THE City of Dundee is Scotland’s fourth largest city in terms of population and is also the country’s smallest local government area at just 60 square kilometres.
With its position near the entry to the mouth of the River Tay, for many centuries Dundee was a strategic settlement which in turn led to its exposure to invasion and occupation.
The area the modern city now stands first saw human settlement in the Stone Age and there have been many archaeological finds dating to the Bronze Age.
In the Iron Age, the Picts occupied the area and did so for much of the first millennium, probably with a fort located on Dundee Law, the hill in the centre of the city. The name of the city comes from that fort or “Dun” allied to either the ancient name for the Tay or a local ruler of a similar name.
Dundee was the East Kilbride or Livingston of its day, specifically created as a new town in the later years of the 12th century by David, Prince of Scotland, who was given Dundee by his elder brother King William I. David, the great-great-grandfather of Robert the Bruce, built Dundee Castle and endowed the city’s St Mary’s Church.
By the 16th century, Dundee was a thriving port, though its walls were destroyed by the Cromwellian occupying army of General Monck in the 1650s.
Dundee recovered, despite the bubonic plague ravaging the population in 1607-08, and really began to grow in the 18th and 19th centuries when linen production, fishing, whaling, shipbuilding and then the famous jute and jam – marmalade, actually – industries employed a growing population with many immigrants from Ireland after the Great Famine.
The city declined as a port and shipbuilding centre in the 20th century, but new industries arrived and the city can proudly boast today that it is the centre of a booming tech and games industry.
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