Tayside's lost village

For more than 800 years, the village of Pitmiddle was home to a community that lived through the ebbs and flows of Scottish history. Today, all that remains of the place are ruined crofts, overgrown trees and wild gooseberry bushes, the last resident having packed his bags one snowy day in 1938. Pitmiddle’s tale is a sad one, bound up in the steady decline of rural life over recent centuries – where once was a settlement of weavers, joiners, butchers and shoemakers, is today a deserted ghost village. To wander its crumbling remains is a stirring experience.

The father of modern hypnosis?

Nineteenth-century ‘gentleman scientist’ James Braid is regarded by many as the father of modern hypnotherapy, a weighty accolade for a man who grew up in Kinross as the youngest of seven children. A trained physician with a deeply curious mind, in 1841 he became interested in the work of a travelling Swiss ‘mesmerist’ and set about trying to induce a trancelike state in his own patients. When he succeeded, finding it a valuable way of aiding certain treatments, he concluded that it was in fact a form of sleep, then coining the term ‘hypnosis’ after Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep.