Scotland: The Story of a Nation

In the last few years there has been a revolution in Scottish historical thinking. Many of our cherished conceptions and ideas about our past are being revised. Where did the ‘Scots’ come from? What happened to the Picts? And what about Macbeth, whom both Shakespeare and Scott cast as the prototype villain of Scottish monarchy? Did Robert Bruce ever see a spider in a cave? How important was the ‘Declaration of Arbroath’ (which Scott does not even mention)? What was the Scottish Renaissance? What really happened at the Reformation? What was the significance of the reign of Mary Queen of Scots? Who were the Covenanters? What was the impact of Jacobitism on the Highlands and the Scottish identity? And what were the real, long-term effects of the 1707 Treaty of Union?

All these crucial themes in Scotland’s history are being examined, sometimes even turned upside-down, by a generation of brilliant and realistic Scottish academic historians. General books and specialised research papers pour from the presses. Illustrated part-series, like the fifty-two-part Story of Scotland published by the Sunday Mail in 1988–89 and the current Scotland’s Story (First Press Publishing), masterminded by Professor Ted Cowan (Professor of Scottish History at Glasgow University), bring Scottish history to a wide and appreciative audience in a highly readable and accessible form.

The study of Scottish history in our universities has been revolutionised since Walter Scott’s day. The first chair specifically dedicated to the subject was endowed at Edinburgh University by a bequest as the Chair of Scottish History and Palaeography in 1901. Glasgow followed in 1911, when a joint Chair of Scottish History and Literature was established by public subscription. St Andrews University started a lectureship in 1948 which was elevated to a professorship in 1974. More specialised research institutes have recently been established, like the Institute for Environmental History at St Andrews and Dundee (by the Historiographer Royal in Scotland, Professor Chris Smout) and the Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at Aberdeen (by Professor Tom Devine, author of the recent The Scottish Nation 1700–2000).

The teaching of Scottish history in our schools has also been gradually expanding over the years since I was learning about it (at home) from an edition of Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather abridged by Elizabeth Grierson (1934). At my school in Edinburgh we were taught only British history, about English rather than Scottish monarchs, about the history of the British Empire.

(#ulink_4b0099fc-987f-523d-884e-1d531d8ea69d) In Scotland today there is a formal requirement on schools and teachers to cover, at their discretion, aspects of Scottish history for pupils aged five to fourteen: the Wars of Independence, the vikings, the Jacobites, Victorian Scotland and the impact of the two world wars are the most popular at present. For pupils at Standard grade (the successor to the O-grade) who take History as a subject, Scottish History is compulsory.

Scotland: The Story of a Nation arose from a broadcast series on Scottish history which I presented on BBC Radio Scotland in 1998. It was entitled Tales of a Grandfather because it used Scott’s Tales as its framework. In the series, I interviewed twenty-four contemporary historians who were busy casting new light on Scotland’s history; they helped me to show how radically the perceptions of that history have altered in recent years. Extracts from several of these interviews are quoted in this book. The series presented a re-examination and a re-illumination of traditional views about Scotland’s past, from its roots in the so-called Dark Ages to the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 and the last throes of Jacobitism in the 1745 Rising – which is where Walter Scott ended his history.

I have used almost the same framework in Scotland: The Story of a Nation. However, as far as Scott was concerned, Scottish history did not begin until the accession of Macbeth in 1040; all the preceding centuries were wrapped up in a preamble to the story (Chapter 1: ‘How Scotland and England came to be separate kingdoms’), for the dreariness of which he apologised to his young grandson: ‘This is but a dull chapter, Master Littlejohn.’ He gave a brief account of the Roman invasion of Britain, talked about the continual warfare between the Scots and the Picts after the Romans withdrew, and then, with a sigh of relief, moved on to Macbeth – ‘The next story shall be more entertaining.’ To my mind, the centuries before Macbeth are just as fascinating and revealing as those which came afterwards – and just as important for an understanding of the identity of the Scots.

Like Walter Scott, I am a devotee of the landscape of history, the monuments, the man-made relics, the places as well as the people of history. Scotland: The Story of a Nation takes the reader on a tour of Scotland’s history, from the earliest Mesolithic settlers on the Island of Rum nine thousand years ago to the establishment of Scotland’s new parliament in 1999. We visit many of the sites and monuments which celebrate significant moments in Scotland’s history: the marvellous Neolithic village of Skara Brae on Orkney; the overgrown hill-fort near Inverness where St Columba tried to convert the King of the Picts to Christianity in AD 600; the site of the decisive battle of Nechtansmere (Dunnichen) in Angus where the Picts repelled the Northumbrians in 685, as illustrated by the ‘war-correspondent’ Pictish stone at nearby Aberlemno; the cliff in Fife where Alexander III fell to his death to create a major succession crisis in 1286; the little-known plaque in Westminster Hall which marks the spot where William Wallace was condemned to a brutal death in 1305; the site of the Battle of Flodden where James IV and the ‘Flowers of the Forest’ were scythed down in 1513.

