Fun Fact of the Week! Scotland

By Quinn Hoop

I was having difficulty writing a Fun Fact of the Week article, until I turned to Scotland, a land bristling with uniqueness and ‘I’m not like the other girls’ energy. So this week let us salute the strange northern territory that gave us haggis, tartans, and FREEDOOOOM!

Let’s first go over some basic fun facts, just to get the basics out of the way.

• Scotland’s national animal is the unicorn because Scotland just can’t be normal (also its bestie Wales’ national animal is a red dragon). 
• Scotland has 86.6 Sheep per Square Kilometer, or about 1.25 sheep per person. 
• Haggis has been illegal to import into the United States since 1971 under an FDA policy that prohibits the addition of animal lungs in food. Sheep lungs are a main ingredient in haggis. 
• Scotland beats out Sweden by 8 years for the title of longest continually functioning post office. The post office in Sanquhar, Scotland has been mailing since 1712. 
• The County of Perthshire has the Meikleour beech hedge, the largest (both longest and tallest) hedge in the world. It’s been growing since 1745, supposedly because the men who planted it died in battle. 

The Meikleour beech hedge. Image Courtesy of Pinterest 

• Nils Olav The First was initially promoted to corporal of the Norwegian army in 1982, and made it to Sargent by 1987. Tragically, he died less than a year later, but was replaced by Nils Olav II. This Sir Nils Olav II served until 2008, attained the role of colonel-in-chief, and was knighted by the Norwegian king in 2005. A bronze statue of his likeness was presented to his home in Scotland the same year. Nils Olav II died in 2008, and was replaced by Nils Olav III, and by 2023 had achieved Major General, the highest role attainable in peacetime. The strange thing about Nils Olav 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, was that they were all 4-foot-tall penguins hailing from Edinburgh Zoo. 

In terms of political history, Scotland has had a bit of a wild ride. The Celtic Prehistory was pretty awesome, for example: in my opinion, the Callanish Stones are way cooler than Stonehenge, and were built 5,000 years prior. The Romans threw in the towel by the time they made it to Scotland, as they were too damn tired of the weather, the people mercilessly assaulting them, and their own infighting. Arguably the second boss battle for England’s colonial expansion project, the lands of Scotland had been fighting those of England basically since there was a ‘Scotland,’ and maybe even a fair bit before that. Some interesting happenings from this time were the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, which was signed in 1502 and ceased being perpetual less than 50 years later; James IV’s invasion of England, becoming the last UK Monarch to die in battle in 1531; and the brief war in 1543 known as ‘the Rough Wooing.’ 

One of the most interesting things I found while researching Scotland was that its legal code is entirely unique in that juries have three verdicts to find, adding ‘not proven’ to the repertoire of ‘guilty’ and ‘not guilty.’ This stemmed primarily from the pre-1700s legal system, where the jury decided the guilt of the accused. By the early 1700s however, the system had shifted so that the jury more or less decided which facts were true (proven, not proven), and then the judge decided whether the accused was guilty off of that information. However, in 1728 a drunken sword fight resulted in a man named Carnegie accidentally skewering his friend instead of the man he was trying to fight. The defendant for the case insisted that, although the facts of the case were proven (and so the judge would find him guilty), Carnegie was not guilty, and so should have another option. So, the jury insisted that, although it was proven, Carnegie was not guilty. While the rest of the world never went through the proven/not proven phase, it has stuck around in Scotland until today. Although in 2022 there were major calls to remove ‘not proven’ from the legal system, with ~62% public support, nothing seems to have come of it so far as I can tell.