In 1985, Neal Ascherson compared the different attitudes which the English and the Scots have to their national histories. When the English think of their past, he argued, they “are gazing from the terrace of a country house down carefully-landscaped perspectives of barbered lawns and positioned trees”. The eye is carefully guided towards a clear focal point: a single, national story, leading neatly up to the present and keeping the past safely organised in the past.
Scots, however, have a wholly different relationship to their inheritance. Instead of a clear linear narrative, Ascherson described Scottish history as “a scrapbook of highly coloured, often bloody scenes or tableaux whose sequence or relation to one another is obscure”. Without much context or perspective in the popular imagination, these scenes might as well have happened yesterday. Scotland’s past can never stay still; it is a black shadow that moves under the waves, looming up to the surface whenever blood is in the water.
Content from our partners
