As late as the 1970s, there was a British story here in most people’s heads. It went like this: in 1707 a poor Scotland and a rich England fused. The results were fantastic. Families rushed to work in the spectacularly industrialising Lowlands, and destitute crofters set out to conquer and colonise the world under the Union Jack. The Highlands, went the old reading, had been improved from misery into thriving sheep farms and grouse moors, with the people packed off to new, better lives in Canada and the other thriving white colonies. But ever since the 1970s, another story has come to fill the minds of the majority in Scotland.

In 1973, a radical theatre group toured the Highlands. They were performing a play by John McGrath, The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil. The church halls were packed. The Highlands, the story went, had not seen any improvements. In fact, it had been a colonial frontier. Treacherous lairds, conniving with London money, had expelled their own people from the lands. Then they ruthlessly exploited them: first the stolen moors had become sporting estates, and then came the fire-belching oil-platforms of the North Sea. Actors screamed, chased by the Duke of Sutherland’s men across the stage, until an actress sung auld Gaelic melodies of woe. It was an instant sensation; as it toured the Highlands, villagers were in a state of shock. Never before had they seen the laird insulted, ridiculed or condemned. The actors put two demands in people’s head: it’s Scotland’s oil, and it’s Scotland’s land.

In 1974, a radical, little-known theorist published a book. The Break-Up Of Britain by Tom Nairn was sniggered at in London as fantasy. It is now seen as a milestone in Scottish writing. Nairn argued that Britain was nothing less than an old, aristocratic imperial state: a decrepit thing holding back democracy like Austria-Hungary. Seen from London, this seemed faintly ridiculous, but to a new generation in Glasgow and Edinburgh it felt bang on. Nairn’s villains were the men who owned the Scottish countryside. Not only were the Duke of Sutherland’s heirs sitting Tory MPs, they stuffed the House of Lords, amending any bill that touched their estates. Scottish nationalism, said Nairn, who would inevitably address the SNP conference, was nothing less than a revolution against the aristocracy.

Along the coast road, a few miles north of the Mannie, I find that a new history is being erected in Scotland. Here is the village of Helmsdale, all shuttered shops and pubs, where Alex Salmond came in 2007 soon after becoming Scotland’s First Minister. At dusk, bluish lights from oilrigs blink from the sea as I stand by the SNP’s anti-monument: The Emigrants. This is dedicated to those driven out of the hills by the Duke of Sutherland. A bronze couple and their children, evicted to lives overseas, the father looking forward, the mother looking back into these tumbling hills of pleasure shooting, with hate. The book, the play and the statue all tie together — into the emergence of a new popular mythology, replacing at its heart Britishness with the Clearances. It is Scotland reimagined as a second Ireland, England’s victim, not England’s partner. Everywhere I go in the Highlands, I find this past triumphant in people’s heads, one that views the sporting estates as historically illegitimate. And rising with this new past is a new demand for “our land”.

When they free Scotland, SNP activists dream they’ll free the hills. In Highland pubs, I find the land reform dreamers. Cleaners are planning to turn the grouse moors into national parks. Water-maintenance technicians are sketching out how to turn the gamekeepers into park rangers. On the road to Inverness, in one hamlet after another, is a militant SNP.