The SNP is addicted to fictions (Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)

For the past 13 years, I have lived on the banks of a wild river that forms part of the Anglo-Scottish border. Liddel Water was once the eastern boundary of the Debatable Land, a 50-square-mile enclave of wooded gorges, rough upland pasture and bogs impassable even to the sheep whose corpses still litter the landscape.
In the late Iron Age, the Debatable Land was a remarkably stable buffer zone between three Celtic tribes. It survived as an independent territory until the mid-16th century, when it became the last part of Great Britain to be brought under the control of a state. In what now seems an impressive act of international cooperation, the Debatable Land was divided equally between Scotland and England. The English deported the most troublesome inhabitants of their half to Ireland; the Scots enlisted a wily local warlord who helpfully hanged, drowned, burned, denuded and dismembered the autarkic groups that made up the local population.
I published a book about this neglected relic of a self-governing British statelet just in time to include the battle for Scottish independence and its aftermath. It gave the normally genteel process of promoting a book a missionary thrill. It also had the strange effect of fictionalising the place I call home. The ideology of nationalism requires a drastic compression and repackaging of the mass of people, geography and history that constitutes a nation. It politicises the very landscape, trivialises local ways of life and promotes ignorance of the country it purports to represent.
As the Manchester-born son of Scottish parents, I knew all about English ignorance of Scotland. Several visitors to our home on the border shared their surprise at discovering that Carlisle is not in Scotland and that Hadrian’s Wall is not the national border. I could understand the Scots’ frustration with oblivious, snooty, Scots-baiting politicians and commentators (the kind who attached sub-racist labels such as “dour”, “canny” and “thrifty” to an entire population). But I was surprised to find similar ignorance in Scotland.
On a rainy night in the spring of 2018, I gave a talk in one of the few council areas of Scotland in which a majority had voted for independence. In the bowels of the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, a red-faced man glowered at me as I spoke. His wife appeared to be egging him on to do something. When the time came for questions, I pointed him out to the chair, and then the pent-up question burst forth: “Where is this “Debatable Land”?”
I began a minute description of its bounds, but this enraged the man even more. “I’m not answering your question, am I?” “Well,” he shouted triumphantly, “I’ve never heard of it! And I was born in Dumfries!”
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