Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing, Onward the sailors cry.
Carry the lad that's born to be king, Over the sea to sky.
Loud the winds howl, loud the waves roar, Thunder claps rend the air.
Baffled our foes stand by the shore, Follow they will not dare.
It is strange indeed that the pursuers of Bonnie Prince Charlie were thwarted by the storm referred to in the Sky Boat Song.
For the shortest crossing to the Isle of Sky, from the Kairulokhoush on the mainland to Kailakin, takes a mere five minutes.
Ever popular with visitors, Sky, the largest of the Inner Hebridean Islands, has been associated with legends since the earliest times.
Its aura of mysticism has seen the Isle known variously as the Cloud Island, the Misty Isle and the Winged Isle.
Like skies and mountainous landscape that is more often than not draped in cloud, Scotland's history is shrouded in misty myths that are as spectacular as the great events they obscure.
It's therefore fitting that it was on Sky that one of history's great romantic tales reached its conclusion.
For it was here that Bonnie Prince Charlie's flight across the heather ended, following his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.
The uprising that culminated in the battle was to be the last attempt by the Jacobites to restore the Stuart monarchy.
To each family who had a claim to the throne, their claim was right and just.
And in terms of the Stuarts, Bonnie Prince Charlie's father and Bonnie Prince Charlie himself, their family had actually sat on the British throne.
They considered themselves to have been unjustly deposed in 1688 by William of Orange and Mary.
Many British people felt that as well, so there was a strong nucleus of support at home for their claim.
They felt very strongly that they had been unjustly deprived of the crown, and that is why Bonnie Prince Charlie determined to fight for what he saw as his father's right and his own right to succeed on the throne after his father had died.
He'd never been to Britain at all. He had spent most of his life in Rome and in Italy.
But his father had an exiled court around him in Rome, which was staffed mainly by English, Irish and Scots Jacobites.
So Bonnie Prince Charlie was brought up, if you like, as a British heir to the throne.
Charles Edward Stuart's campaign to regain that throne began when he landed at Eriskey on the 23rd of July, 1745.
When he landed, the clan chiefs were somewhat horrified to find that he hadn't brought any money and guns and supplies with him, and in particular no troops.
They felt that such a rising was doomed from the very start, just with seven men.
But the force of Bonnie Prince Charlie's personality won over some of the more important clan chiefs like Cameron of Loch Eel.
Near Glenfinnan, at the head of Loch Eel where three glens meet, the Glenfinnan monument marks a spot where on the 19th of August, 1745,
Prince Charlie stood surrounded by the clans who had already pledged their support.
They were waiting to discover whether Cameron of Loch Eel would be joining them. If he did, others would surely follow.
Their prayers were answered when, slowly, the sound of the pipes rose in the distance,
and this powerful chief appeared at the head of seven hundred clansmen marching down the hills.
Other clans then rose to the call, and where the monument now stands, the standard was raised,
proclaiming the old pretender as King James VIII of Scotland and the Bonnie Prince as his regent.
The prince had succeeded in overcoming much of the apathy he had initially encountered,
and was to go on to raise an effective fighting force of nine thousand men.
Soon he was holding court in Edinburgh before marching south. The hope was to attract more Jacobites on the way and eventually take London.
In the event, the Jacobite army made it as far south as Derby.
It's pretty far south, and the thing is, we know from contemporary sources that the morale of the Highland army at the time was at its highest.
They were in the heart of England. They'd seen no effect of opposition. Local opposition was non-existent.
They'd outmaneuvered two Hanoverian armies, and they were within striking distance of the capitals,
so the morale of the army itself was very, very high, and Bonnie Prince Charlie always saw the turning point at Derby as the black spot of his entire career.
He was all for going on because there was near panic in London.
It's said that George II had the Royal Yacht packed with all his belongings at the tower, and was ready to sail off if the Jacobites pushed south.
There was a run on the Bank of England as depositors demanded their money out, and there's a story that they slowed down the queue by paying out the money in sixpences.
If somebody came in and wanted their £2,000 out and they got it paid in sixpences, it would take a long time to count, and that's how the Bank of England stayed in business.
Contrary to common myth, Bonnie Prince Charlie's force was no ragtag army, but highly disciplined fighters who posed a real threat. So why did they turn back?
Lord George Murray was perhaps one of the greatest generals Scotland has ever produced.
It was his misfortune to be under the command of a younger man who was a greater tactician.
Bonnie Prince Charlie was perhaps one of the greatest tacticians. He was no good as a general, but he was a superb tactician, whereas Lord George Murray was the exact opposite.