We find the site of the house in Perth in which James I was murdered in a sewer in 1437, and of the house in Edinburgh where Mary Queen of Scots’ husband, Lord Darnley, was murdered after an explosion in 1567. We visit the superb sarcophagus for Mary in Westminster Abbey which James VI built for his mother. We discover the derelict summerhouse in Edinburgh in which the 1707 Union of the Parliaments of Scotland and England was signed. And we explore not just the battlefield of Culloden but also the magnificent fortress near Inverness which the Hanoverian government built in the worried aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Rising – Fort George. And all along the way we savour the ‘people’s history’ of Scotland – the living wealth of local legends and traditions about ‘Braveheart’ William Wallace, for instance, which can have just as much resonance for the general reader as the careful analyses of academics.

History on the hoof, indeed, down the long, helter-skelter trail of Scotland’s quest for its identity through nationhood; it is a story of high drama and far-reaching change – change which has never been more striking than in recent years. The words which Sir Walter Scott wrote in the final chapter of his novel Waverley (1814), nearly two centuries ago, are even more relevant today:

There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, or little more, has undergone so complex a change as this kingdom of Scotland.

Magnus Magnusson KBE

April 2000

1 (#ulink_13122e2b-5ad6-553c-897d-1b924abe7def) As a historian, Scott ‘was familiar with all the historical works of the Scottish Enlightenment as well as that of editors and antiquaries, and he knew also the medieval chroniclers. It is probably true to say that as a political and cultural historian of Western Europe he was better equipped with knowledge of both primary and secondary sources than any of his contemporaries.’ (David Daiches, ‘Character and History in Scott’s Novels’, in The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club Bulletin, 1993/4).

1 (#ulink_428f5c31-b54f-5e9c-ba87-f6e439f6d0c9) Some pupils of my vintage in Scotland were luckier than I was: other schools showed a greater interest in Scottish history, but everything depended on the enthusiasms of individual teachers.

Chapter 1 IN THE BEGINNING (#ulink_e1ac0768-926c-5a9c-8b15-21223041518a)

England is the southern, and Scotland is the northern part of the celebrated island called Great Britain. England is greatly larger than Scotland, and the land is much richer, and produces better crops. There are also a great many more men in England, and both the gentlemen and the country people are more wealthy, and have better food and clothing there than in Scotland. The towns, also, are much more numerous, and more populous.

Scotland, on the contrary, is full of hills, and huge moors and wildernesses, which bear no corn, and afford but little food for flocks of sheep or herds of cattle. But the level ground that lies along the great rivers is more fertile, and produces good crops. The natives of Scotland are accustomed to live more hardily in general than those of England.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER I

For three billion years Scotland was on a collision course with England.

I am talking in terms of geology. Scotland’s geological past involves a barely believable story in which whole continents moved around like croutons floating half-submerged in a bowl of thick soup; a story of great oceans forming and disappearing like seasonal puddles, of mighty mountains being thrown up and worn down, of formidable glaciers and ice-caps advancing and retreating behind mile-thick walls of ice as they melted and reformed again. Scotland itself has been a desert, a swamp, a tropical rainforest, and a desert again; it has drifted north over the planet with an ever-changing cargo of lizards, dinosaurs, tropical forests, giant redwoods, sharks, bears, lynx, giant elk, wolves – and also, in the last twinkling of an eye in the geological time-scale, human beings.

And always it was on that inexorable collision course with England.

In their learned writings, geologists tend to toss millions of years around like confetti. About three billion years ago what is now (largely speaking) ‘Scotland’ was part of a continent known as Laurentia, one of the many differently-sized ‘plates’ which moved slowly around the surface of the globe. Some eight hundred million years ago it was lying in the centre of another super-continent thirty degrees south of the equator. Over aeons of time it wandered the southern hemisphere before drifting north across the equator. By six hundred million years ago Scotland was attached to the North American continent, separated by an ocean called Iapetus from the southerly part of what was to become Britain and which was then attached to the European continent.

