Free Republic

A fragment of “lost” music, discovered within the pages of Scotland’s first full-length printed book, is offering valuable insights into the sound of music from five centuries ago.Experts from Edinburgh College of Art and KU Leuven in Belgium have been examining the origins of this musical score—comprising just 55 notes—to shed light on early sixteenth-century, pre-Reformation Scottish music.Researchers describe the find as a rare glimpse into the musical practices of Scottish religious institutions 500 years ago. Notably, it is the only surviving piece of music from this era originating in the northeast of Scotland.The scholars made the discovery in a...

“If you could even guess the nature of this castle’s secret,” said Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore, “you would get down on your knees and thank God it was not yours.” That awful secret was once the talk of Europe. From perhaps the 1840s until 1905, the Earl’s ancestral seat at Glamis Castle, in the Scottish lowlands, was home to a “mystery of mysteries”—an enigma that involved a hidden room, a secret passage, solemn initiations, scandal, and shadowy figures glimpsed by night on castle battlements. The conundrum engaged two generations of high society until, soon after 1900, the secret...