He wasn't very good as a tactician, but he was a superb general.
And Lord George Murray saw himself in the heart of enemy territory, surrounded by what he thought were hostile forces because there was a Hanoverian spy in the camp who told them that there was a government army bearing down on them and they were going to be caught in a pincer.
And Lord George Murray felt that he could not fight his way out of a trap like that.
He persuaded the rest of Bonnie Prince Charlie's council that the only thing to do was to retreat and to fight a battle in the Highlanders' home territory.
Inverness, the capital of the Highlands, is located at the northern end of the Great Glen, the stride, the outlet of Loch Ness.
Today it's the administrative centre for the whole region and the focal point for shopping and entertainment.
Its sheltered position beside the sea, where the roads through the glens converge, has made it an important trading centre since the earliest times.
In the Middle Ages it developed a port and shipbuilding industry and established commercial links with Europe.
The River Ness flows through the heart of the town and the strategic importance of the location has seen Inverness subjected to repeated bouts of destruction.
Such a troubled history has left Inverness with few historic buildings for a place of its size.
But there are some reminders of past invaders.
The clock tower, for instance, is all that remains of a fort erected by Cromwell's army in the 17th century.
However, the town we see today is largely the result of the expansion that took place in the 19th century.
Among the buildings of that period is the imposing and richly decorated neo-gothic St Andrew's Cathedral.
It was built between 1866 and 1874 for the Episcopal Diocese of Moray, Ross and Caithness.
Inverness has, of course, possessed a castle since long before the 19th century, but the current castle, like so much else, is a product of that period.
It now houses the law courts and government offices.
However, it's the statue of the Jacobite heroine Flora MacDonald, which stands proudly in front of the castle, that points to the tragedy that awaited Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1746.
Following the retreat from Derby, the strategically located Inverness was the obvious place for the Jacobite army to base itself.
And it was from here, on the 16th of April, that the Jacobites ventured out to meet the Duke of Cumberland's government troops, who were marching towards Inverness.
Five miles east of Inverness, on Dromossy Moor, at Culloden, the two armies clashed.
It is, perhaps, a pity that Culloden was chosen as the battlefield, because it was a hopeless ground for the Highlanders' traditional tactics.
And indeed, Lord George Murray wanted to fight the battle on the hills across the River Naren from Culloden, where the ground's broken.
It's very steep, and it would have broken up the government army, and the Highlanders would have had a greater chance of success.
In the event, it was a tactical error by Bonnie Prince Charlie that resulted in the battle being fought at Culloden.
Bonnie Prince Charlie then thought that what they should do was the Duke of Cumberland's birthday,
and he reasoned that the English army or the British army, knowing their troops, he reasoned that they would all be drunk,
because they'd be celebrating the Duke of Cumberland's birthday.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.
But he took so long to persuade Lord George Murray and the other members of his council that such an attack would be profitable,
that by the time they set out and by the time they'd marched the 12 miles to Naren to surprise Cumberland's camp,
Cumberland's camp was already stirring, getting up and ready to fight.
So they then had to march the 12 miles back, and they just dropped exhausted on the spot where they'd marched from.
Cumberland realised his advantage and marched his army immediately out,
and so the Highlanders were in a way surprised and caught by the government army, the British army,
on a spot that was absolutely hopeless for fighting.
The battle itself was a very quick one. It was over in about an hour, an hour and a half.
Once the two armies had drawn themselves up on this moor, Bonnie Prince Charlie waited for the Duke of Cumberland to attack,
so he stood his men and he didn't give an order to attack.
The Duke of Cumberland realised that he was doing this, so he ordered his artillery to fire on the Jacobites.
The Jacobites had opened fire first, but their supplies had soon run out,
and the adjutant, or the controller of supplies, was an Irishman, O'Sullivan, totally incompetently,
had sent up the wrong calibre of ammunition from Inverness,
and valuable time was lost sending back to Inverness for the correct ammunition for the guns.
All this was going on, the Hanoverian artillery were tearing huge gaps in the front rows of the regiments on the Jacobite side,
and eventually the Duke of Cumberland realised they still weren't moving,
so he started giving orders for chainshot and grapeshot to be fired, which tore even bigger holes in the ranks of the army.
By the time Bonnie Prince Charlie realised that the Duke of Cumberland wasn't going to attack first,
a lot of damage had been done, and you could almost say that the battle had been lost by that mistake on the part of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Once the order to attack had been given, two messengers were sent out to the right wing and to the left wing of the Jacobite army.
