Lowland Scotland

Where most Scots have always lived, and where the Enlightenment happened. The Lowlands speak Scots, a Germanic tongue that developed alongside English from Northumbrian Old English and was the language of the Scottish court and its literature - Dunbar and Henryson wrote in it - before converging with English after 1603. The Reformation of 1560 built a Presbyterian church governed by assemblies of ministers and elders rather than bishops, and its commitment to universal Bible reading produced a parish school system and near-universal literacy well ahead of England. That is the direct cause of what followed: Edinburgh and Glasgow in the eighteenth century produced Hume, Adam Smith, Hutton, Black and Watt within a few decades of each other, in what became known as the Scottish Enlightenment. The Union of 1707 preserved Scots law, the church and the universities while removing the parliament. Glasgow then industrialised on tobacco, cotton, iron and shipbuilding, becoming the second city of the empire. Deindustrialisation hit it hard from the 1960s. Edinburgh remains a financial and legal centre. The Scottish Parliament reconvened in 1999. The central belt between Glasgow and Edinburgh holds most of Scotland's population. Scots and Scottish Gaelic both have recognised status alongside English. New Lanark, a planned mill village, is a World Heritage site. The Forth Bridge, completed in 1890, is another. Burns wrote in Scots and is commemorated worldwide each January. The Edinburgh Festival is the largest arts festival in the world. Golf was codified here, at St Andrews, whose university is the oldest in Scotland.

• Existed: 1124 CE – present
• Type: Entity