Re Scottish pounds being widely used in Scotland but not so much the rest of the UK, does this apply to coinage as well, or only paper notes? Thank you.

No one really pays much attention to pound coins so you shouldn't have any problems, be they English, Scottish or from Northern Ireland. I could be wrong, but I think the Royal Mint produces all coins in the UK.

coins are the same ,you can use them anywhere,in fact some of the coins can be good souvineers as many depict certain people as well as historical and cultural events.
Many of the Scottish banknotes are collector items ,we had one a few years ago a £5 note with Jack Nicklaus on it which is quite a collectors item these days

Funny story (at least to me..)

We were visiting some friends in Yorkshire on our way back to the US after a trip to Spain and Portugal. While in Spain we had spent a day in Gibraltar, where I had exchanged some money for Sterling to do some shopping. I had kept a couple of pounds in coins, figuring I'd spend them in England.

I was at a Tesco (I think) in Harrogate buying something to take to dinner at our friends and gave some of the coins to the cashier for payment. She looked at one of the coins, I think maybe a 50p piece, and said to her fellow checker at the next stall, "Ooh, there's a monkey on this coin. When did they start that?" (Obviously although the coin didn't say Gibraltar on it, it carried a picture of a Barbary Ape on the reverse, with the normal Mrs. Q head on the obverse.)

Her companion replied, "Oh I think they're putting monkeys on all of them."

True story.

There was a time when British shopkeepers would reject coins from Guernsey and Jersey. They commonly turned up on the south coast where I lived.

The trick was then to include them in a bag of coins being paid into a bank. They didn't examine them carefully - just weighed them.

There are quite a lot of counterfeit £1 coins about in the U.K. They are indistiguishable unless you try to use them in a coin-operated machine, when they will be rejected because of their weight.

Thanks so much - I appreciate both the factual info and the amusing anecdotes. Happy "Blue Moon" everyone!

The Mint does produce all the coins for the UK; they do have different designs to acknowledge Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland through the relevant symbols and mottos (particularly on the £1 coins, though you will find some older designs on other denominations), but they all circulate throughout the country. The Mint has a comprehensive list and history:
http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk...specifications

Gibraltar, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man take their own decisions about currency designs, and I don't think anyone in the UK is obliged to take them, though you never know your luck.