Now the messenger got to the right wing of the Jacobite army and they in fact charged,
but the messenger who was to take the message to the left wing was decapitated by a cannonball,
so more time was lost finding a new messenger and sending a messenger to the left wing of the Jacobite army,
so the army did not charge as one, there was a charge on the right and a ragged charge on the left until the order reached them.
Now the actual right wing of the Jacobite army did run 400 yards across a bleak open moorland being shot at all the time.
They actually reached the Hanoverian regiments, it would be the Hanoverian regiments on the left of the Hanoverian army,
and that's where the majority of Hanoverian casualties came from.
However, they were then forced to retreat and as they retreated, they came up with the Jacobite regiments on the left.
There was a confused girdle, the Hanoverians realised that they had the advantage
and sent flanking attacks of dragoons round to take them at the side
and a lot of damage was done in the centre of the field, which is why the graves of the clans are actually in the centre of the field.
They are buried where they fell.
The last great pitch battle on mainland Britain was over.
In the 90 minutes that it lasted, Dromossi Moor was turned into a mass graveyard and remains so today.
The victorious government troops showed no mercy and the atrocities inflicted on the fleeing Jacobites earned their general the subriquet butcher Cumberland.
For the young pretender, it was all a far cry from those heady days when he raised his standard at Glenfinnan.
A price of £30,000, several millions in today's terms, was placed on his head
and yet no highlander turned him in during the months of his flight across the heather.
Eventually he made it to Skye where the brave heroine Flora MacDonald risked her life, family and lands by disguising him as her maid and offering him protection.
Even now we can perhaps somewhere on Skye see the ghost of Bonnie Prince Charlie, steadied by the loyal hand of Flora MacDonald as he faced the prospect of despair.
After sailing from Elgol on the Skye coast and eventually escaping, he secretly visited London in 1750 and allowed himself sight of the royal houses that once might have been his.
His life was degenerating into bouts of drunkenness. Born in Rome, he died in Rome in 1788. It was also the death of the Stuart dynasty.
The Jacobite, Donald MacDonald of Kepoch, wrote Loch Lomond in Carlisle jail following Culloden
to explain that his spirit would reach Scotland on the low road of death faster than his living companions on the high road.
But Culloden also hastened the low road for something else, the clan system.
To ensure there would be no further uprisings, the act of prescription of 1747 barred highland dress and the bearing of arms amongst the general populace.
With the highland threat removed, one place that was unquestionably taking the high road was Edinburgh.
Until the 18th century, Edinburgh had been a poor place that had not expanded beyond what is now called the Old Town.
Unlike most ancient cities which grew up through proximity to a river, Edinburgh, ringed by hills, developed from a tiny community perched on the plug of a volcanic rock that now supports the castle.
The castle is a vivid reminder of the strategic importance of the rock.
With its steep, easily defended sides, the castle rock was fought over from the earliest times.
Indeed, Edinburgh may well have derived its name from Northumbrian King Edwin who died before his people captured the site in AD 638.
However, the castle did not become a favoured royal residence until the 11th century when Edinburgh settled to become the capital.
From the original focal point of the castle, Edinburgh developed along the windy ridge of high ground that eventually found itself sandwiched between the castle at one end and the abbey of Holyrood at the other.
The roofless nave is all that remains of this once great abbey, but its magnificence echoes the importance of a site where successive monarchs were crowned and buried.
Holyrood Abbey dates mainly from the late 12th and early 13th centuries, and its history runs in tandem with that of the castle.
Its origins are associated with Queen Margaret, and the name, meaning the Holy Cross, is said to have come from a fragment of the True Cross that she brought to Scotland.
The adjacent palace was originally built around 1500 by James IV. Intent on using it as a royal residence in preference to the castle, he enlarged an existing guest house of the abbey by building the present north-west tower.
However, most of the structure we see today was built at the time of Charles II, who never actually set fruit in the building he commissioned.
His architect, Sir William Bruce, retained the original tower and counterbalanced it with a second.
The entrance front was the last part of the palace to be built. The carved stonework that forms part of its elaborate design incorporates the Scottish coat of arms and the crown.
Today, Holyrood Palace continues to be the Queen's official residence in Edinburgh.
It's not perhaps surprising that the road that stretches along the ridge between Holyrood and the castle should be known as the Royal Mile.
It was the principal thoroughfare of the old town that grew up and spread out under the protection of the castle.
The Royal Mile is in fact a succession of four streets and was described by Daniel Defoe as perhaps the largest, longest and finest street for buildings and number of inhabitants, not in Britain only, but in the world.
Certainly, the few original buildings that remain offer a glimpse of what Edinburgh life was like in the original old town.
