Scottish Country Dancing Dictionary

St Margaret's Strathspey

Scottish Country Dance Instruction

ST MARGARET'S STRATHSPEY (S4x32) Sq.Set Alice McLean Laurieston Collection 1

1- 8 All circle 8H round and back
9-16 1s+3s dance ½ R&L, 2s+4s dance ½ R&L and all end facing corners
17-24 All dance Interlocking reels of 4 (RSh to corner to start)
25-32 All Petronella-in-tandem to next place anticlockwise, set to partner and turn 2H ready to start again

(MINICRIB. Dance crib compiled by Charles Upton, Deeside Caledonian Society, and his successors)


Dance Information

This dance, St Margaret's Strathspey, is from the Laurieston Collection of dances by Alice McLean. Laurieston is a district in the Gorbals area situated south of the River Clyde, in the Scottish city of Glasgow and St. Margaret's Place is less than a mile away.
Saint Margaret of Scotland (c. 1045-1093), also known as Margaret of Wessex, was an English princess and a Scottish queen.

Born in exile in the Kingdom of Hungary, she was the sister of Edgar Ætheling, the short reigned and uncrowned Anglo-Saxon King of England. Margaret and her family returned to the Kingdom of England in 1057, but fled to the Kingdom of Scotland following the Norman conquest of England in 1066. By the end of 1070, Margaret had married King Malcolm III of Scotland, becoming Queen of Scots.

She was a very pious Roman Catholic, and among many charitable works she established a ferry across the Firth of Forth in Scotland for pilgrims travelling to St Andrews in Fife, which gave the towns of South Queensferry and North Queensferry their names.

Margaret was the mother of three kings of Scotland, or four, if Edmund of Scotland is counted, and of a queen consort of England. According to the Vita S. Margaritae Reginae, attributed to Turgot of Durham, she died at Edinburgh Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1093, merely days after receiving the news of her husband's death in battle.

In 1250, Pope Innocent IV canonized her, and her remains were reinterred in a shrine in Dunfermline Abbey in Fife, Scotland.

St Margaret Of Scotland - Information Video

St Margaret Of Scotland
St Margaret Of Scotland
Stained Glass Window, St Margaret's Chapel, Edinburgh Castle


Dance information licensed under this Creative Commons Licence 3.0.
Text from this original Laurieston, Glasgow article on Wikipedia.
Text from this original Saint Margaret Of Scotland article on Wikipedia.

Back to the top of this Scottish Country Dancing Instructions 'St Margaret's Strathspey' page