The village of Blackness‘s War Memorial lies on a turning on the A 903 down from the main A 904 road into Bo’ness just before the approach to Blackness Castle. Blackness originally served as a port for Linlithgow, when Scottish monarchs used Linlithgow Palace as a main residence.

It’s a square slightly stepped granite pillar on a square base.

Dedication and names. Eight for the Great War, two (below) for World War 2:-

I meant to put this in one of my recent Linlithgow Palace posts but forgot. The statue is in the grounds of the Palace on the Linlithgow side.

View of Linlithgow from Linlithgow Palace (stitch of three photos.) St Michael’s Church just left of centre. Part of Linlithgow Loch to right:-

Linlithgow Loch looking east from Palace:-

Linlithgow Loch looking north form Palace:-

The view of the Loch to the east is in this post.

South range and rooftop, Linlithgow beyond:-

Rooftop looking east:-

Great Hall fireplace:-

Interior:-

Stairwell:-

Window seat:-

Linlithgow in West Lothian is one of our favourite places. I could have sworn I had posted photos of the palace there,  Linlithgow Palace, where Mary, Queen of Scots was born in 1542, but a search on the blog proved fruitless.

The Palace is approached from the town up a short road and is partly obscured by St Michael’s Church on your right as you do so. As a result there is not a good angle to view the Palace facade. It opens out a bit at the top.

The Palace – with St Michael’s Church (the tower with crossed beams) behind – is best viewed as a whole from across Linlithgow Loch:-

Side view from the grounds surrounding the Palace:-

The interior courtyard is dominated by an elaborate fountain:_

Fountain and east range. The Palace’s original entrance  was on the east. The wall above taht enrtance would have been painted in bright colours:-

North range:-

For historical reasons this black bitch is a symbol of Linlithgow in West Lothian. So much so that citizens born there, no matter their colour or sex, are proud to be called a black bitch.  However, there was a stushie when this statue was commissioned and erected as people thought the description was offensive.

But the dog was female and black and the epithet is therefore descriptive.

The information board tells the story:-

Illustrated by George Craig. Nelson, 1960, 186p.

I bought this in a charity shop in Linlithgow. One time I was there they had a swatch of (overpriced) E C Eliott books with wonderfully nostalgic covers – in particular one called Tas and the Postal Rocket. On my next visit most had gone but this one had been brought down from a frankly ridiculous £19.99 to something more reasonable for a book without its dust-jacket. At the same time I bought a Prof A M Low book of similar vintage.

This is perhaps what was once called a juvenile – young adult would be pushing it a bit; it’s definitely not a grown-up kind of tale. Kemlo is a Space Scout, brought up in space on a satellite as part of a quasi-military organisation. Space infants are kept in a nursery looked after by their mothers and nurses. Scouts graduate to their own quarters between the ages of six and nine. The boys’ and girls’ quarters are separate – and this is all we hear of the girls. Despite this apparent distancing and a large degree of control over their own activities the Scouts still have reverence for and defer to their parents who can visit at any time but are mostly absent. Nevertheless Kemlo’s relationship with his father and mother seems not very different from one in a “normal” family.

The story is a farrago of nonsense about the imminent building of a huge satellite mixed in with a rudimentary plot about the extension of the restrictive social arrangements down on Earth up into the space environment. There is also a load of guff about weightlessness and gravity. The station has gravity “rays” and levers which can switch gravity on and off. For some odd reason – unexplained here – the Scouts all have names which begin with K. There are lumps of info dumping and conversations which exist only to outline or advance the plot.

Spookily there is a chief engineer who speaks in Scotticisms. Perhaps Gene Roddenberry read Kemlo books! By the way I’ve still to find the plaque in Linlithgow to Star Trek’s Scotty, the one that says he’ll be born there in 2222 or something. Apparently it’s in Annet House Museum.

Kemlo and the Satellite Builders is firmly of its time in its social and political attitudes but there is something unabashedly optimistic in it. And the illustrations are a retro delight. Not that that redeems its many failures.

Pedants’ corner:- Gravity rays! “We get our power by feeding gravity rays across the generator fins of our power units, because we’ve no natural gravity up here.” So: 1) where does the power for the “gravity rays” come from? 2) the generator fins obviously do not generate, they transform, 3) they do have natural gravity, they just won’t notice its effects because they’re in free-fall.
The Scouts are told the new satellite will, “not be in orbit with Earth. It therefore will not spin on its own axis in order for it maintain the velocity necessary to retain it in an orbit.” Satellites do not need to spin to stay in orbit. Simple velocity (linear, not rotational) balancing the attractive force of Earth is enough.
The Satellite is made of uraniametal, “the strongest and lightest substance known to man.” Really? Substitute least dense for lightest and metal for substance and you might get close. Otherwise a kilo of uraniametal will still be 1,000 times heavier than a gram of lead (or a gram of anything come to that.) Oh; and any gas is much, much “lighter” than the equivalent volume of any solid.

Italian scientists have reported a finding that implies that neutrinos can travel faster than light. So much for Einstein, then. (And perhaps Lieutenant Montgomery Scott of Star Trek fame – to be born in Linlithgow in 2222.)

I can’t deny it’s quite exciting and may mean we have to throw over everything we thought we knew about the the way the universe works.

And perhaps all those space operas where starships cleave the paper light years with ease might be reasonable after all.

Well, maybe.

The result is only that the neutrinos seem to arrive 60 billionths of a second earlier than they should have, with a plus or minus margin of 10 billionths of a second. It awaits checking.

Caution may be in order. Remember cold fusion?

In any case light is already known to travel at slightly different speeds depending on the medium it is moving through. It is slower in glass and air than in a vacuum, so maybe this is a similar effect.

Anyway, the reported difference between neutrinos and light isn’t much – 299,798,454 metres per second compared to the 299,792,458 metres per second of light in a vacuum and according to the first link above it’s already been postulated that neutrinos might be faster than light, if only by a fraction.

I think there’s sufficient accumulated evidence to suggest that Einstein’s famous E = mc² equation is reliable that we won’t have to junk it just yet. Newton’s F = ma and F = Gm₁m₂/r² are still going strong after 400 years.