Always busy today, it was overflowing with people in medieval times.
For Edinburgh's old town population was crushed together within the steep, winding streets that characterise this area of the city.
The warren of close-packed houses that cling to the ground in the vicinity of the castle reflect the fear that arrested Edinburgh's early development.
Edinburgh was originally restricted by the King's Wall, built in 1450, which separated it from the castle.
But after Scotland's defeat at the Battle of Flodden in 1513, panic set in and a new wall was built.
The Flodden Wall, remains of which still exist, initially enabled an expansion as the old town extended towards it.
But after that, it remained Edinburgh's boundary for 250 years.
In times dominated by the insecurity of successive wars, it was Edinburgh's only protection.
Such confinement meant building upwards and, as today, the gables of the tenements looming against the sky gave Edinburgh a unique atmosphere.
So cramped was the town that the aristocracy and commoners frequently shared the same tenement buildings, often occupying them from top to bottom in order of social status.
Forced to live cheek by jaw within the Flodden Wall, they would have physically rubbed shoulders in the stairways and closes.
A judge who delivered an unpopular verdict could expect an uncomfortable journey home.
The old town was a breeding ground for vermin and disease.
Effluent would pour out from its walls and accumulate on the low ground below the town.
Today, this area forms Princess Street Gardens.
But up to the early 18th century, the buildings beyond the base of the rock did not exist.
What's now Parkland was known as the Knorr Loch, a stinking cesspool of filthy waste.
The subruque Auld Reekie remains attached to Edinburgh to this day, despite the fact that as the 18th century progressed, things changed rapidly.
Following the act of union and the end to the Jacobites as a serious threat, something quite extraordinary happened.
Freed at last from the danger of invasion, Edinburgh burst out beyond its ancient walls and alongside the old town, a spacious new town was created.
Work began in 1767 after James Craig had won the competition for its design that had been instigated by the city fathers.
At first, it was rather tentatively regarded. People had to be virtually induced, I think, to move there and were encouraged with some relief on the taxes they might have to pay by moving there.
It was originally conceived, the first new town as we call it, but it was then seen as a complete residential entity and that was the area which covers Princess Street to Queen Street with George Street on the ridge of the hill, the spine of the development, George Street being seen as the principal street.
The development has been described as a political statement in stone, and with the Jacobites quashed, its street names certainly offered a salute to the Hanoverian ascendancy.
Even Princess Street takes its name from the princes who were the sons of George III.
Shops have now replaced the houses that originally stood facing across the old Knorr Loch, but Princess Street retains the unique character of a one-sided boulevard.
Amazingly, the planners of the 1960s, responsible for so many architectural atrocities elsewhere, seriously proposed to develop the south side of the street, but thankfully were defeated by the influence of the professional people living in the area.
No doubt similar influence was exercised 200 years earlier in order to get the Knorr Loch drained.
The gardens that replaced the old cesspool were originally exclusively for Princess Street residents, but today they can be enjoyed by all, and one of the principal features to be seen from them is the mound.
This was built using the rubble dug out from the foundations of the new town and replaced the stepping stones that previously offered the main link with the old Edinburgh.
The town can now justly be regarded as a masterpiece, but it was only after development was underway that the typical Georgian street pattern, with its squares and crescents, was adorned by a strong architectural concept.
Edward Adam was a pointed architect to design what we call the Palace Front, which is really a series of single-family terrace houses grouped together behind a grand frontage which looks like a complete palace, but in fact, if you look closely at that, you'll see that it divides up in various sections into a variety of houses.
The Palace Front concept was expanded when the second new town developed from the early 1800s. This was on ground farther north again. The layouts were always interspersed with very spacious gardens, as well as the street being of very wide and generous proportion.
Guardianship of the 776 acres of Georgian Edinburgh is now in the hands of the New Town Conservation Committee.
There was a conference set up in 1970 which posed the question, is Georgian Edinburgh worth preserving, and if it is, how can this be done? And the Edinburgh New Town was regarded as very significant, the extent of it, the survival as probably the largest piece of classical planning to survive virtually anywhere we think.
This was followed up through the setting up of this committee, and for every £1 that the City Council agreed to put into our budget, the central government put up too, and the funding is principally used to help residential property.
Buildings continue best to be served if they continue in their original use, and it is really a living city centre that we want to retain.
Today, Edinburgh is very much a living city. Buildings such as that of the National Gallery of Scotland, designed by William Playfair between 1822 and 1845, give it a classical feel.
