If you’ve been on the internet much, you’ve probably encountered an advertisement at some point claiming that, if you own any amount of land in Scotland, even if it is only one square foot, then you legally qualify for the title of “lord” or “lady.” Numerous companies have promoted this assertion, purporting that, if you buy one square foot of land from them, then you can call yourself a Scottish lord or lady and they will send you a certificate to indicate your new title. A few of the companies of this sort that you may have heard of include Highland Titles, Scotland Title, Scotland Titles (which is apparently a different company), Established Titles, Laird Title, The Scottish Gift, and so on.
All the titles these companies are selling are fake and they are not worth the paper they are printed on. For one thing, under current Scots law, it is not actually possible to transfer legal ownership rights to a single square foot of land in the first place. Furthermore, even if it were possible, merely owning one square foot of land would not make anyone a “lord” or “lady” in any sense.
Why I am writing about this issue
Regular readers of my blog are aware that I normally write posts about ancient history, so this post about the business of fake Scottish titles is a bit of a departure from my usual content. There are, however, a couple of reasons why I have decided to write this post.
The first reason is because, a couple of days ago, I watched a video by a history YouTuber (whose name I will not disclose here) in which he was promoting one of these companies for a sponsorship. After watching that video, it occurred to me that the target market for these fake title companies overlaps considerably with the online history community.
The second reason is because, as some readers may have guessed from my last name McDaniel, I have some Scottish ancestry on my father’s side. Admittedly, my ancestors bearing the name McDaniel came over to the British colonies in North America way back in the 1700s, before the United States was even a country, and have been living here continuously ever since. My most recent McDaniel ancestor who actually lived in Scotland is John McDaniel, who was born in Scotland in around 1760. By 1776, he was living in Frederick County, Maryland. I myself have lived my whole life in the United States and have never even visited Scotland. I do not consider myself Scottish and instead consider myself only an American.
My only connection to my Scottish ancestry other than my last name is my hair, which is reddish blond. (The color changes somewhat depending on the light, so sometimes the blond is more evident and sometimes the red is more evident.) My mother is blond, so I’ve clearly inherited the blond in my hair from her. I know that I’ve inherited the red from the McDaniel line because my father and father’s father both have red in their beards and I have an aunt and four cousins on the McDaniel side who all have red hair.
It’s generally people like me who have some remote Scottish ancestry, but who are thoroughly removed from Scotland itself, that companies try to target with these fake title shenanigans. As it happens, I would personally make for a very poor target for this particular kind of shenanigan, since I am strongly opposed to all royal and noble titles. I firmly believe that such titles should not exist in any contemporary society that claims to be free and democratic. Nonetheless, I feel that I should try to make other people aware of the truth about this whole fake-title-selling charade.
ABOVE: Photograph I took using the camera on my laptop on 18 May 2022 showing me sitting in front of one of my bookshelves with the red in my hair plainly visible
ABOVE: Photograph I took of myself in front of the same bookshelf on 2 June 2022 at a different time of day and with different lighting
Why you can’t actually buy one square foot of land in Scotland
Like Roman law, Scots law holds that real property ownership is absolute, meaning the owner of a piece of property owns all rights whatsoever to that property and they cannot transfer some rights to the piece of property to another person without transferring all the rights to it.
A sale of land in Scotland is only legal if it is officially registered with the Land Register and, in order to register a sale of land, the sale must abide by all the requirements of Scots law. As it happens, the Land Registration etc. (Scotland) Act 2012, Section 22(1)(b), specifically prohibits the sale of “souvenir plots” of land, which Section 22(2) defines as follows:
“In subsection (1)(b), ‘souvenir plot‘ means a plot of land which—
(a) is of inconsiderable size and of no practical utility, and
(b) is neither—
(i) a registered plot, nor
(ii) a plot the ownership of which has, at any time, separately been constituted or transferred by a document recorded in the Register of Sasines.”
In other words, it is not possible under current Scots law for anyone to transfer any form of legal ownership over a single square foot of land because such a plot of land “of inconsiderable size and no practical utility” obviously fits the legal definition of a “souvenir plot” and therefore cannot be registered with the Land Register of Scotland.
