Alex begins talking about history, as I wonder whether all new nations must be based on victimhood. He explains that when this fort was built in the 18th century, a quarter of those in Scotland spoke Gaelic and lived with their own clans and culture. Nationalists like him believe that from this ruin, beginning with the Jacobite rebellions, there is one story line that matters: the conquest of Gaelic Scotland. Lairds who fought the redcoats were executed, and their land possessed by the Crown, gifted to loyalists. Gaelic dress and Gaelic schooling were forbidden, this way of life finally broken in the Clearances.

“It’s awful, just awful, what they did.”

But there is one crucial difference between both crushings: betrayal. Unlike Ireland, Gaelic Scotland was broken by its own lairds — the clan chieftains tenants once revered, now turned Westminster peers. When Queen Victoria was crowned, a fifth of Scotland spoke Gaelic, by her death, only 5 per cent, mostly in the Isles, still could. 

“You know what?” Back in the car Alex is talking about his grandfather. “He was a keen walker, he was a good man, and he walked over Scotland. And I was at my parents’ recently, and I found his diaries. He’d written in there: ‘It is my firm belief having walked through the Highlands that the Clearances were the right thing. This land cannot sustain life for a population of any size.’ And I just thought, oh my God — how could you have thought that?” History is a constant, rolling judgment. 

Plantation Ireland, with its bards and rebels, was never truly conquered. Clearance Scotland was utterly vanquished. Helpless, with no one to rally around, the peasants of the Sutherland estate turned to attack the sheep, not the landlords, wildly, but more pathetically, trying to chase away the herds replacing them. Gaelic Ireland was to Britain always something dangerous, to be despised. By 1822, the first time a British monarch had been to Scotland in nearly 200 years, Gaelic Scotland was so smashed it could be sentimentalised. George IV was presented with a kilt. Scotland is not just what it remembers; it is also what it forgets. The old British myth forgot the Highlands for the Anglicised Lowlands, which became the great industrial cities of their age. The new Scottish myth forgets the Victorian Lowlands; its theatre of Scottish history is the Highlands alone.

Driving back in lowering gloom, I sit listening. “The SNP is not an ethnic nationalist party, it’s a civic one.”

Alex has been in the volunteer fire brigade. A few years ago, at 1.30am, their pagers had rung, bleeping, bleeping — emergency in the grounds. Panting, the boys ran and raced to the grand mansion. It was the laird’s son. He was having a party. “And he was there, surrounded by all these bottles of champagne and boys and girls and he went, I’ve run out of water for me guests, can you refill me tank? The boys did it, and he gave them a glass of champagne, and a crate of beer. Those were the right sweepings off an Englishman’s table, I tell ya.”