The classical theme is continued by the National Monument on top of Carlton Hill. Intended as a replica of the Parthenon to commemorate Scots killed in the Napoleonic Wars, it was never completed due to lack of funds.
The expansion of Edinburgh from a crowded walled town into a world class city is a physical expression of the great intellectual surge that followed the Union and the defeat of the Jacobites.
Just as Edinburgh shed the confinement of its walls, the middle classes were released from the constraints of the lowland aristocracy, who largely drifted southwards to London.
The new freedom of thought that resulted would help herald in the steam age and the industrial growth it fostered.
Many influential figures would emerge at a time that came to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment. Scottish ideas and inventions were about to find a world stage and play a major role in creating the conditions from which the British Empire would emerge.
By one of those happy coincidences, the Bowness and Keneal Railway, home of the Scottish Railway Preservation Society, runs close to the workshop near the Forth where one such Enlightenment figure did so much to advance the development of steam power.
The cylinder on which he conducted experiments still stands at Keneal today, although what remains of his workshop is a rather dilapidated tribute to a man whose inventiveness helped lay the foundations of the Industrial Revolution, James Watt.
The origins of Watt's inventiveness and much of its legacy can be traced not to the Forth, but to Greenock on the Clyde. It was here that he was born in 1736.
From his earliest years he did have this proficiency in the practical side of things and of course Greenock had started out as a herring fishing town and subsequently with harbour developments and ship building operations like Scots which started in 1711, there was a lot of maritime interest in the area and his father had a number of business interests which included a ship's chandlers.
Young James actually helped his father and developed quite a lot of practical skills working in the workshop repairing maritime instruments of one sort or another.
After his teenage years he was really based in Glasgow for quite a spell and of course it was in Glasgow that his major invention came about.
What happened was he was given the charge of repairing a Newcomen engine model by John Anderson of the what's now Strathclyde University and this particular model had a fault that he couldn't correct and while he was walking across Glasgow Green that he had this inspiration that it was actually an inherent fault in the design that was the problem.
And this was to become subsequently his invention of the separate condenser which was a major improvement on the Newcomen engine.
Of course he was not the inventor of the steam engine, the rare working steam engines previously, but they were much more inefficient.
Despite his breakthrough, the work what carried out at Glasgow and later at Keneal lacked adequate finance. The success he later achieved came only after he went into partnership with Birmingham based Matthew Bolton.
Matthew Bolton was an ideal counterpart to what he had finance. He had the idea of bringing various trades under one roof in the Soho Manufactory.
He had the business acumen and the drive to get on with the business side of things whereas what was left in peace to do the practical work.
And I think even throughout his life at the end of his life and he felt when he retired in Birmingham he made all sorts of other things like sculpture copying machines and the proliferation of different sorts of industries and the use of power and manufacturing of course.
I think all of these things many of the paths lead back to what when you look at the context.
The foundations of the Industrial Revolution being laid by people like what were part of a broader revolution in thought that flourished in the liberating climate of the Enlightenment period.
The man who would be among the most eloquent in giving expression to this intellectual revolution was born here in Alloway 23 years after what.
Robert Burns was the son of an educated but impoverished market gardener.
Impoverishment was to be a recurring theme in his own life linked with a complex series of personal relationships and a role in the new thinking of the period that saw him constantly at odds with the church.
Had Burns been born perhaps 50 years earlier we might never have heard of him.
Up till the mid 1750s the church literally ruled in Scotland and they preached predestination and according to the teaching at that time you were put in this earth to be the servants and the slaves of God's chosen people.
God's chosen people being the people with money.
Now at that time there was a Dutch divine called Arminius who was preaching very much against this.
There was no such thing as God's chosen people.
We were all God's chosen people.
Now Burns was born into this period and of course he had a brilliant mind and he could see the hypocrisy and the superstition within the church.
And so Burns wrote his satires on the church.
The one thing in Scotland was that they had the best education system in the world.
The churches set up little schools that even the poorest of children were taught to read and to write.
This was to enable them to study their Bibles because religion ruled more or less in these days.
But when you teach people to read and to write you teach them to think.
Now of course at that time around about the mid 1750s very little literature in Scotland did not have to have a religious connotation.
But literature now coming from England such as Shakespeare was beginning to appear in Scotland and people were anxious for something different.
And of course Burns appeared on the scene with some brilliant poems and some wonderful songs and people were ready to accept them.
Burns' longing for literature was matched by another which he called that delicious passion which I hold to be the first of human joys.
When he went to Kirk Oswald in 1775 he discovered it with a vengeance.
There was a schoolmaster there Hugh Roger who was very famous for his mathematics and teaching.