Because of this, companies that claim to “sell” souvenir plots of this kind will typically have a disclaimer somewhere saying that making a purchase with them does not imply any legal transfer of ownership and that they will merely “dedicate” a piece of land to the buyer, or some other similar wording.
These disclaimers sometimes use sneaky language that disguises or obfuscates what they are really saying. For instance, the company Scotland Title, which is owned by the larger corporation Highland Titles OU, has a “Frequently Asked Questions” page on their website, which lists the question “Must I register my land?” Here is their answer to that question:
“No. You cannot register your land, because this is such a small plot; specifically it is defined as a ‘souvenir plot’.”
“‘Souvenir’ plots of land have been sold in Scotland for over 30 years. The sale of these plots is governed by the Land Registration (Scotland) Act 1979, recently revised as the Land Registration etc. (Scotland) Act 2012. Please note that this act does not permit souvenir plots of land to be added to the Land Register.”
“Details of your personal rights in your plot will be recorded in a Register of Land maintained by Highland Titles and details of each plot can be viewed online using our website.”
In other words, if you “buy” a souvenir plot of land from them, they will retain all legal ownership of the land. The land will never really be yours and they retain the right to “sell” that exact same plot of land to anyone else who happens to come along. (Highland Titles insists that they do not do this, but there is still absolutely nothing to stop them from doing it.)
Why owning one square foot of land would not make you a “Scottish lord” anyway
In the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Australia, and most other western countries, anyone can legally call themself anything they want, as long as they are not committing fraud or identity theft. Thus, in the same way that anyone can legally use the courtesy title of “doctor,” even though only some people actually possess the legal right to practice medicine, anyone can legally call themself a “lord” or “lady,” even though only some people possess the legal recognition, privileges, and protections associated with those titles.
In the United Kingdom, “lord” and “lady” are peerage titles, meaning a person can only hold the legal recognition, privileges, and protections associated with those titles if they rightfully inherit them, if they marry into a noble family, or if the queen grants them a peerage. Since the only hereditary peerages the queen has granted in decades have been to members of the royal family, realistically, the only ways a person can become a lord or lady are either by inheritance or by marrying into a noble family. It is not possible for someone to buy their way into lordship or ladyship.
Companies that sell souvenir plots with the claim of granting titles often rely on a conflation of the titles “lord” and “lady” with “laird,” which is not a peerage title, but rather solely a courtesy title akin to the English phrase “lord of the manor.” In Scotland, this title is traditionally applied to a member of the landed gentry who owns a large estate that has a long history and who generally has servants and tenants. Because “laird” is merely a courtesy title, it has no legal significance; there are no special privileges or protections under U.K. law for being a laird.
Although it is legal for anyone to call themself a “laird,” merely owning some small amount of land in Scotland does not actually make someone a laird. In order to actually be a laird, a person must own a large estate with a long history. It is possible to buy one’s way into lairdship, but one has to buy a whole heck of a lot more than just one square foot of land. If you want to do it, you’ll have to buy an entire historic Scottish mansion.
One example of a person who has become a laird is the British novelist J. K. Rowling, who is best known as both the author of the bestselling series of children’s novels Harry Potter and also arguably the most influential proponent of transphobia in the English-speaking world today. In 2001, having become outlandishly wealthy through the success of the first four Harry Potter novels, Rowling purchased the sprawling, historic country estate of Killiechassie, located on the bank of the River Tay near the town of Weem in the historic county of Perthshire, Scotland.
The Killiechassie estate dates at least as far back as the twelfth century CE, but the current mansion on the property was built in 1865. A columbarium (i.e., a building meant to house pigeons or doves) on the estate grounds is a Category B listed structure, which means that it is officially recognized as a major historic monument. The estate itself is so famous and historically important that it even has its own article on Wikipedia.
In addition to owning Killiechassie, Rowling also owns a very large seventeenth-century mansion in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, which is surrounded by enormous thirty-foot Leylandii hedges. The city of Edinburgh has to close the entire road in front of Rowling’s mansion every year or so in order for her hedges to be trimmed. This inevitably results in traffic chaos and is frequently reported in both local and national news outlets.
