In Reply

Certainly, the historic link dates from the highland clearances – a mass migration caused solely and completely by… yes, you’ve guessed… the wool trade.Huge swathes of Scotland, and in a different manner, England too, were cleared of indigenous resident sustainable populations by an elite with political and military power, in order to occupy the cleared lands with huge sheep farms. The wool trade was partly, I believe, serving to fuel the Napoleonic wars, though I forget what the English army used wool for. Today’s residual contingent of struggling UK sheepfarmers is largely a hangover from this not-too-distant example of ethnic cleansing – the previous sustainable populations kept cattle, pigs, grew oats… were foresters… coppiced… Now the hills are bare and the soil has no nitrogen content – the nitrogen went into the wool. Taken from the land and not put back… Fertility was lost. A culture was shifted, by sea, to New Scotland (nova scotia); to New Zealand (Dunedin, NZ city, named after the original Gaelic name for Edinburgh), to Australia, to Canada. With the exodus went knowledge. There is a theory that the grail is now in Nova Scotia.