And so Burns' father sent him there to learn measuring and surveying.
Now unfortunately of course he met a young lady there Peggy Thompson who so bewitched him that he could no longer study or do anything in it to leave there.
But Kirk Oswald became famous because it was there that the start of his poem Tame Shanta occurred.
Probably Burns' greatest poem.
The poem was inspired by two of Burns' drinking friends at Kirk Oswald.
Douglas Graham of Shanta Farm and John Davidson the cobbler who became the fictitional suitor Johnny from which the cottage in the village takes its name.
Clearly already forming ideas that would later surface in his work when he was 19 Burns' family moved to a farm near Tarbolton.
It was in the innkeeper's house at Tarbolton that Burns helped form the bachelor's club a debating society where he and his friends could revel in the new intellectual freedom of the times.
They first met in November of 1780 and agreed to meet every month after that.
Probably the most important thing that took place in this room was that Burns in this room Burns was apprenticed into the Masonic Lodge.
Important for Burns these men were mainly from the upper class of society.
Men who had a much better education than the young men that Burns was debating with.
And so it gave him a far greater opportunity for intellectual conversations and discussions.
They were also men of influence.
When Burns came to publish he couldn't afford a publisher and it was the Masons who were instrumental in getting a great number of subscribers enabling Burns then to publish.
Despite this financial insecurity obliged Burns to make several abortive attempts at farming.
When Burns first went to Moughlin he made every endeavour to be a successful farmer.
But the first year he was there they got bad seed from the seed merchant, their crop failed.
In despair Burns who had worked so hard with nothing to show for it signed the farm over to his brother Gilbert and was intending emigrating to Jamaica.
By that time of course he had courted Jean Armour as a result of their courtship she was now pregnant.
And so Burns married Jean in what was common law marriage.
However Jean Armour's father a well to do stonemason was not at all pleased with this and he insisted that Jean gave him the marriage certificate.
He took it to a lawyer in air Robert Aiken who cut the names from the bottom of it destroying the certificate and the father took that to be the end of the marriage.
Feeling rejected Burns exchanged a pledge of marriage with Mary Campbell in whose arms he had probably sought solace on more than one occasion.
It was still his intention to emigrate but news of his Kilmarnock poems had reached Dr Blacklock in Edinburgh.
And so Burns went through to Edinburgh towards the end of 1786 he was still there in 1787 receiving small sums of money from time to time from the publisher.
These he used as living expenses at that time.
However during this period he toured the highlands he toured the borders he was back in Moughlin.
Once more he took up with Jean Armour.
In 1791 having married Jean for a second time he moved here to Dumfries with further farming ventures having failed and paternity claims mounting up he trained as an excise man.
It was here that he died in 1793 leaving his wife penniless but his reputation was to spread across the world.
In those days being joined to England and being governed by the parliament in England Scottish members of parliament had to go south.
And so they carried with them to the works of Burns and this became known in the south because again of the brilliance of his work.
But not only that of course there were the highland clearances and this contributed as well because people were forced into emigrating.
And many Scots went to different countries all over the world and as they went there they carried with them their love of Burns and of course nowadays old Langstein is practically a world anthem.
In the far north of Scotland Sutherland's haunting landscape covers 1.3 million acres and yet has a mere 13,000 inhabitants.
Like many other areas of the highlands it has still not recovered from the clearances that were so instrumental in carrying the influence of Burns across the world.
Where empty shells of homes and villages stand today there were once thriving crofting communities.
But the people have gone uprooted by the 18th and 19th century landowners who were inspired by the improving mentality of their time.
They have never returned.
Many of the people involved in these improvements were motivated by that a general spirit of the age, a feeling that these were the things that landowners opt to do.
By far the worst of the clearances were later in the 19th century but the most notorious of the clearances were in the early part of the century on the estates of the Sutherland family.
The Countess of Sutherland had married the Marcus of Stafford and when these two fortunes were put together that family was then one of the richest families in Britain.
Their fortune was known as a Leviathan of wealth and they set about with an overall plan to some extent for their estate which involved clearing people from the inland part,
introducing large sheep farms, moving people down to the coast, establishing fishing villages and they had very ambitious plans to get manufacturers going and industry of one kind or another.
Now although they had some kind of a plan it's quite clear that the clearances were nevertheless carried out in a very, in some cases a brutal way.
One of the recent things which has made the Sutherland clearances notorious was the fact that a number of the clearances were carried out by an agent of the Sutherland family called Patrick Sellar
who was eventually tried and acquitted for arson having been involved in clearing people, burning houses and during one of these clearances an old woman who had been taken out of a house,
the house had been burnt, she had died.
