Polish Plaid

Poles living in Scotland now have their own tartan, which incorporates the red and white of the Polish flag.

"I want to buy a kilt because I am living in Scotland," Sebastian Flasza, owner of Rock and Roll Tattoo and Piercing in Edinburgh, told The Times of London. "But I am a Polish Scot. I feel this represents me. Oh, aye."

Poland and Scotland have a long common history. Bonnie Prince Charlie, the ill-fated Stuart heir, was half-Polish, and there is also a myth in Poland that Lech Walesa, leader of the Solidarity movement, is descended from Sir William Wallace, the Scottish nationalist executed by the English in 1305. [Link]

Modern-Day Braveheart: Death March Not So Bad

From Telegraph.co.uk:

700 years on, a funeral is held for William Wallace

By Sally Pook
(Filed: 24/08/2005)

There was little of William Wallace to bury after he was strangled by hanging, released near death, drawn, quartered and beheaded.

His head was placed on a pike on London Bridge and his limbs displayed across Scotland to serve as a terrible warning.

Seven hundred years later, a symbolic funeral service was conducted for the Scottish rebel leader in London yesterday, close to his place of execution.

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Tied to horses and stripped naked, he was dragged for six miles through the city in 1305 to a site next to St Bartholomew's church in Smithfield, where he is commemorated by a plaque dedicated to his "immortal memory".

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Colin Hay, 32, a youth worker from Perth, who walked the death route from Westminster to Smithfield, said: "It was the easiest six miles of my life. I didn't feel it. We were walking for a purpose, in honour of Wallace."

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No, Not That One

From The (Glasgow, Scotland) Herald:

Inspiring cry for freedom

JIM WALLACE [Member of the Scottish Parliament] August 05 2005

To mark the Scottish Genealogical Society's 50th anniversary in 2003, the society researched the family trees of Scotland's four party leaders. Tracing my ancestry disclosed that my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was William Wallace. The day after the public handover of the "trees", a tabloid newspaper splashed a Braveheart headline with photographs of myself and Sir William Wallace, otherwise known as Mel Gibson.

What was not really clear to the reader was that my ancestor, William Wallace, was a linen weaver who was born in Tynron near Dumfries in 1752. My press officer thought that in this case a rebuttal line shouldn't be offered.

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[Read the whole story]