Scotland

How slow can you go? Probably not much slower than these four: Ken Brown of Scotland, Bernhard Langer of West Germany, Denis Watson of South Africa and Nick Faldo of England. They were the top vote-getters in an informal poll of Golf Digest magazine as pro golf's slowest players. The slowest? Brown gets that vote. But just so no one really gets left out, Faldo and Langer got the harshest criticism.

The approach to this landmark Scottish garden, a mile-long driveway lined with tall beech trees, looks more like a country road than a private preserve. We passed a pond where geese were taxiing for takeoff. A gardener scythed grass under the trees. A light rain started to fall, but then we'd been rained on all over Scotland. We were used to it.

"Haste ye back," beckoned a sign at the car ferry terminal at Ardrossan on Scotland's western coast as the boat eased up to the dock after crossing from the Isle of Arran. I told myself I'd heed the invitation. It was July and I'd been distillery-hopping on Scottish islands. After two days on Arran, the largest of the Firth of Clyde islands, I had followed the whiskey trail to Islay and Jura in the southern Inner Hebrides.

Kerry Washington, 33, is probably best known for playing the wives of Ray Charles (in "Ray") and Idi Amin (in "The Last King of Scotland"). Other prominent appearances include the two "Fantastic Four" movies, "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," "Lakeview Terrace" with Samuel L. Jackson and Patrick Wilson, "The Human Stain" with Anthony Hopkins, "I Think I Love My Wife" with Chris Rock, "Bad Company" with Hopkins and Rock, and Spike Lee's "She Hate Me." Of 2006's "The Dead Girl," she says, "I watched it again just recently when Brittany [Murphy]

'Braveheart" will have his revenge. That's how some fervent Scottish nationalists will portray the announcement last week that the British government has approved a referendum on whether Scotland will end its 300-year-old formal union with England. Meeting in Edinburgh, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Alex Salmond, Scotland's pro-independence first minister, agreed that residents of Scotland -- including 16- and 17-year olds -- would decide the issue in a 2014 plebiscite. For Americans, schooled by the outcome of our Civil War to consider secession unthinkable, the willingness of the British government to see itself potentially dismembered is remarkable.

England and Scotland, the rose and the thistle, are neighbors in the same kingdom. But when it comes to soccer, forget brotherhood. Think instead of flashing swords and screaming blue-painted faces. Scots and English celebrate their first soccer encounter in seven years at London's Wembley Stadium this afternoon as the dramatic--and potentially violent--centerpiece of Euro 96, a 16-nation soccer extravaganza to crown a continental champion.

Police on Thursday searched a house in Scotland that may have been where the bombs were produced for attempted terrorist attacks in London and at Glasgow Airport, officials and news reports said. Community leaders in Scotland appealed for calm after Glasgow police said there had been dozens of racially motivated incidents since the attack on the airport Saturday in which two men crashed a gasoline-laden Jeep Cherokee into an entrance to the main terminal.

It was on the low cliffs looming over the white-capped Firth of Forth here that Alexander III, the last of Scotland's Celtic kings, plunged from his horse to his death one inky night 721 years ago. England backed a successor, and ultimately invaded, touching off the wars of Scottish independence that inspired medieval verses about refusing to submit to "the bonds of slavery entwined" and opulently tragic films such as "Braveheart."

Nine hundred forty-six years ago come Thursday, Macbeth, thane of Glamis and Cawdor, slew Duncan, king of Scotland, not in his bed, as Shakespeare tells it, but as he fled the field of battle. Shakespeare's Macbeth is a courageous yet irresolute, ambitious yet gullible, violent yet not unremorseful man; his Duncan, a venerable monarch.

The chilly, wind-whipped dunes and grasslands of the Scottish coast may have been the birthplace of golf, but that hasn't been much help to Donald Trump and his plans to create what he says will be the world's best golf course here. Don't even start with the fact that the old Menie estate is said to be haunted by someone called the Green Lady.