It’s well-known that Mary Queen of Scots was taller by some measure than the English monarch Elizabeth much to the latter’s considerable displeasure but tall stature was not confined to the Scottish nobility as the inhabitants of Glen Tilt demonstrated. Nowadays Scots suffer premature deaths and are puny compared with earlier generations as they tuck into high sugar, high fat junk food, white bread, cakes and biscuits, sugary drinks and over-sweetened breakfast cereals with scarce a glance at the perhaps boring but wholesome foods that made their ancestors taller and stronger than them. The population of Glen Tilt were also long-lived, thriving on the traditional Scottish diet of oats, barley, vegetables, milk, butter, eggs, local grown fruit and honey supplemented with small amounts of meat, venison and fish. Scots were once the tallest of all European peoples with Highland men pushing up the average to between 6ft and 7ft.Īt the end of the 18th century a survey of 600 crofters from Glen Tilt in Perthshire discovered every adult male in the glen was at least 6 feet tall – and broad with calves at least 17 inches around. Scots can expect to live shorter lives than their English neighbours and be shorter in height as well. It looks like the Union of equals has proved to be anything but equal in ways you cannot imagine. They carried their heads so freely and gaily and marched so lightly, swinging along with their bare knees.
BURLY MEN AT SEA BIRDS FREE
“They were men! All strong, nimble and free as if they had come straight from the hand of God.
“I saw them in Brussels a year before the battle of Waterloo,” said Eckermann. “Wellington’s Scottish Highlanders were a different set of heroes, from all accounts,” replied his fellow German, the celebrated playwright and author, Goethe. Remembering back to the Napoleonic period and the French Wars, the German poet and author, Johann Eckermann commented on how puny Paris’ infantrymen looked and wondered what they could achieve in battle.
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