Wind skims the heather on the Highlands, then drops into dark lochs and island shores. Long before there was a kingdom, people were here: stone tools from around 14,500 years ago, then farmers by about 6000 years ago, leaving places like Skara Brae in Orkney and the Callanish Stones on Lewis cut into the land itself.

By 79 AD the Romans had come north. Agricola, a Roman governor, beat a Caledonian army at Mons Graupius in 83, built forts near the Highland line, then pulled back; later came Hadrian's Wall in northern England and, from 142, the Antonine Wall between the Clyde and the Forth. Rome never held the whole country, but in the south it left roads, forts and Christianity.

From the sixth century the land was split between Picts, Gaels of Dál Riata, Britons around Alt Clut, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Saint Columba, a missionary monk on Iona, helped spread Gaelic Christianity. Then Viking raids began in the eighth century, hard enough that in the ninth a Gael, Kenneth the First, took Pictland and began Alba, the kingdom from which the medieval realm grew.

That realm hardened in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries under kings such as David the First, who drew Moray, Galloway and Caithness tighter to the crown. French, English and Flemish settlers changed the towns and the language, with Scots spreading as Gaelic retreated. In 1266, after war with Norway and the Battle of Largs, the Hebrides were reclaimed: a small war, but a big shift in who ruled the western sea.

The fracture came with a death. In 1286 Alexander the Third died, the succession broke, and Edward the First of England pushed in. John Balliol was made king, then resistance flared under Andrew Moray and William Wallace before Robert the Bruce seized the crown in 1306. Bannockburn in 1314 proved the kingdom could hold; the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 told the pope and Europe that this was a sovereign realm.

A later union came not by battle but by crowns and signatures. In 1603 James the Sixth inherited England and Ireland and left for London, though the kingdoms kept separate laws and parliaments. Then, after the Darien scheme in Panama ruined many investors, the political bargain changed. The Treaty of Union was agreed in 1706, and on 1 May 1707 the Scottish Parliament vanished into the new Parliament of Great Britain, despite riots in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Union did not end the argument, but it changed the scale. The failed Jacobite rising of 1745 ended at Culloden; then came the Enlightenment, Clydeside shipyards, empire trade and later industrial decline. In 1999, after the Scotland Act 1998, a parliament sat again in Edinburgh. Today the sharpest modern question is still sovereignty: in the 2014 independence referendum, fifty-five per cent voted no.