“… the freshness of his approach lies in his equal focus on Highland life and culture as much as Lowland. He details the development of a distinct post-Reformation religious outlook in the North, referencing the Irish Catholic missionary endeavour to the Western Highlands in 1619-46, and recounts little-known clan disputes and warfare in the post-Restoration period. As he observes, the popular view of the Lowlands as “civilised” and the Highlands as “barbarous” is challenged by the fact that witch-hunting – for which James VI was an enthusiast – was virtually unknown in the Highlands until the 1640s whilst it was rife elsewhere in Scotland for decades before.

Gallacher’s aim is to set the events of the period in an appropriate cultural-historical context. He seeks to encourage a serious reflection on our national story as an antidote to simplistic interpretations of disputes such as those between Protestants and Catholics, or Williamites and Jacobites. He decries blind loyalism either to a Presbyterian, Covenanting, Whig tradition or to an Episcopalian, Catholic, Tory one, noting the overlaps between both. His ambition is for modern Scotland to embrace the strands equally: Highland and Lowland, Nationalist and Unionist, Europhile and Anglophile.