On account of her ownership of these large, historic properties, Rowling can accurately describe herself as a “laird.”
ABOVE: Aerial photograph showing the exterior of the historic Scottish country estate Killiechassie, which is currently owned by J. K. Rowling
Before the twentieth century, upper-middle-class landowners in Scotland who owned and cultivated rural estates that were smaller than those of true lairds, but that were still of a significant size, were informally known as “bonnet lairds.” This appellation is roughly equivalent to the term “yeoman” in English parlance, signifying a person who is of a social and economic status just beneath that of the landed gentry or true lairds.
The phrase “bonnet laird” is etymologically derived from the fact that, in Scotland before the twentieth century, such small-time landowners often still wore bonnets, a kind of hat that was associated with the lower classes and not with the landed gentry.
Although this term is largely historical and is seldom used nowadays, one could at least argue that people who own smaller estates in Scotland may still accurately call themselves “bonnet lairds” and that becoming one may be easier than becoming a laird proper. Being a bonnet laird, though, would still require someone to own a house and a significant plot of land in Scotland. Merely owning one square foot of land obviously would not qualify someone for the title.
ABOVE: Portrait painted c. 1720, attributed to the Swiss painter Johann Rudolf Huber, showing Peter David Stürler, a citizen of Glasgow, wearing traditional Scottish clothing, including a bonnet, the kind of hat from which the “bonnet lairds” of premodern rural Scotland took their informal name
Many companies that claim to “sell” souvenir plots of land conveying titles have disclaimers somewhere in which they explain that fake ownership of a souvenir plot of land does not actually grant someone a true title of nobility. For instance, Scotland Title’s “Frequently Asked Questions” page lists the question “How can you sell me a title?” with the following answer:
“We cannot sell you a title. We are simply acknowledging your right to use the title of Laird, Lord or Lady of Glencoe, which is trademarked by HT. If you prefer not to assume a title, you will be given that option when you make your land purchase. Advice published by Scottish Solicitors is ‘in Scotland anyone can, subject to requirements of good faith, call themselves whatever they like, including “Laird”, “Lord” or “Lady”.’ We do not know of any jurisdiction where this is not true.”
In other words, they don’t actually sell real titles.
Scottish Prescriptive Baronies by Tenure: the only genuine U.K. titles of nobility that can be bought and sold
There is only one kind of genuine, legally recognized title of nobility in the U.K. that can be bought and sold, which is a Scottish Prescriptive Barony by Tenure. Until 2004, a Scottish barony was defined by ownership of a caput (i.e., a castle or estate that a Crown Charter had erected into a barony). In 2004, however, the Abolition of Feudal Tenure etc. (Scotland) Act 2000 abolished the system of feudal land tenure, which resulted in major changes to how Scottish baronies work.
Section 63(1) of the act declares that ownership of a caput no longer conveys a barony, but stipulates “nothing in this Act affects the dignity of baron or any other dignity or office (whether or not of feudal origin).” Section 63(2) further stipulates:
“When, by this Act, an estate held in barony ceases to exist as a feudal estate, the dignity of baron, though retained, shall not attach to the land; and on and after the appointed day any such dignity shall be, and shall be transferable only as, incorporeal heritable property (and shall not be a right as respects which a deed can be registered in the Land Register of Scotland or recorded in the Register of Sasines).”
This means that titles of Scottish Prescriptive Baron by Tenure can now be freely bought and sold independent of the real properties to which those titles were once attached.
Genuine Scottish baronies, however, only come up for sale very rarely and, when they do, they always end up selling for the equivalent of many tens of thousands of dollars at least. They are well outside the price range of what any person who is not already a member of the top 1% can afford.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing Ayton Castle in the Scottish Borders, built in 1851, the traditional caput of the Scottish barony of Ayton
What about the whole “nature reserve” thing?
Some companies that “sell” souvenir plots in Scotland, such as Highland Titles, claim that they maintain the land they use for souvenir plots as a “nature reserve” and that, by “buying” a souvenir plot from them, you are helping to restore and preserve the natural environment of Scotland.
