How do you do justice to a history of Scotland? The scale of the subject, coupled with the sheer volume of books already available, makes the task daunting enough. By pitching my best efforts in amongst the rest, I am making of myself a minnow in an ocean heavily populated by leviathans - not to mention several sharks and the occasional venomous jellyfish. But Scotland is a place I have loved all my life. For me, therefore, writing about Scotland is like writing about a loved one and the fear of not doing right by her is almost overwhelming.
I found the only way to get started in the first place was to accept, even to celebrate, the fact that Scotland’s history belongs to every one of us: to all who live there now as well as to any whose family trees stretch a root all the way back to the old country from wherever they find themselves today. The biggest mistake is to imagine that only academics have a say in recording and commenting upon the story of this land and this people. On the contrary, I believe it is the responsibility of every one of us to understand how and why our nation turned out the way it has. Failure to do so is to live for ever on one, randomly selected page of a novel. History is the collective memory we can use to start the book at the beginning - to understand the emergence of the characters and plots we share our own few lines with. How can we fail to be fascinated by history when we are, all of us, its survivors? ‘To live at all is miracle enough’, said Mervyn Peake, and it is history that explains the mystery of how any of us are even walking the earth. Without that understanding we are adrift like goldfish in a bowl, condemned to greet every moment of the present with wide-eyed surprise.
Scotland’s history is also a crucial component of the history of Britain, of Europe and of the world. The unfolding story north of the Border has inevitably shaped the stories of the neighbouring countries of this (for now at least) United Kingdom. Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales are like tenants of a shared house. We each have our own room but we meet the others in the hall, the kitchen and the living room all the time. Scotland has also shaped the story of the wider world. Scots have long been the world’s vagabonds, ‘the tattered outcasts of the earth’, and our very natures have dictated at least a few lines of the story of every other country on the planet.
Apart from anything else, history is always family business - the good, the bad and the ugly as well as the downright shameful and embarrassing - and discussing it in public always leads to arguments. Scotland’s history, like every other, is an amalgam of fact and opinion - and there are at least as many of the latter as the former. And that is why it is the most fascinating and engaging stuff of all. There is nothing like a good old row.
I was curious about my own family from the very beginning. I wanted to know where we had come from and why. Why we lived in the house we did, in the town we did. Who were our relatives and where did they live, and what did they do, and why? Eventually I realised this was the beginning of an interest in history: I simply needed to understand how the people I knew fitted into the bigger story. Having done that, the bigger story became just as fascinating and compelling as anything happening at home.
So when I was given the chance to get involved with BBC Scotland’s ‘Scotland’s History’ project I recognised it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. All-singing, all-dancing productions like this, with television and radio programmes, books, websites, music and concerts do not come along very often - perhaps once a generation - and to have the chance to be identified with my own generation’s telling of my nation’s story was completely intoxicating.
I started my working life as a field archaeologist, helping to excavate and record sites from all periods of Scotland’s past, from the Stone Ages to the Industrial Revolution. My first ‘dig’ was at Loch Doon, near the village of Dalmellington, in Ayrshire. It was directed by a dear man called Tom Affleck who had made a second career for himself, relatively late in life, out of his lifelong fascination with archaeology. Tom’s first degree, completed just after World War II, had been in botany and for years he had been a market gardener. But, happily for many of us, he went back to university in the 1970s to pursue his second academic love. By the time I met him, in the mid 1980s, he was working towards his doctorate in the subject.
We were investigating what proved to be a campsite used by hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago and for the most part we were finding little more than tiny chips of flint and chert, the debris of stone tool-making long ago. Tom had a genius for passing on his enthusiasm, however, and to make the whole exercise more worthwhile he took the time to show us an astonishing product of his painstaking efforts at the site in previous years. He walked a group of us to an unprepossessing patch of ground, on a natural terrace overlooking the gunmetal grey waters of the loch, with a roll of white paper under his arm. This he opened out to reveal a carefully drawn plan of the little plot of stony earth we now stood beside. It showed the precise locations of hundreds of fragments of flint that had been recovered from an area measuring just a few feet square. At first sight it appeared to be - and essentially was - a random scatter. But, after a few moments, Tom pointed out four little sub-circular patches within the plan that were entirely blank. Each was no larger than a beer mat and together they formed a fairly neat rectangle. So what? ‘The two larger ones are where his knees were,’ said Tom, pointing at the larger pair of side-by-side blanks. ‘The smaller ones were left by his toes.’
All at once the pattern made sense. There on that patch of ground someone had knelt down for a few minutes to knap and shape a few stone tools. The tiny fragments were the debris left behind and, of course, none had landed on the four spots occupied by knees and feet. But that ancestor had knelt on that spot several thousand years ago. We had precious little information about this long-lost individual - even whether it was a man or a woman - but we knew with absolute certainty where he or she had spent some moments of their life, and what they had been doing while they were there.
I was stunned then and I am still stunned now, more than twenty years later. Here was a near-physical connection to an ancient, otherwise anonymous life. With reference to the plan it was even possible to place a hand where those knees and toes had once been. To be able to find a spot where someone had knelt down; to realise that even a few, seemingly inconsequential minutes of a life leave a trace that can be found thousands of years later is profoundly moving for me.
That moment on that hillside with Tom, who died prematurely just a few years later, changed my life for ever. From then on I realised history - even the ancient past - was close by and all around us. History is right here and we can touch it. (I am well aware that archaeology and history are to be regarded as largely separate disciplines - the latter made of documents, the former of material remains - but for me the two have more to connect them than to keep them apart.)
I believe that we are made of the land we live on. We breathe the air and drink the water. Sometimes, some of the food we eat is local too, and not flown in from thousands of miles away. The landscape - our awareness and appreciation of it - surely shapes us as well. In this way, then, we gradually assimilate the very stuff of the little patch of the earth we call home. Atoms of it are briefly made part of us and so those of us who live in Scotland are therefore made, at least in part, of Scotland.
So for me a history of Scotland is personal and the completion of the project has been a transforming one. I saw up close, in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the ‘Chronicle of the Kings of Alba’ - the so-called ‘birth certificate’ of Scotland - and in Lincoln Castle one of the four original copies of Magna Carta. I walked the streets and lanes of the medieval hill town of Anagni, south of Rome - some of the same that were walked by Scots churchmen 700 years ago as they strove to persuade the Pope to recognise Robert the Bruce as King of Scots - and visited the château in Amboise, on the bank of the River Loire, where Mary Queen of Scots spent much of her early life.
The filming took us all over Scotland and the rest of the UK as well, of course, from the Up Helly Aa Viking festival on Shetland in the north, to Dover Castle, where a teenage Alexander II , King of Scots marched an army to pursue his claims on English soil in the early thirteenth century; from the Holy Island of Iona in the west, first home of Christianity in Scotland, to St Andrews Cathedral in the east, the shrine that eventually overshadowed its predecessor. For me the most poignant of all was Finlaggan, on Islay, once the centre of the Lordship of the Isles. Little remains to be seen and yet it was once the beating heart of an empire that rivalled the demesne of the kings of Scots themselves. There is a reminder among those few ruins about the transient nature of power, and of importance.
If I loved Scotland before this project, I love the place even more now. I thought I knew her well enough, but the discoveries and rediscoveries of the past two years have been a revelation. Some of the story is stuff to make any Scot proud; plenty of it should make us hang our heads in shame. But when you love someone, you love them completely or not at all, the good and the bad.
Scotland’s story is one of the oldest on the face of the earth. Some tiny part of it is my story and my family’s story. It is enough just to belong.
A mid-nineteenth-century map showing Scotland firmly part of the Union