Prologue

A Nation Is Born

A four thousand year old bronze age burial cairn and stone circle at Clava near Culloden Moor. Numerous sites like these still survive throughout Scotland, testaments in stone bequeathed by the earliest ancestors of the Scottish nation to their present-day descendants.

Historic Voices

"When the blood fondly says, 'This is my land' it is at that moment profoundly in harmony and at peace."

Scottish writer Neil M Gunn

Who are the Scots? What makes them a nation? This is not an easy question to answer. Nationality is a complex and controversial concept in which people seek their identity in a combination of myth, archaeology and history. Ultimately it is a search for one's roots.

To find the roots of the Scottish nation we must begin by seeking out the first people known to have inhabited the remote northern European territory that would one day come to be known as Scotland. For what scarce knowledge we have of this distant era we are indebted to the archaeologist, painstakingly sifting through the ancient Scottish soil in search of the past. Sometimes the earth yields a few fragmented clues – a broken arrowhead, some splinters of flint, a handful of old bones.

These relics tell us that the earliest forefathers of the Scots arrived in the aftermath of the last ice age some 10,000 years ago. As the glaciers retreated the people advanced, creeping northwards, reclaiming the hills and glens from the grip of the ice. Owning nothing, living nowhere, moving with the seasons, they wandered the land seeking food and shelter wherever they could find it. They survived in the wilderness just as their ancestors had survived for countless generations before them. Perhaps they expected to exist this way for eternity. Instead, sometime around 4000 BC, they stopped. Gradually they ceased to wander the earth and settled down in one place to cultivate it. They would not have been aware of it, but the entire future course of human history now depended on their struggle for survival. Had they chosen to abandon the early backbreaking process of  food growing and returned to their former nomadic existence the world as we know it today would not exist.

The new way of life required new ways of living. Amongst other changes, the more settled existence imposed by agriculture compelled the people to create more durable structures around themselves. And now, with little more than sticks and stones, they set about reshaping the harsh land beneath their feet, scraping and cutting a raw early draft of civilisation: covered dwellings, chambered cairns, monumental circles of stone: places to live, to worship, to lay their dead to rest. Later generations, the Picts, would carve their own legacy into the landscape: images of ancient battles, semi-mythical beasts and mysterious abstract symbols, the foundation stones of art and culture. Scattered across the Scottish landscape from the northernmost islands to the borders their legacy endures, a stark, primitive beauty that still holds power to haunt the imagination today, a testament in stone.

It is here in the long struggle to bring the world under man's dominion, in the primal impulse to leave behind an indelible mark upon the landscape, that we discern the very first roots of the Scottish national consciousness being set down deep in the earth. For it is in this struggle that a deeper attachment to the land is formed; and from that springs a more profound sense of being at one with the land, of belonging to a homeland – a Heartland.

Illustration: Symbolic Pictish carving. The precise meaning of these intriguing symbols is now irrecoverably lost to us, making them the subject of much vivid speculation today.

Heartland Heritage Sites

A Nation Is Born

Find out more about early Scotland by visiting the heritage sites featured below.