The European news network Euronews, however, conducted an investigation into Highland Titles and their purported “nature reserves” and published their findings in a news article earlier this year. The news article notes that, although Highland Titles does indeed own multiple nature reserves, the company has never disclosed their finances and it is not clear how much of the apparently vast money they bring in actually goes toward conservation efforts. The article also quotes an anonymous source at a major non-government organization in Scotland as saying:
“The environment sector in Scotland generally does not hold a high opinion of the work carried out by Highland Titles. But their reputation for running to court means that people don’t feel comfortable speaking out. Scots with a wider cultural awareness find the whole proposition of selling titles ludicrous and insulting. As you would find with any brief trawl through social media on the subject.”
In other words, it is actually not clear to what extent, if at all, the “purchase” of a souvenir plot from Highland Titles or any of the various other companies in the business actually contributes to nature restoration and conservation work. Moreover, the actual quality of this work is very much in doubt.
ABOVE: Screenshot from the Google Maps street view showing the entrance to the Highland Titles Nature Reserve at Duror
Very interesting article. I have seen these web adverts occasionally, but far less than you. From reading this it is clear their target audience is people outside the UK with vague ties to Scotland, not people who actually live here in Britain.
That makes sense as even vaguely aware British people would see this kind of thing the way even vaguely aware Americans would see a web site promising that for $20 you get a certificate saying you’re a Justice on the US Supreme Court or Governor or Tennessee or something. If you then tried to claim you were a member of the Supreme Court, or showed people that certificate, they would think you were not only gullible but utterly clueless about the country you lived in.
I’ve seen the ads quite a bit on social media.
I think your analogy that this is like someone trying sell someone a certificate saying that they are a Supreme Court justice or the governor of Tennessee is clever and very fitting.
Thanks. Obviously the American examples are more important positions. But the relevant similarity is that anyone who knows what the roles actually are knows there is a process by which someone gets them. Jokes aside, that process doesn’t begin and end with anyone in the world sending your credit card details to a web site and getting a certificate in the mail. Same with British Peerages.
I wonder if there is a second or third order element to this in that the sellers know they are selling nonsense, and so do most of the buyers know this too. But the buyers think most people they show the certificate to won’t understand and that’s good enough for them.
There is in fact a way in which one can become a lord or lady in the UK, which is by being appointed to a life peerage. This is a position which gives the recipient a seat in the House of Lords, but is not a heritable title of nobility. They’re mostly given to politicians their party wants to kick upstairs, but they are also given to persons distinguished in other ways, who, it is thought, might contribute to the debates and deliberations of the Upper House. As for buying a title: there is an old tradition in the UK of selling titles of nobility. The title of baronet was specifically invented as a fundraiser for James VI and I of Scotland and England (I think it was that one: it was certainly one of those deplorable Stuarts), and Lloyd George notoriously sold peerages in the early 20th c. Could one do it under the present UK government? Nothing seems off the table in terms of corruption and lawlessness, but as himself is pretty rich already, it would be expensive.
> I have lived my whole life in the United States and have never even visited Scotland. I do not consider myself Scottish and instead consider myself only an American.
As someone who lives in Italy (or Europe in general), thank you. While there is nothing wrong with celebrating your past heritage, and it’s actually something which I find very laudable, people in Europe tend to find the obsession many Americans have with blood to be a little off-putting, if not concerning. For instance, I am of Bangladeshi ancestry, but I don’t call myself Bangladeshi, nor would anyone in my situation do that. I also wouldn’t dream about making baseless speculations about the connection between my heritage and my personality, which is something I see a lot of Americans do. In Italy, if you said something like ‘I must like spicy foods so much because of my Bangladeshi blood’, unless you mean it as something cultural (that is, due to your contact with Bangladeshi cuisine) or as a joke, you would be thought as a very weird person, if not racist.
I think it’s quite telling how many Americans do believe that race is something more than a social label, and yet in Italy (and most of Western Europe at least) if you seriously talk about ‘race’ you are seen as potentially racist.
