18th September: Scotland decides

Today's the day that the Scottish people votedto stay in the United Kingdom. Here are 10 things you might not know about Scotland:

1. Edinburgh is the capital, but Glasgow is the largest city. Glasgow was at one time known as "the Second City of the Empire" after London.
2. Edinburgh was the first city in the world to have its own fire brigade and has more listed buildings than anywhere else in the world.
3. Scotland is home to the shortest scheduled flight in the world (one-and-a-half miles from Westray to Papa Westray in the Orkney Islands of Scotland. The journey takes 1 minute 14 seconds) and the longest echo in a man made structure (15 seconds, at The Hamilton Mausoleum in South Lanarkshire).
4. It is also home to the world's tallest tree (a grand fir planted beside Loch Fyne, Argyll in the 1870s) and the oldest tree in Europe (the Fortingall Yew, which could be 5,000 years old and there is a local legend that Pontius Pilate was born under it and played under it as a child).
5. The motto of Scotland is Nemo me impune lacessit, or: "No one provokes me with impunity".
6. The national animal of Scotland is fictitious - the Unicorn.
7. There are more people living abroad who can claim Scottish ancestry than there are people in Scotland itself. 5.2 people live in Scotland, whereas 9.2 million Americans say they are of Scottish descent - and then there's 4.7 million in Canada, and 20% of New Zealand's original settlers were Scottish.
8. Although tartan is widely associated with Scotland, between 1746 and 1782, it was illegal to wear tartan there.
9. Although Scotland and England share a monarch at the moment, that wasn't always the case, and there has already been controversy around regnal numbering. Elizabeth I was only queen of England and so when the current queen was crowned, there was a legal action contesting her right to be called Elizabeth II in Scotland. As a result of that, it was agreed that future monarchs will be known by the higher of the two numbers if there is a discrepancy. So if there is a King Henry he will be Henry IX in England and Scotland, even though there has never been a King Henry in Scotland, and a King James would be James XIII, even though England has only had two kings called James. Although if they vote for independence, presumably all this will be irrelevant.
10. Scotland has the highest proportion of redheads in the world. Around 13 per cent of the population has red hair, with 40 per cent carrying the recessive gene.