An Anti-Scottish, Scottish Establishment?

What makes Scotland unique? What highlights its place in the world and within history? What establishes the basis of Scotland’s civic and national pride? Three answers come to the fore: its unique culture, its history, and its landscapes. These fundamental merits, ie., ‘Scottishness’ transcend all transitional; politics, ideologies, popular trends, religious perspectives and the changing constitution of Scotland’s society. Scotland has always been a sum of disparate parts, clans, Highlanders, Lowlanders, Gallovidians, Hebrideans. Orcadians, Outlanders, etc, etc. What binds them together is a universal Scottish identity and a common pride in a country’s legend.

For six years, Digger and I have attempted to add to Scotland’s remarkable qualities and its legend—reattach loose and missing threads of its extraordinary history—to prevent, not provoke the rot that threatens its treasured historic environment—to broadcast to the world, Scotland’s historical contribution; the mettle and resoluteness of its medieval peoples and their leadership.

However, instead of Scotland’s mentorship and support for the authentication of an extraordinary medieval discovery, we have experienced nothing but a widespread environment of indifference, deceit, ignorance, avoidance and idiocy. We have been subjected to an incredibly imperceptive academic, professional and public sector—an establishment failing to promote and protect Scotland’s history from loss and degradation—an establishment big on rhetoric but failing to provide understanding, sustainability and dynamic public engagement in both the celebration and safekeeping of Scotland’s heritage and its historical legend.

If we had presented a meritless understanding of our find, then we should expect censure. But this is not the case. No qualified supportable or credible disavowal of our discovery has ever been presented. Instead, institutional equivocation replaces support, and so any good news has been irrevocably tainted by the betrayal of Scotland’s heritage and political governance.

The following article allows interrogation of our individual petitions to over twenty Scottish politicians, illustration of the lack of community concern for Holywood Church and the discovery, and review of our experience of not only the government’s heritage agencies, but the response from the community-based heritage sector. We illustrate why Digger and I are having to shout to be heard to ensure the protection and promotion of an extraordinary piece of Scottish history—a huge, good news story—of world interest. And how faced with an unresponsive community, avoidant heritage agencies, and the inaction and disinterest of its political leadership, we are having to publicly condemn Scotland in order to goad prudent recognition and celebration of its own history and heritage.

[Full article to follow]