But that very same laird claimed an old clansman’s lineage. The first thing they tell you is that Scotland is not England. And they tell it you often. But in terms of class, Scotland is a comically exaggerated version of England. In Scotland, the moment you become posh, you become essentially English. The gulf of worlds is greater, the accent-shift more grating, and so is the sense of us and them. This is why Scottish nationalism is not about blood. Scottish nationalists don’t care if the ancestors of a Harrovian lord from the King’s Road led the charge in 1745. At first glance this is something utterly British, and at its heart about class. But this is also the only nationalism that could be expected of a nation betrayed by its elites. The only thing you need to know is that in Scots Gaelic they call the Highland Clearances the “expulsion of the Gael”.

The road passes the tracks of the Caledonian sleeper north.

Alex is dreaming, imagining what the lairds would say to land reform. Everyone in the Highlands knows how the lairds tell you their family history, squiggly family trees on paper rolls, stretching back hundreds of years. They imagine that if you confront the landed they would issue a plaintive gasp: “Our family has been here for 300 years.”

Alex flickers, angry. For everyone else living on the moor, a long, long time  means nothing at all. The car drives back to the real Highlands, a land of dismal bungalows, mini-roundabouts and co-ops, not turreted Victorian follies.

“That old laird, from the estate, we remember him, back in the referendum, he had his huge big poster: “Delighted to be united”, or whatever. But then six months later, he sold up. There were families living there, they’d been living there and farming there, and one day to the next, the new owners, some billionaire, went ‘Leave’. I tell you, it was like a new Highlands Clearances for them, it was.”

One farmer committed suicide when the old laird sold up and the new oligarch owner gave him notice to get out. “That family had farmed that land for three generations. The Clearances — the power to turf out families because you could — that’s never stopped. This is mental crack.”

Morning light. I am standing on the platform at Rannoch station, where in Trainspotting the junkies come for a breath of fresh air. A reddish wasteland ripples out from the platform into nothing. The deerstalker is waiting for me. We drive up to hunt with the guns.

“When they began, the SNP,” the stalker mutters, “a lot of people thought they were good. To, you know, end the English rule. A lot of people liked it. A lot of people, they rise to them, against the English landowner. But now, we know they are going to interfere with our way of doing things, those of us up the hill don’t like them at all.”

Trudging over a Jackson Pollock landscape of yellowy lichen, sprouting tufts and reddish moss, the bog sucks, like lips, on my boots. There is no horizon. Mist surrounds us in white. “There’s the beast.” Spectral shapes of stags emerge, gallop, then disappear. Binoculars pointed, the stalker hunts them with his eyes. “They’re not like us. They only see in black and white. There are no colours for them. Only shades of grey. That’s why they can always see us in the fog.”