There are few places in Sutherland that have not in some way been connected with the clearances.
In keeping with the landowner's policy of moving people to the coast, villages like Helmsdale saw rapid increases in population as crofters were burned or chased out of their homes.
Those who refused to go were often left to die of exposure, huddled against their ruined cottages.
Many who accepted eviction were expected to live and continue farming under impossible conditions.
What remains of the village of Badby clings perilously to the crumbling cliff edge.
The crofters who were resettled here by the powerful Sutherland family had to build a boundary wall to prevent the livestock plunging into the sea,
whilst they tethered their children to posts to protect them from a similar fate.
It's easy to imagine these poor families clinging to the cliff edge with a grip as tenuous as that with which they were clinging to life itself.
The injustices that were carried out throughout the highlands in the name of progress are brought into sharp focus in Sutherland.
The pitiful sight of the coast at Badby and the vast emptiness of the interior were once there were villages, contrasts harshly with the symbols of the Sutherland family's wealth.
Symbols like Dunrobin Castle, where the Duchess of Sutherland played lady-in-waiting when Queen Victoria came to stay.
And symbols like the statue of the first Duke of Sutherland on the nearby hillside, staring out to sea, insensitive to the human misery represented by the desolate, empty glens behind him.
What is difficult is that people still argue very much and feel very strongly about the clearances.
The worst of the clearances were later in the middle part of the 19th century on the west coast where a number of landlords simply wanted to get rid of the people as quickly as possible and introduce sheep.
And in many cases people were cleared at very short notice and had no alternative but to emigrate with no clear view of what conditions would be like for them in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
In the heart of the southern uplands, one of Britain's great rivers reminds us that it's not just wealthy families that can wield great force.
In 1784, David Dale and Richard Arkwright, the inventor of cotton spinning machinery, realised their ambition to harness the falls of Clyde to power a new cotton mill.
But they had a problem, finding labour.
It was solved when a ship carrying crofters evicted by the clearances sheltered in the Firth of Clyde.
Like many others, they were on their way to a new life in America, but 200 of them were persuaded to remain here in New Lanark instead.
It was just one example of how the new farming methods that had helped initiate the clearances and the increasing mechanisation of manufacturing was causing employment to shift away from the land and into the factories.
But New Lanark was to become unique. When Dale's son-in-law Robert took over the estate, he turned it into an experiment in community living, which he called his Village of Unity.
It was to be a testing ground for socialist ideas encompassing manufacturing, housing and education.
Its radical innovations included a ten and a half hour working day, a cost price shop and the first infant school in Britain.
Ultimately a victim of the cotton industry's decline, New Lanark nevertheless demonstrated that a new line of political thought had emerged in response to the increasingly industrial and urban culture.
While the workers were drifting to the towns, another trend was developing that eventually saw the nobility flocking to the very highlands that the lower classes had been obliged to vacate.
The seeds of this trend were sown by the one-time owner of Abbotsford House, Sir Walter Scott.
It was here that Scotland's greatest publicist spent the last 20 years of his life.
He'd already had numerous poems and ballads published anonymously and the income from these and his post as Sheriff of Selkircher enabled him to finance this fanciful castle.
But in 1826 disaster struck when the printing business in which he had a stake went bankrupt together with Scott's publisher.
Not only liable for some £114,000, he rose to the responsibility by turning out a succession of novels in order to pay his creditors.
In an age when there were no mechanical aids, he produced a staggering three novels a year.
But the effort took its toll and the man who had combined a detailed knowledge of Scottish history with a strong sense of romance and adventure died in the dining room at Abbotsford in September 1832.
But it was his activities ten years earlier that were to set a new way of life in motion.
At a time when the drawing room at Abbotsford resounded in the company of all the learned men of the day, Scott undertook to stage manage King George IV's visit to Edinburgh.
Thanks to Scott, the King himself turned out with his 20 stone frame draped in tartan.
Once loathed and outlawed for its Jacobite associations, tartan was to suddenly become the favourite dress of anyone who was anyone.
To compound the irony, this Hanoverian King was dressed in the very tartan connected with the dynasty that the Jacobites had failed to restore, Royal Stuart.
It's here in Aberdeenshire that the link between tartan and royalty took the mania for tartan to new heights.
This is the part of Scotland where the Grampian Mountains fall eastward to lush farmlands.
Winding its way through the heart of this landscape is the River Dee.
Rising 4,000 feet up on the Cairngorn Plateau, this great Salmon River thunders down through the steep-sided ravines and stampedes over precipices as it gathers strength from its tributaries.
