Everything Scotland

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! There is a castle in Angus where, the stories say, a man is playing cards with the Devil in a room that no longer exists, a monster lives in the walls, and a Grey Lady has a seat in the chapel that nobody will take. Part of Everything Scotland's October run on the spooky and scary side of Scotl...

Ask any Scot whether they believe in any of this, and they will say no. Then watch them uncross two knives on the dinner table without even noticing they have done it. This episode opens Everything Scotland's run of October episodes with the gap between what we say we believe and what we actually still do. In this episode, Lesley traces Scottish superstition back through layers of pre-Christian Ce...

In 2015, the North Coast 500 did not exist, not as a named, branded route anyway. Within a few years it was one of the most talked about road trips on earth, and the Highlands have not been quite the same since, for better and for worse. In this episode, Lesley traces the NC500 from its 2015 launch by the North Highland Initiative, backed by the then Prince of Wales, now King Charles, through the...

In 1457, the Scottish Parliament banned golf. Not discouraged it, banned it by Act of Parliament because too many men were on the links instead of practising their archery. It did not work. Six hundred years later, golf is one of the biggest reasons people book a flight to Scotland at all. In this episode, Lesley traces golf's Scottish origins from stones knocked around coastal links land to the A...

Scotland's national animal is a unicorn. The national flower is a weed. The national emblem's official motto translates as nobody provokes me with impunity. And the national anthem situation involves a song that contains a verse specifically asking God to crush the Scottish people. This is not a country that does things by halves. In this episode, Lesley goes through Scotland's national symbols pr...

Hollywood has been coming to Scotland for decades. Sometimes it gets it spectacularly right. Sometimes it gets it spectacularly wrong. And sometimes it sends thousands of people to a castle in Lanarkshire hoping to find a shirtless man raking hay in the courtyard. He is never there. Lesley has checked. In this episode, Lesley goes through Hollywood's Scotland honestly and with genuine affection fo...

Scotland has a population of around five million people. It has also given the world the telephone, the television, radar, the MRI scanner, penicillin, insulin, anaesthesia, the hypodermic needle, ultrasound scanning, the refrigerator, the vacuum flask, the toaster, the raincoat, the pneumatic tyre, the bicycle, the flushing toilet, colour photography, universal standard time, and Dolly the sheep....

Series 2 of Everything Scotland begins with Scotland's most iconic garment. The kilt: where it came from, what the different types are, why the Scotland versus Ireland debate is more complicated than either side admits, and the question that every tour guide in Scotland gets asked eventually. Lesley Kennedy is answering all of it, including the five questions she is asked on every tour, the undern...

Scotland has over nine hundred islands. In the final episode of Series One, Lesley Kennedy goes to the edges of the country, the places where Scotland runs out of land and meets the Atlantic, and talks about them the way she talks about everything: honestly, personally, and with genuine enthusiasm for what makes them unlike anywhere else. In this episode: Skye, including something Lesley has wante...

Scotland has given the world music that spans centuries and continents. From a folk tradition that predates the printing press to a generation of artists rewriting what Scottish music sounds like. This is the episode Lesley Kennedy has been looking forward to since Episode One. In 2014, during the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum, a man called Gerry Cinnamon posted a song called Hope...

Ten episodes of Scottish history, mythology and a three-attempt execution. Time for something to eat. Scottish food has a reputation problem. Too many people hear the words and picture deep-fried everything and a diet that explains certain health statistics. They are wrong, and Lesley Kennedy is here to fix that, starting with haggis, still the most unfairly avoided dish in Scotland, and finishing...

Mary Queen of Scots has been romanticised for four hundred years. Lesley Kennedy is not doing the romantic version today. She is doing the honest one: the good, the bad, and the genuinely baffling decisions of a woman who was brilliant in some areas, catastrophic in others, and the master of her own disasters in ways the films tend to gloss over. In this episode: Mary's birth at Linlithgow Palace,...

Lesley Kennedy wears a silver kelpie pendant every day. A kelpie is a shape-shifting water horse that will drag you into a loch and drown you, leaving only your liver on the bank, and Lesley has thoughts about the liver specifically. Most tour guests who notice the pendant have questions. Some reassess their choice of guide. She stands by it entirely, on the grounds that the kelpie deserves better...

Scottish myths and legends were the plan. Then Scotland went to the World Cup, the Tartan Army went to America, and everything else had to wait. In this episode: Lesley Kennedy, who is not a football fan but is absolutely a Scotland fan and knows the difference, tells the story of the Tartan Army. The FIFA Fair Play Award they won for being good tourists. The philanthropy that never makes the head...

Is your surname Scottish? Possibly. Probably. But the answer is more complicated and considerably more interesting than a simple yes or no, and Lesley Kennedy, who married into a clan and has spent years on tour gently managing the expectations of people who arrived in Scotland certain their name connected them to something dramatic, is going to walk you through it. In this episode: what a clan ac...

The first time Lesley Kennedy went to Edinburgh, she was twenty-one, attending court as a witness, with no map, no smartphone, and no idea where she was going. She asked strangers for directions. Several of those strangers were also lost. Some didn't speak English. She made it. In this episode: Edinburgh's pronunciation sorted once and for all. The Glasgow vs Edinburgh question answered honestly....

Lesley Kennedy is not a sporty person. She has not voluntarily participated in sport since a game of netball in primary school and has no intention of starting now. She is, however, completely in love with the Highland Games, which tells you everything you need to know about the Highland Games. This week: a man the size of a wardrobe throws a hundred-and-seventy-five-pound pine tree, and is judged...

Lesley has just visited Islay during Fèis Ìle, the Islay Festival of Music and Malt, the annual event that turns this island of 3,200 people into the whisky capital of the world for ten days every May. In this episode: the ferry crossing that looked like a film, Port Ellen on a warm May evening, an Ardnahoe guide who made everyone laugh while teaching them things, the Paps of Jura from across the...

Scotland produces roughly 40 bottles of Scotch whisky per second. There are 130+ active distilleries. The industry exports £5.6 billion worth of product every year. And every single cask gives 2% of itself to the air annually, the Angel's Share. Today, we cover how Scotch is made, a tour of all five whisky regions and their radically different characters, how to actually taste whisky without embar...

In 1745, a 24-year-old Italian-educated prince sailed to Scotland with seven men and nearly overthrew the British Crown. This is the full story of the Jacobites, Bonnie Prince Charlie's astonishing campaign from Glenfinnan to Derby and back, the catastrophe of Culloden in sixty brutal minutes, Flora MacDonald's remarkable escape operation, and the systematic destruction of Highland culture that fo...

Welcome to Everything Scotland, the podcast hosted by Lesley Kennedy, born and raised in Scotland, a former police officer turned tour guide. In Episode 1, Lesley introduces herself, covers Scotland 101, dives into the 700-year-old letter that explains the Scottish character better than anything ever written, busts five massive myths, and teaches you your first Scots word: dreich . Pull up a chair...