In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I've been to Orkney several times, and it's an incredible place. The people who built Skara Brae had more advanced architecture than the Romans did (at least, they had better drains, and understood things like septic tanks and keeping drainage away from water supplies).
But why did they put so many spinner traps and magic mouths in the perfectly rectilinear, monster-filled maze underneath the town?
In all seriousness, I had no idea until just now that Skara Brae was a real place, and not just a setting for tales sung by bards.
I grew up not far from there (it's about a six or seven hour drive, followed by a two hour ferry journey, so it's not something you do every day, but barely 160 miles in a straight line) and it was all Iron Age brochs and such. Skara Brae was already ancient and lost when they were built.
I actually live in Scotland. I have never seen anywhere that sells deep-fried Mars bars here, but I have seen them in England.
"They surveyed hundreds of fish and chip shops in Scotland to find out if "the delicacy" was available and if people were actually buying them. It found 66 shops which sold them, 22% of those who answered the survey. [...] Annie Anderson, from the Centre for Public Health Nutrition Research at the University of Dundee, used to send her medical students out into the city to see if they could find somewhere that sold deep-fried Mars bar. "It was not much of a challenge in Dundee," she says."
The link above literally has a picture of a shop in Aberdeenshire which sells deep-fried Mars and claims to have invented the delicacy.
Consider the possibility that your experience might not fully encompass the truth and you might not have seen the whole of Scotland. It's quite a large country.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Carron/@56.9627456,-2....
They're basically a silly novelty equivalent to "deep fried butter" is in the USA but they definitely came from Scotland. I've never had one and know only a handful of people who did, I suspect they came about as a sort of pre-internet way to grab attention and go "viral"
They're not exactly a delicacy or something that we should be proud of, mind ...
Scotland is the home of deep frying things that have no right to be deep fried. My English friends are alarmed when I tell them of the “half pizza and chips” we used to have for lunch. Half a deep fried pizza, that is.
Delicious but excessive consumption would certainly reduce your life expectancy.
Anything
God, how ridiculously hyperbolic. But we're in the midst of a debate about the origins of a deep fried candy bar with strangers on HN and just supposed to believe that you live in Scotland and have seen every possible offering in every possible shop.
Sounds stupid to decry something that people can verify to some extent then proceed to offer information that nobody can verify, doesn't it? This tired drum of Wikipedia being able to be edited by any wad off the street needs to be laid to rest, especially now in an age where misinformation is insanely prevalent in our general media and trusted sources who get paid to spread it.
I had one in Whitby, so they do exist in (the north of) England.
I used to work with a guy whose parents were Pakistani but who had been born in Scotland, although he had quite a strong accent from living with his grandparents for several years. People used to ask him "So where are you really from?" quite often.
"I'm from Wishie", he'd say.
"No but where are you really from?"
"Well, dinna tell onyone," he'd say, dialling up the Lanarkshire accent, "but I'm really from Newmains, but if they hear I'm from there they'll think I'm a bam"