"Welcome to Scotland" a Scotland Travel Page by maclean

Scotland is a country of beautiful country with strikingly beautiful landscapes and people.

Edinburgh (pronounced /ˈɛdɪnˌbrə/), Dùn Èideann (/tuːn ˈeːtʃən/) in Scottish Gaelic, is the second-largest city in Scotland and is the country's capital city.

It is situated on the east coast of Scotland's central lowlands on the south shore of the Firth of Forth . It has been the capital of Scotland since 1437 and is the seat of the country's Scottish Executive. The city was one of the major centres of the enlightenment, led by the University of Edinburgh. The Old Town and New Town districts of Edinburgh were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995. In the census of 2001, Edinburgh had a total resident population of 448,624.

Edinburgh is well known for the annual Edinburgh Festival, the largest performing arts festival in the world, and for the Hogmanay street party. At the time of the art festivals the population of the city doubles. The city is one of the world's major tourist destinations, attracting roughly 13 million visitors a year.

Known as the commercial capital of Scotland, the City of Glasgow is a bustling, cosmopolitan city. At the 2001 Census the city had a population of 629,501 making it the largest city in Scotland. This is down from its 1960s peak of 1.1 million (mostly due to boundary changes rather than population decline per se and also due to the mass building of towns or 'overspil' in the surrounding suburbs during the 1960s and 1970s), while approximately 2.1 million people live in Greater Glasgow : A 15 mile radius of the city centre known as the city of Glasgow and the greater metropolitan area. The surrounding region of Strathclyde (from the Gaelic for 'valley of the River Clyde') has a population of over 2.6 million, over half of the whole Scottish population.

The city's name comes from the older Gaelic glas cu (compare modern Gaelic Glaschu), meaning green hollow. The "dear green place" (Glaschu) has been misquoted as a Gaelic translation for the city, but this was actually Daniel Defoe's description of the city when he visited in the early 18th century; he also claimed that Glasgow was "the paradise of Scotland and one of the cleanliest and best built cities in Britain." Another writer of the time said of the River Clyde: "I have never seen before any river which for natural beauty can stand competition with the Clyde. Never did a stream glide more gracefully to the ocean or through a fairer region." At that time, the city's population numbered approximately 12,000, and its structures largely consisted of attractive, compact wooden buildings, none of which remain today.

Fife (Fìobh in Gaelic) is a unitary council region of Scotland situated between the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth. It was originally one of the Pictish kingdoms known as Fib, and is commonly known as the Kingdom of Fife in the area.

It is also a traditional county of Scotland and a Lieutenancy area. Much to the locals annoyance, it is sometimes incorrectly known outside of Scotland as Fifeshire despite there being no town called Fife. A person from Fife is known as a Fifer.

Fife is officially the only Kingdom within a Kingdom this came around due to the King falling from his horse on the Fife cliffs walkways and being found by one of the locals. The local persons, allegedly, were not aware that this was the King and when he came to he was so happy with the treatment he received that the declared Fife to be a Kingdom in its own right.

The origin of the city's name is understood to come from the Brythonic Din Eidyn (Fort of Eidyn) from the time when it was a Gododdin hillfort, perhaps, as David Nash Ford suggests, when it was the home of the mid-6th century King Clinog Eitin, whose epithet records the place name.

After it was besieged by the Bernician Angles the name changed to Edin-burh, which some have argued derives from the Anglo-Saxon for "Edwin's fort", possibly derived from the 7th century Northumbrian king Edwin. However, since the name apparently predates King Edwin, this is highly unlikely. The burgh element means "fortress" or "group of buildings", i.e. a town or city and is akin to the German burg, Latin parcus, Greek pyrgos etc. This word can be traced back to the Chaldean perach meaning "growth", in the sense that a group of buildings is a growth from the earth, and may be a borrowing.

The first evidence of the existence of the town as a separate entity from the fort lies in an early 12th century charter, generally thought to date from 1124, by King David I granting land to the Church of the Holy Rood of Edinburgh. This suggests that the town came into official existence between 1018 (when King Malcolm II secured the Lothians from the Northumbrians) and 1124.

The charter refers to the recipients (in Latin) as "Ecclisie Sancte Crucis Edwinesburgensi". This could mean that those who drafted the charter believed Edwin to be the original source of the name and decided to derive the Latinisation from what they believed to be the ancient name. It could also mean that at some point in the preceding 600 years the name had altered to include a w. If the latter scenario was the case then it was soon to change; by the 1170s King William the Lion was using the name "Edenesburch" in a charter (again in Latin) confirming the 1124 grant of David I.

Documents from the 14th century show the name to have settled into its current form; although other spellings ("Edynburgh" and "Edynburghe") appear, these are simply spelling variants of the current name.