due to the subservience of them and their ilk.

#37
I don't blame the Americans and some of the Canadians for this rubbish that goes on, I do blame the so called Clan Chiefs, tourist promoters and film makers for what they have done and continue to do to the Gaelic language and culture.
What is done to Anglo-Scottish Culture is not my business as their are sufficiet people around who can stand up for it or not as the case may be. Having grown up in a completely Gaelic environment provides one with a viewpoint which is very different from a non Gaelic one.

It is clear Scottish people in general know so little about their own culture that one could almost say they were so integrated into British/English culture and language that they hang onto anything that suggests they are different even in the most simple ways.
When one talks about de-culturalisation then one should think about the Scots.

37 Alvie,
"It is quite erroneous to infer that the highland Gaelic culture is--or ever has been--synonymous with the greater reality of the nation/state of Scotland."

As the very concept of Scotland was formed by Celtic Christian Gaels and Gaelic was spoken all the way to Cumbria and nearly Newcastle for well over a Thousand years. You are exactly wrong.
This was the language of Royalty, Law and Church. Interestingly Cumbria has official annals blending a curious mix of Cymry and Gaelic in the Time of MacBeth.

Etymology.

Indeed the continuity of the deep root of the cultural thread extended both with the Ancient British (Pictish) and the Irish back thousands of years right up till the Protestant reformation, was still never fully erased.
The Irish monarchy - hence Scots monarchy is aknowledged as the oldest in Europe. The Pictish is so old it is heavily debated.

42 If one talks of de-culturalisation
one must remember it is ostracisation by english colonial institutions.

Col. Blimp IV*--

I would be careful, if I were you, of characterizing other Scots who don't agree with you and aren't as viscerally and vocally anti-Unionist, anti-English, anti-British as yourself as being "Uncle Toms." That all sounds uncomfortably like the same kind of rhetoric used in the 1930s about the right thinking real Germans as contrasted with those other questionable, even treacherous types who weren't as enthusiastic about the New Germany as the National Socialists thought they should have been.

As to 300 years of Scottish stagnation due to "the subservience of them and their ilk," that betrays, besides a meanness of spirit, a woeful ignorance of history on your part. Just one succinct but telling example: The Darien debacle entirely devastated an already desperately poor Scottish economy just before the Union of 1707 because Scotland could not maintain its colony against Spanish power in the Caribbean. Yet by the end of the 18th century, Glasgow was second only to London as the largest, richest city in Great Britain, the global trade of the enterprising Glaswegian burghers in tobacco and cotton secured by preeminence of the Royal Navy on the oceans of the world. A Royal Navy, replete it might be added, with a disproportionate amount of Scots, from admirals to seamen.

#43 Ard Righ (or, 'High King' in the Gael)

OK, so ya got me indeed (about Gaelic culture "never" being synonymous with the Scottish nation) if one goes back that far. I readily concede; it was a sloppy declamation. I should have said explicitly that I had in mind the first beginnings of the modern Scottish nation from roughly the time of the establishment of the Norman nobility in Scotland with all that that entailed; a "European" or continental system of hierarchical feudalization and social and economic organisation and a monarchy of primogeniture displacing the more loosely structured concept of Gaelic clan leadership.

Subsequently, because of that cultural displacment, Scotland evolved and was transformed through the Wars of Independence with Edward I of England, Robert deBrus, the establishment of the House of Stuart, the Reformation, the Union of the Crowns, the 17th century civil wars in Scotland and England, the Cromwell Commonwealth, the Succession of William and Mary, the Scottish Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, etc., etc., down to present times.

This transformation over the centuries could not have happened in a Gaelic context as Gaelic culture was essentially agrarian and tribal and did not evolve in a "European" manner along with the rest of Scotland, but remained static, thus becoming marginalised, and slowly retreated northward and westward to its mountain redoubts, where the faultlines of a Gaelic and non-Gaelic Scotland can still be somewwhat discerned.

As to the morality, or lack thereof, of it all, and the sorting out of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, I see an overabundance of that kind of thing every day when I read some of these e-mailed comments in which some people become quite exercised and in the process, usually generate more heat than light. To them, I'm tempted to say, in the words of a wise auld Heilan' Scots granny, "Thank heaven it happened n

45
The Reformation was roughly 1560 to 1700

Primogeniture was brought by the Romans.

The whole of the Western European seaboard was a Celtic Confederacy, in a very decentralised manner. Quite healthy really.Hence Stewarts, Bruce, etc.

Personally I'd choose a well balanced land scape to Industrial Wastelands.

Lord Semple says that Scots are coming to terms with their identity; What rubbish!!!!

Most Scottish people are not coming to terms with any identity other than their very British identity and why should as it has been very good for them in so many ways.
They loved the Empire and did little to get rid of it untilit was clear it was a no hope situation. Gaining position and rank was uppermost for them and it sat very easily in all their dealings. They could be British one minute and then without any difficulty be so called Scottish by wearing a piece of Tartan on their shoulder or the Kilt around their back side to be the instant smashing Scot. Nice one if you please.