Quotes from Alistair Moffat

The Romans are vivid because they left records and a great deal of archaeology, but they were incomers, not the ancestors of my own people. Perhaps precisely because the native people left so few marks on the landscape, were little more than grey figures who barely emerge from the darkness of the long past, these nameless farmers seemed to me to deserve all and any respect I could give them.

On the west coast of the Isle of Man, near the hamlet of Niarbyl, the cliffs of a small cove have running diagonally across them a thin, greyish-white seam of rock. It is visible for only a hundred metres or so before it disappears into the waters of the Irish Sea but it is a memorial to the making of Scotland. Known as the Iapetus Suture, it marks the precise place where the vast continents of Laurentia and Avalonia collided, having welded the four terranes together.

Now, two centuries after George IV appeared resembling a tartan dumpling, few formal occasions are kilt-free. Lowland bridegrooms and their male guests routinely put on the dress of men who were believed by their ancestors to be sub-human savages.

Our nation is the sum of Scandinavian Scotland, Pictish Scotland, Irish Scotland, English Scotland and British Scotland.

It was impossible for Catus to understand that, in Celtic society, women had status and could rule. In Rome, women had the same legal standing as children.

ch like the Scots loch, a sound the English affect to be unable to pronounce although many manage the name of the German composer, J. S. Bach, well enough.

Therefore, it is possible to say with considerable certainty that more than 40 per cent of all Scots, men and women, carry the DNA of the people of the painted caves.

Old woods can be more than atmospheric, more than merely picturesque; they are sometimes magical. In their shadows wisps of ancient belief can be glimpsed. In what is now called lore, but is actually the residue of belief, Gaelic culture remembers the Creideamh Sith, frivolously translated as 'the Fairy Faith'.

Over me green branches hang A blackbird leads the loud song; Above my penlined booklet I hear a fluting bird-throng. The cuckoo pipes a clear call Its dun cloak hid in deep dell; Praise to God for this goodness That in woodland I write well.

And it should be remembered that before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons in the sixth and seventh centuries, dialects of Old Welsh were spoken the length of Celtic Britain.

Our history is written in our rocks just as surely as it is in monastic chronicles, census returns or the stones and bones of archaeological

Farmers have been extremely conservative. Throughout the world there are 148 species of large animals and yet only fourteen of these have been domesticated as farm animals, grown for meat, milk or wool, or all three, or used to supply muscle-power to pull carts, ploughs or carry people.

And with plant species the proportion which has been cultivated is even smaller. From 200,000 higher plant species, only 100 or so are grown for food. And almost all of these were first tended or cultivated in the fourth millennium BC in Europe.

The western seaboard was, in part, settled by migrants from Iberia and south-western France and they often came by sea. There is a clear set of staging posts marked by a shared lexicon. Celtic languages were once spoken in Spain and are still whispered in Galicia, Breton clings on in Brittany, Cornish is being revived, Welsh thrives, Manx survives, Irish is constitutionally enshrined and Scots Gaelic hangs on, just.

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Archaeologists believe that wine-making began in Georgia and northern Persia some time between 6000 BC and 5000 BC.

In high contrast to modern land-based perceptions, the earliest Scots understood Scotland from the sea, its lochs and rivers. It was probably seen less as a landmass with a scatter of islands offshore and more as a series of related shorelines.

Archaeologists made a haunting discovery that lends a little weight to this conjecture. Amongst the shells and fish bones of one midden, human fingers had been deliberately placed on seal flippers. This powerful note of identification with the natural world, the association of the fingers and flippers, may point to a sense of an afterlife, one where the souls of the dead swam with the seals in the deeps of the world.

The word clann is Gaelic for 'children' and the term clan began to be applied to all those with links, geographical as well as genealogical, with a common name father.

Being in my late 60s, what my wife calls the cocktail hour of life, some of these walks were much more tiring than I anticipated, even though my farm work keeps me reasonably fit. But that is the nature of research.

At Falkland Palace, Andrew Melville famously reminded James VI in 1596 that: [t]hair is twa Kings and twa Kingdomes in Scotland. Thair is Christ Jesus the King, and His kingdom, the Kirk, whase subject King James the Saxt is, and of whase kingdome nocht a king, not a lord, not a heid, but a member.

about Scotland's history, I saw parts of it in a completely new light. In Jim Hunter's memorable phrase, I compiled an archive of the feet.

Anyone who wants to understand something of the elemental nature of our history should try to walk through it, should listen for the natural sounds our ancestors heard, smell the hedgerow honeysuckle and the pungent, grassy, milky stink of cowshit, look up and know something of shifts in the weather and the transit of the seasons and feel the earth that once was grained into their hands.