And then, some sixty million years ago, the Iapetus ocean began to close. North Britain and South Britain came together, roughly along the line of Hadrian’s Wall. That collision produced the Britain we know today (although it was still connected to Europe). But the weld continued to be subject to stress and strain long after the land masses had locked together: over a three-million-year period a chain of volcanoes erupting off the western seaboard of Scotland created many of the islands of the Hebrides, including Skye, Mull, Arran, Ailsa Craig, St Kilda and Rum.

The foundation of history is geology and its related subject of geomorphology. The underlying rock has shaped the landscape and has influenced, through the soil, the kind of plants, animals, birds and insects in every part of the countryside; it has thereby shaped the lives and livelihoods of the human communities which have lived here.

Agriculture would flourish on the productive farmland on the flatter east coast of Scotland. The more mountainous landscape of the west with its thin, acid soils was suitable only for subsistence husbandry. In the Central Belt of Scotland the abundance of coal and oil-shale entombed in the underlying rocks fuelled the Industrial Revolution and would foster the growth of the iron, steel, heavy engineering and shipbuilding industries.

Edinburgh Castle, at the heart of what became the nation of Scotland, would be built on the eroded roots of a volcano which had erupted some 340 million years ago, when Scotland still lay south of the equator. Castle Rock itself was carved into a classic crag-and-tail shape by the gouging passage of ice during the last glaciation.

When Sir Walter Scott opened his Tales of a Grandfather with his summary description of the difference between Scotland and England, the modern science of geology was in its infancy (that science, incidentally, was created by Scotsmen like James Hutton

(#ulink_4e5eb29b-612c-56dd-bc32-92be0fb0c3d8) and Sir Charles Lyell

(#ulink_87747c3a-0352-5148-80df-959c7931268f). Scott did not know why Scotland was so different from England; it took the pioneers of geology to explain it.

The first people in Scotland (c.7000 BC)

One day in the early 1980s a ploughman was working on a potato field near the village of Kinloch, at the head of Loch Scresort on the island of Rum in the Inner Hebrides. As his ploughshare turned over the soil, he caught sight of a beautiful barbed and tanged stone arrowhead. He reported the find at once, and in 1984–85 archaeologist Caroline Wickham-Jones conducted an excavation of the area on behalf of Historic Scotland. What she unearthed was the earliest human settlement site yet discovered in Scotland, dating from the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) period, nearly nine thousand years ago.

It was a large camp-site rather than a formal settlement: arcs of stake-holes indicated the locations of several shelters, and there were many traces of fires and broken hearth-stones as well as numerous pits and hollows. These first ‘Scots’ had built small tent-like shelters out of wood, brushwood and skins; they made hearths on which they could prepare food and even smoke meat and fish to keep for the winter. The climate at that time was moist and relatively warm – perhaps 2°C warmer than today; much of the island was covered by open heathlands with shrubs of juniper and bog myrtle, but there was also light, low-canopied woodland, while copses of birch and hazel flourished in the more sheltered areas. Remains of carbonised hazelnut shells showed that nuts were an important part of the early inhabitants’ diet.

The most significant find at Kinloch was the discovery of an assemblage of more than 140,000 stone tools and discarded flint-like material. The Mesolithic dwellers on Rum had made a variety of tools from stone, including microlithic (‘small stone’) arrowheads, scrapers, awls, blades and flakes. They used flint which they collected as pebbles from the beaches; but they also had access to a good knapping stone known as bloodstone, which has similar properties to flint. The source of the Rum bloodstone was on the west coast of the island, ten kilometres from the Kinloch settlement: Bloodstone Hill (Creag nan Steàrnan).

Good-quality stone for tools is rare in Scotland, and the presence of bloodstone made Rum very special to the early inhabitants of the western seaboard; we know from archaeological sites elsewhere that people from many of the surrounding islands and the adjoining mainland used bloodstone from Rum for their tools.

Such were the first known inhabitants of prehistoric Scotland. They had moved up from the south (i.e. England) soon after the end of the last Ice Age, ten thousand years ago, during the Mesolithic period. This sounds very ancient indeed, but it is worth remembering that hunter-gatherers had been living in England for at least four thousand years before that; and in the much warmer climate of the Middle East, people were already living in cities and experimenting with woollen textiles, metal-working, pottery and the irrigation of farmlands.

