About Gilbert Summers - and contact

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Hello! My name is Gilbert Summers and I’ve been really lucky to have spent years writing about Scotland. There are so many topics to write about, so much information to convey. As a professional and an expert on my home territory, I've been flattered to be asked by international guidebook publishers and national tourism organisations to provide information for guides, brochures, websites and so on.

But clients sometimes want their material to take a certain slant. Naturally, the good points of a destination get the emphasis. Nobody ever said - 'Go on, tell them what you really think.'

So that’s why I’m putting together this site. Maybe you are planning a trip and you really only have a week – in which case some of the tour suggestions should be helpful. But Scotland in a week is really just another way of saying that I hope this site will point you towards the best bits but also will make you look at some of the icons of this little European nation in a fresh way.

I’m thinking here of the inevitable tartan packaging, the clans of old and castles, for instance. Plus some of the historical characters you might encounter, from Robert Burns (please don’t call him Rabbie until you get to know him better) to Robert the Bruce (who prefers to be King Robert I – and quite right, too.) I hope you'll wander through some information here about my home country and I promise that I’ll be straightforward and honest and reasonably entertaining on the way. After all, nobody in the tourism trade has asked me to do this. I’m free to select and share the information with you without any bias, after all these years of living and exploring my homeland but having to write a visitor industry version of Scotland that may have relied on too many sunny sky pictures!

It’s still a great place though. So come and visit soon. Trust me, there really are ways and means of dealing with those pesky midges……

PS Just a wee note about the photographs. All the pictures on the site are mine, unless otherwise stated. Not all have blue sky. Just a few, in fact, if you look closely (and I’d rather you didn’t), appear to have small clouds of black dots and in a very few instances, flying snakes. These are not midges or some kind of Scottish crypto-zoology. No, it’s just dust.

While the large majority of the pics are digital, I delved into my collection of colour transparencies going back many years. Some had returned from a photo library that had not survived into the digital age. Others were in cupboards or drawers and, in a few cases, neatly stacked, in piles of ones, all over the place. I have scanned the relevant ones for this site. Heck, it’s a bit of a fiddle, isn’t it? But you’re worth it!

Finally, if you have any questions or thoughts for me on anything you read here - or anything you think I should take a look at, then use the form below.

Exactly how am I writing this site?

Well, I've written a site or two of my own before now and contributed copy to plenty more. I've seen lots of really talented design agencies deliver brilliantly conceived websites to clients. But I've felt that there was a divide between those in the know - the webmasters and designers - and the rest of us who really just needed the tools to upload copy, to make changes without hassle and, most importantly, to assemble by our own efforts a coherent and useful web presence that - vitally - was found by our customers or those with whom we wanted to communicate.

So that's why I am using Site Build It! I'm endlessly encouraged seeing the traffic build, by the potential of the tools I've been given and by the fact that I can focus on content, knowing I can get that material on line so easily. You can find out everything you need to know about SBI! here.