Other than this, excellent article! I always love your articles and also debunking articles, and this happens to be both ^W^
Thanks! I think it would be ridiculous for me to call myself Scottish. Even from a “blood quantum” perspective, I have ancestors from all over western Europe and Great Britain. I only have a Scottish last name because my patrilineal line happens to be Scottish. I think it would be rather sexist of me to prioritize my very remote patrilineal ancestors over all my other ancestors.
I arguably have much closer ties to Germany than I do to Scotland, since my most recent ancestors to come over to the United States are actually my mother’s father’s mother’s parents (i.e., my great-great-grandparents) Wilhelm Heinrich Friedrich Rohrberg (who was born in 1861 in Niedersachsen, Germany) and Louise Dörr (who was born in 1878 in Baden-Württemberg, Germany). They came over to the United States independently in the late nineteenth century and met here in the U.S.
My maternal grandfather always used to tell the story that Wilhelm was a music professor when he was in Germany. When he came to live in Indiana, Purdue University supposedly offered him a faculty position, but he supposedly turned it down because he felt he didn’t speak English well enough. My Mom has never been able to find any documentary evidence to corroborate this specific story, but we do have a photo of Wilhelm taken after he came to the U.S. that shows him wearing a lyre pin and we know that he was the director of the local Männerchor (i.e., the German men’s choir) in Logansport, so music seems to have been important to him.
Wilhelm had a wife and four daughters in Germany, but, for some unknown reason, he left them, came to the United States alone, and remarried. He also died very mysteriously. According to a contemporary newspaper report, he “received a letter from Germany which caused him much agitation.” This letter has not survived, but one news report from the time says that it was from his sister in Germany asking for money. Shortly after receiving the letter, on 21 April 1912, he reportedly left his home where his wife and children were living and shot himself in the head. His body was found in gravel pit. The coroner apparently concluded that he killed himself out of “insanity.”
Wilhelm died long before my maternal grandfather was born, but Louise was still alive when he was growing up. My maternal grandfather told the story that, during World War II, men from the government supposedly came around asking her about the daughters Wilhelm had left behind in Germany. She always told them that she didn’t know anything. Supposedly there were also rumors around town at the time that one of the daughters had married a high-ranking Nazi officer. These stories, if they are true at all, probably tell us more about the climate of suspicion that surrounded German Americans during World War II than it does about what Wilhelm’s daughters were actually doing in Germany. (My mother has never been able to find any documentation of what became of them.)
My maternal grandfather also used to tell the story that he himself only spoke Plattdeutsch (i.e., Low German) until he was in third grade. He said that he went to a school of mostly German immigrant children, so the teachers all knew Hochdeutsch (i.e., High German), but they didn’t recognize that he was speaking Plattdeutsch, so they all just assumed that he had a developmental disability and that he was trying to speak Hochdeutsch wrong. Then he claims that his third-grade teacher recognized that he was speaking Plattdeutsch and kept him after class to teach him English and he’s been speaking English ever since.
There are very good reasons to doubt that the version of this story that my maternal grandfather always told is accurate. For one thing, my grandfather’s father, who helped raise him, was an American who only spoke English and my grandfather himself always maintained that his mother and her mother only ever spoke English in the house. Furthermore, although Wilhelm was from Niedersachsen, so it would make sense that he would have spoken Plattdeutsch, he died long before my grandfather was born. Louise, the only family member who had actually lived in Germany who was still alive when my grandpa was growing up, was from Baden-Württemberg and the German books she owned that I’ve inherited are all in Hochdeutsch. It’s therefore very unclear how my grandfather could have learned Plattdeutsch and not English. He claimed that he knew Plattdeutsch by instinct because it was in his blood, but that’s obviously impossible and not how languages work.
There’s also the additional problem that, by the time my mother and her older siblings were born, my grandfather could not remember even a single word of Plattdeutsch. He always claimed that he simply forgot the language entirely, but it seems implausible that someone could completely forget his own first language that he supposedly grew up speaking exclusively until he was in third grade. I mean, even my Mom still remembers a little bit of French from having taken it in high school decades ago, even though she was never fluent.
