Lairds of Glenhighton, Borders

Strachan, Lairds of Glenhighton Farm

Arms of Sir Hew Strachan	Sir Hew and Lady Pamela Strachan

Glenhighton is located near Broughton, in Peeblesshire in the Scottish Borders. It is about a 1 hour drive south-west of Edinburgh.

The property is owned by Professor Sir Hew Strachan and his wife Lady Strachan, and sits on approximately 2200 acres. Sir Hew has three children and two step children.

Aerial Image of Glenhighton

The farm is mostly hill grazing for Scottish Blackface sheep, and also includes about 600 acres of dedicated woodland.

Sir Hew was born in Edinburgh 1949, and educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (History Tripos Part I in 1970, History Tripos Part II in 1971, BA 1971, MA 1975, and PhD 1977).

Sir Hew's father, Michael Francis Strachan CBE, FRSE, filed a petition and obtained a new Grant of Arms from the Court of the Lord Lyon (c. 1964) after doing some research on his own family origins as part of his election to the Royal Company of Archers (the Queen's Bodyguard of Scotland). Upon the death of his father, Hew (as the eldest son) inherited his father's Arms.

Hew Strachan has been Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College since January 2002. Between 2004 and 2012 he was the Director of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War. He also serves on the Strategic Advisory Panel of the Chief of the Defence Staff and on the UK Defence Academy Advisory Board, as well as being a Trustee of the Imperial War Museum, a Commonwealth War Graves Commissioner, and member of the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Born in Edinburgh in 1949, and educated at Rugby and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, he was elected a Research Fellow of Corpus Christi in 1975, became a Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the RMA Sandhurst in 1978, and then returned to Corpus in 1979, where he was successively Admissions Tutor and Senior Tutor, and is now a Life Fellow. From 1992 to 2001 he was Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow, and from 1996 to 2001 founding Director of the Scottish Centre for War Studies.

His books include: European Armies and the Conduct of War (1983, and also translated into Spanish), Wellington's Legacy: the Reform of the British Army 1830-54 (1984), From Waterloo to Balaclava: Tactics, Technology and the British Army 1815-1854 (1985) (awarded the Templer Medal), The Politics of the British Army (1997) (awarded the Westminster Medal), the first volume of his projected three-volume, The First World War (To Arms) (2001) (awarded two American military history prizes and nominated for the Glenfiddich Scottish book of the year), and The First World War: A New Illustrated History (2003), published to accompany the 10-part Wark Clements television series for Channel 4, (nominated for a British Book Award and translated into German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, French and Greek). His latest book is Carl von Clausewitz's On War: a biography (2007, and translated into Portuguese, German, Dutch, Polish, Italian and Finnish). He is joint editor of the journal, War in History, and editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (1998), The British Army, Manpower and Society into the 21st Century (2000), Big wars and small wars: the British army and the lessons of war in the 20th century (2006), (with Andreas Herberg-Rothe) Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (2007), (with Sibylle Scheipers), The Changing Character of War (2011), and (with Holger Afflerbach), How fighting ends: a history of surrender (2012).

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2003 and awarded an Hon. D. Univ. by the University of Paisley in 2005. In 2010 he chaired a task force on the implementation of the Armed Forces Covenant for the Prime Minister, and he has served on the Covenant Reference Group since its inception by the Labour government. In 2011 he was the inaugural Humanitas Visiting Professor in War Studies at the University of Cambridge and became a specialist adviser to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the National Security Strategy. He is a Deputy Lieutenant for Tweeddale, and a Brigadier in the Queen's Bodyguard for Scotland (Royal Company of Archers). He was knighted in the New Year's Honours for 2013.