"Eat, drink and be merry!" With roots in the Roman festival of Saturnalia, the Lord of Misrule was a festive, roll-reversal ...

Mary Queen of Scots, queen of Scotland at the age of just 6 days, had a very chaotic and endangered life. When she travelled to France in 1548 for her own protection and safety, she was escorted by ...

Many folklore customs have their roots planted firmly back in the Dark Ages, when the ancient Celts had divided their year by four major festivals. Beltane or ‘the fire of Bel’, had particular ...

Robert Burns is the best loved Scottish poet, admired not only for his verse and great love-songs, but also for his character, his high spirits, ‘kirk-defying’, hard drinking and womanising! He came ...

Visitors to Scotland will find some of the finest and most complete castles in Britain, as well as some of the best country house hotels. The following pages list around 100 of the very best ...

Unlike their invasion of England, the Norman penetration into Wales took place very gradually after 1066. The new king of England, William I (‘The Conqueror’) quickly secured his English kingdom by ...

Discover a more relaxed pace of life on the historic canals and rivers of Britain and Ireland. Once the very arteries of the Industrial Revolution, they now offer a very different and unique holiday ...

On 29th May 1660, on his 30th birthday, Charles II arrived in London to a rapturous welcome. This was a defining moment not only for Charles personally but for a nation that wanted to see a restored ...

St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, has quite a history for such a small place. Legend claims that the town was so called because it harboured the relics of St. Andrew, which were brought here by a bishop, ...

The last major engagement of the Wars of the Roses took place at the Battle of Stoke Field, near the town Newark in Nottinghamshire. Although the Yorkist King Richard III had been killed at the Battle ...

Britain was at war and supplies were becoming scarce. The ships of the Merchant Navy were under attack from German U-Boats at sea and rationing was introduced on 8th January 1940. At first it was just ...

Following a century of relative turmoil – the ousting of the Stuarts in favour of the House of Orange, the Jacobite Rebellions, the failure of the Darien Scheme, the (albeit reluctantly for some) ...