I think that, most likely, my grandpa’s mother and grandmother probably spoke both English and Hochdeutsch, possibly colored with some Plattdeutsch vocabulary they knew from Wilhelm, in the home. My grandpa probably couldn’t tell the two languages apart and what he was probably speaking until third grade was probably not fluent Plattdeutsch, but rather an incomprehensible mixture of English, Hochdeutsch, and maybe some Plattdeutsch.
Whatever the case may be, I took German for four years in high school, mostly because German and Spanish were the only options and I didn’t want to take Spanish because nearly everyone takes Spanish. The fact that I was taking German greatly pleased my maternal grandfather. Sadly, he died a few years ago, but, before he died, he gave me two old books in German that belonged to his grandmother Louise. The first is a Gesangbuch or Lutheran devotional book printed in 1891 that she apparently received upon her confirmation in 1892 and subsequently brought with her when she immigrated to the United States. The second is a spectacularly lavish anthology of poems in German by famous German poets titled Ich denke Dein (after the poem of that title by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which is the first poem in the collection) with a gilded cover and extensive engraved illustrations that Heinrich gave to her as a gift shortly before their wedding in 1900.
What a story! Thank you for sharing it with us. I guess that Gesangbuch uses the old Fraktur script – it can be very difficult to tell f and long s apart in it! I bought a four-volume set with the complete works of Heine (not including his letters) three years ago in Ljubljana for €20, and I’m still occasionally misreading some words because of that awful typography (and because my German is worse than poor…). But well, there are greater evils: at least we don’t need to decode handwriting in Kurrent!
Oh, it’s a Gesangbuch, not a Gefangbuch! That makes so much more sense! I understood the “-buch” part, but I couldn’t figure out what the “Gefang-” part meant. Now I feel like a complete idiot for not realizing that was an s not an f, since it seems so obvious in retrospect!
Did you edit your comment? If so, why can’t everyone else edit theirs?
Yes, I edited the comment. I can edit comments because I have administrative rights. I actually have the ability to edit other people’s comments if I want to, but I have a rule against doing that unless someone has specifically asked me to edit their comment.
Thanks for this! A refreshing blast of reality and honesty. I’m of Scots ancestry but I can see thru a scam when I see one, and it amazes me when I see Scottish-Americans (in the main) falling for this hucksterism. And what does this say about our bedazzlement with titles? It’s similar to how so many people saying they believe in reincarnation but they think they were Cleopatra or Napoleon or Alexander the Great, when most likely they would have been… peasants. Or tradesmen.
I knew a guy, an historical crank, in San Antonio who went around giving people cards that gave his name as “Lord MacDonald”, based on some fantasy conception of himself and his descent. Lord MacDonald lived in a cramped little bed-sit and harboured all manner of strange concepts. He probably was a prime candidate for buying a few inches of this turf, or rather, worthess paper.
People like to put on airs. Mark Twain told us all about that long ago, see “Huckleberry Finn”!
PS: Excellent example in the illustrations of Highland clothing as worn by Lowland gentry in the early 1700s! That is one I’ve not seen before.
Thank you! I found the image on Wikimedia Commons.
I can’t see the second picture of you.
Thanks for pointing that out! I made the mistake again of copying the image directly from my Google Photos without downloading it to my computer and uploading it to the website, so it showed perfectly fine on my screen when I viewed the page while I was logged in, but, if I viewed the page without being logged in, the photo wouldn’t show up. I had to download it to my computer and then upload it to the website in order for it to show up while I am not logged in. Can you see the photo now?
Yes.
Ok, good!
Ah, the ‘no true laird fallacy’ in action. Brings back memories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_Big_Inch_Land_Promotion. I have a few of the latter deeds.
Thank you for this. As always, I enjoy your writing, and your argument is pretty definitive!
On the other hand, my wife and I have fancy laminated wallet-sized cards saying we can call ourselves “Lord” and “Lady” and listing GPS coordinates for our miniature plots of land in Scotland. Now who am I going to believe??