The Mesolithic incomers to Scotland were not ‘settlers’, as such. They were small family groups or communities of nomadic people who lived by hunting, fishing and gathering plants; they would establish camps where they could spend the winter and then make forays in pursuit of deer herds in the spring and summer. They made tools and weapons of stone, they used fire for cooking and warmth, and they dressed in animal skins. They were mobile on both land and sea, and soon established barter-links with other semi-permanent communities.

It is impossible to say how large the Mesolithic population of Scotland was, but several sites have already been identified at places like Morton on Tentsmuir, north of St Andrews and at various other places from Grampian to Argyll.

The Mesolithic period in Scotland lasted for about four thousand years, and merged into the Neolithic (New Stone Age) period around 3000 BC. By then the last land-link between south-east England and the Continent was submerged, and Britain had become an island. This change had involved an influx of new people from the south, people who started to clear the forests and farm the land. There were now permanent communities, such as the marvellous Neolithic village of Skara Brae, on Orkney.

Skara Brae, Orkney (3100–2600 BC)

In the winter of 1850 a ferocious storm stripped the turf from a high sand-dune known as Skara Brae in the Bay of Skaill, on the west coast of mainland Orkney. An immense midden was exposed, as well as a semi-subterranean warren of ancient stone buildings. What came to light in that storm turned out to be the best-preserved prehistoric village in northern Europe. And not only was it perfectly preserved – it was the earliest in Europe as well: the village of Skara Brae was inhabited around 3100 BC, more than half a millennium before the Great Pyramid of Egypt was built (2500 BC), and long before Stonehenge (2000 BC).

A splendid new £900,000 Visitor Centre was opened in April 1998. It had taken ten years to plan and build, and it provides a graphic introduction to the story of Skara Brae, using interactive computer images and a replica of one of the original stone houses. But nothing can match the extraordinary experience of seeing the place for oneself.

The ‘village’ comprises half a dozen separate houses and some associated structures, including a very large workshop for manufacturing stone tools. The houses are spacious and cellular, connected by covered passage-lanes. The village was deliberately embedded into the congealed mass of the midden up to roof height, to provide stability and insulation. The walls were made of local Orkney flagstone, which is easily worked and splits naturally into building slabs. All the fittings and furnishings were also fashioned from flagstone – the kitchen dressers, the cupboards, the shelves, the compartments for the beds. Some of the houses had under-floor drains for indoor sanitation.

The houses are roofless now. Visitors walk along the tops of the walls and look down into the interiors of the houses. There is a startling sense of intimacy, peering down into these comfortable, well-furnished homes: it is easy to imagine the families who lived there for some twenty generations, from 3100 to 2600 BC. The village evokes a vivid sense of immediacy, of instant identity with that close-knit, self-sufficient farming and fishing community.

They lived well. The womenfolk owned a lot of jewellery (necklaces, pendants and pins made from bone, as well as ivory and pumice) which they kept in a recess above the bed. They cooked with home-made pottery on a square stone-built hearth in the centre of the room. Farming consisted of keeping cattle and sheep and a few pigs, and growing barley; the sea provided cod and saithe, lobsters and crabs, cockles and mussels. The nearby cliffs were a cornucopia of seabirds’ eggs. Wind and weather drove whales, dolphins, porpoises and walrus ashore on their doorstep.

It was a stable, unchanging lifestyle. Then the village was deserted, around 2600 BC – no one knows how or why. There is no archaeological evidence of sudden emergency or destruction.

The merging of the Neolithic Age into the Bronze Age also saw the flowering of an extraordinary architectural phenomenon – the erection of stone circles and standing stones. On Orkney, not far from Skara Brae, the Standing Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brogar survive. But the most imposing, and probably the oldest, of the megalithic (‘big stone’) monuments of Scotland is the great complex at Calanais on the Isle of Lewis – Scotland’s ‘Stonehenge of the North’.

Calanais (Isle of Lewis): 3000–2000 BC

It used to be called ‘Callanish’ or ‘Callernish’. Before that it was ‘Classerniss’. But now the original Gaelic form of the name will be enshrined in the next Ordnance Survey maps of the Western Isles of Scotland, so ‘Calanais’ it is, officially.

Calanais on the Isle of Lewis lies at the head of Loch Roag, some twenty-four kilometres west of Stornoway. It was built in stages from about 3000 BC and was certainly completed by 2000 BC. Briefly, it is a circle of thirteen standing stones huddled round a massive central monolith, 4.75 metres high, and a small chambered cairn. A double line or ‘avenue’ of stones comes in from the north, and ragged tongues protruding from the circle create a rough cruciform shape.