Spring Road Trip Drive East On A85 Road To Visit Crieff Perthshire Scotland

Tour Scotland Spring, Easter Friday travel video of a road trip drive, with Scottish music, on the A85 road to visit Crieff in the Perthshire Highlands. For a number of centuries Highlanders came south to Crieff to sell their black cattle whose meat and hides were avidly sought by the growing urban populations in Lowland Scotland and the north of England. The town acted as a gathering point or tryst for the Michaelmas cattle sale held each year and the surrounding fields and hillsides were black with the tens of thousands of cattle, some from as far away as Caithness and the Outer Hebrides. Rob Roy MacGregor visited Crieff on many occasions, often to sell cattle. Rob Roy's outlaw son was pursued through the streets of Crieff by soldiers and killed. In the second week of October 1714 the Highlanders gathered in Crieff for the October Tryst. By day Crieff was full of soldiers and government spies. Just after midnight, Rob Roy and his men marched to Crieff Town Square and rang the town bell. In front of the gathering crowd they sang Jacobite songs and drank a good many loyal toasts to their uncrowned King James VIII. In 1716, 350 Highlanders returning from the Battle of Sheriffmuir burned most of Crieff to the ground. In 1731, James Drummond, 3rd Duke of Perth, laid out the town's central James Square and established a textile industry with a flax factory. In February 1746 the Jacobite army was quartered in and around the town with Prince Charles Edward Stuart holding his final war council in the old Drummond Arms Inn in James Square, located behind the present abandoned hotel building in Hill Street. He also had his horse shod at the blacksmith's in King Street. Later in the month he reviewed his troops in front of Ferntower House, on what is today the Crieff Golf Course. In the 19th century, Crieff became a fashionable destination for tourists visiting the Highlands and a country retreat for wealthy businessmen from Edinburgh, Glasgow and beyond.
Daniel John Cunningham was born in the manse at Crieff, in 1819, the son of the Reverend John Cunningham and of his wife Susan Porteous Murray. He was a Scottish physician, zoologist, and anatomist, famous for Cunningham's Text-book of Anatomy and Cunningham's Manual of Practical Anatomy. He died unexpectedly at home, 18 Grosvenor Crescent in Edinburgh's West End, on 23 July 1909 and was buried with his wife, Elizabeth, and children near the eastern side of Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh.
Alexander Murray was born in Crieff, Perthshire, on 2 June 1810. He worked as a geologist in the United Kingdom and Canada, before moving to Newfoundland in 1864 to become the first director of the Geological Survey of Newfoundland. His first major task was to produce a reliable topographical map of the interior of the island. Murray did detailed work in the area between Hall's Bay and St. George's Bay, as well as the area surrounding Conception, Placentia and St. Mary's bays. He also mapped parts of the Great Northern Peninsula and central Newfoundland. Murray produced the first geological map of Newfoundland and his reports of rich resources in the island's interior were an important factor in the decision to build the trans-island railway in 1881. Poor health caused him to return to Scotland in 1883 where he died on 18 December 1884.