I’m joking, of course – this was a gag gift for my wife’s birthday a few years ago, instigated in part by my (very) watered-down Scottish ancestry but much more by her appreciation of “Downton Abbey”! – although I did think/hope there was some real land conservancy behind it all…
I think there is a US organization that will sell you a certificate proclaiming you to be an honorary Kentucky Colonel. It may have something to do with the Bourbon industry. Maybe there’s more than one bunch!
Then there are those folks who will “name a star” after someone for a fee, and you get a fancy scroll or some such.
And for a long time, companies have been selling ersatz “Coats of Arms” and cod “family histories” based on your last name, so everyone with a few bucks to spare can point to a paper on a wall and say, “That’s my Heraldic Achievement!” Despite the fact that only old-time nobility was recognized as possessing an armorial right.
It’s all good clean fun, I suppose, who am I to rain on the parade? But:
A _____ and his ______ really ARE soon parted! (Fill in the blanks!)
PS again: the stock image used to promote this charade (the first one reproduced here) isn’t “Glencoe”, it’s actually Glenfinnan. That Highlander monument is a dead giveaway, if not the landscape. Just to prove a point.
The main image for this article is actually just an image of a fake title certificate that I found on Google Images superimposed over a picturesque photo of the Scottish Highlands that I found on Wikimedia Commons. I did not get the image from any of the companies selling souvenir plots and I wasn’t intending for the photo to specifically represent Glencoe.
Ah, understood!
Well, FWIW, both Glen Coe and Glen Finnan are magnificent. You really ought to travel to Scotland sometime down the road, you’d enjoy the scenery and the people!
I actually considered buying one of those things a while back out of morbid curiosity but I’m glad I didn’t. Sadly, I only know my Scots-English heritage (which is full of nobility by all accounts!) but none of my Eastern European (Polish, Slovak, Croatian, etc.). Like you I never saw myself as a European American. My paternal grandmother aside, my family has been here, like yours, since before the beginning and I have more knowledge of almost any other culture, language, and religion than I do Scottland or Ireland. Ask me to write my name in, say, Arabic or Chinese and I can probably do it better than in Gaelic. I tried listening to a YouTube video on the history of Scottish clans and I almost fell asleep five minutes in. I have no interest in current Scottish politics (including secession from the UK) or the Northern Ireland conflict. I didn’t even celebrate St.Patty’s day as an adult until after finishing my undergrad. I don’t see it as an insult to my culture since I don’t see it as “my” culture really, especially when I’m less than 40% Irish to begin with. None of this is meant to discourage anyone with a serious interest in Scotland of course.
Thanks for this post. I had not seen an ad for this ? scam? until it appeared on a language learning YouTube channel I had some mild interest in for learning Latin. The presenter read out the copy himself. Doing that lead me to doubt his commitment to research and honesty. I did leave two comments there, and one on a channel from an associate, and included a link to this post. It actually creeped me out to see this!
Thank you for your research! All of it, of course, but this one rang a bell: some years ago, an email acquaintance in Australia (yes, one with Scottish roots) advised me quite solemnly that he had become a ‘Scottish Laird’, but that he’d accept the title ‘Lord’ if that’s what I wanted to use. I asked him what ‘Laird’ he was, and he told me that he was the ‘Laird of Glencoe.’ A quick search of the internet showed that there were several hundred ‘Lairds of Glencoe’, so I concluded that he had acquired an inch or a foot of Glencoe (which is, as has been remarked, an astonishingly beautiful area!). However, before I first visited the UK, I studied its history and culture. I learned that Scottish titles of nobility, as well as coats of arms (which real Lairds do have), fell under the purview of the Lord Lyon King of Arms, the chief heraldic officer of Scotland. And, I’m afraid that the website of the Court of the Lord Lyon rather severely denounces the fraudulent practice of selling these fake ‘titles’ and ‘arms.’ So, I wrote my Aussie friend, ‘And have your title and arms been confirmed by the Court of the Lord Lyon?’ I would never hear from him again. . . . !
Well done, Sir!
Thank you for this blog post. Very usefull and intresting.
You’re welcome! I’m glad you found my post helpful!