Close to the Dee is the small town of Ballater.
It was here that, in the great age of steam, the royal train would end its journey and allow Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to disembark for Balmoral.
When Victoria first saw this area, she declared it this dear little paradise.
With Albert, she bought a granite mansion in 1852 for the princely sum of 31,000 pounds.
Finding it too small for the royal household, he commissioned a new building in 1853.
The result is Balmoral Castle.
Ever since, this area, now boasting the title Royal Dee Side, has been a favourite with the royal family, who still attend services here at Crathay Church when holidaying at Balmoral.
But it was Prince Albert's decision to furnish his new mansion with a specially designed Balmoral tartan that completed the process started by Sir Walter Scott.
In the wake of Victoria and Albert, the gentry, many of whom had once discarded Scotland for the south, rediscovered the Highlands.
Where sheep had displaced the crofters in the clearances, it was now the turn of the sheep to make way for the new adepts of hunting, shooting and fishing.
And where tartan had once symbolised lawlessness and rebellion against the House of Hanover, it had been transformed into the darling of the upper classes by a Hanoverian king and a consort of German birth.
Meanwhile, for those lower down the social scale, it was not tartan, but industrialisation that was continuing to dominate their lives.
This had a particular impact on one settlement, whose name derives from the Gaelic for the deer green place.
Today, Glasgow is Britain's third most popular city, a city that developed to earn the accolade workshop of the world and stood at the very heart of the British Empire.
It was from here that great ocean liners like the Queen Mary and the QE2 were launched.
And it was from factories in this city that locomotives and machinery emerged to change the lives of millions across the globe.
But wealth was tarnished by division.
For most of its history, Glasgow flourished only in a quiet way, since most of Scotland's trade was conducted with the Low Countries from the East Coast ports.
The city was founded on the spot now occupied by the cathedral.
It was here that St Mungo built the original church that was dedicated to King David I in 1136.
Subsequently rebuilt after a fire, the structure was enhanced by the addition of the crypt, choir and tower in 1233.
The remainder was built in stages during the ensuing years.
The final result is one of the best examples of pre-Reformation Gothic architecture in Scotland.
But it survives only thanks to the intervention of the city's trade guilds, which thwarted attempts to destroy it during the Reformation.
The transformation of Glasgow began with the opening up of trade with the Americas.
Inward trade developed in the first instance and then it was realised that there was a market abroad for materials which Glasgow could produce,
materials which Glasgow was producing for itself and its own people, that material could also be exported.
The money that was created through the mercantile activities by families like the Glasford family,
that money was later used as a good basis for the industrial development of the city and combined with other factors,
Glasgow was able to develop as one of the industrial capitals of the world in the 19th century.
Between 1740 and 1840, Glasgow's population surged from 17,000 to 200,000 as tobacco, sugar and cotton poured into Port Glasgow.
To accommodate the increase in trade, the Clyde, once a shallow Salmon River, had to be dredged.
This allowed ships into the heart of the city.
People were coming into the city not only from the Highlands but also from Ireland.
The Highland clearances meant that people in the Highlands didn't have a living on the land.
The land that they had been living on was put out for sheep. In Ireland the potato blight, the potato famine caused massive starvation
so it was relatively easy for people to come over from Ireland to live in Glasgow where work appeared to be plentiful.
It's fitting that Glasgow Green should be home to the People's Palace Museum which is dedicated to Glasgow's social history.
For what is now Pleasant Parkland became a rallying point for the discontent that built up in a city
that on the one hand generated extreme wealth and on the other bred an under-cared-for and overgrown population.
Socialism found a spiritual home in Glasgow.
Living conditions were very cramped for people in the city.
Most people, working people, lived in single ends and rooms and kitchens, either one-roomed houses or two-roomed houses.
These dwellings were very overcrowded. On occasion there may have been as many as 13 people living in one room.
One of the attempts to alleviate this problem was to introduce a system of ticketing
whereby tickets or sort of metal plaques were put on the outside of houses
saying the number of people who could occupy that particular space.
And a system of inspectors was introduced where inspectors came round the houses to check
and see how many people were in fact living in there and whether there were more people than were allowed.
This situation didn't really solve the problem because no extra housing was provided.
So all it really meant was that people rushed out of the house when the inspectors came in
and rushed back in again once the inspectors had gone.
The combination of great wealth and the collective idealism promoted by poverty has produced a unique heritage.
Today, Glasgow proudly boasts of its cosmopolitanism.
The cultural diversity that originated with a mixed immigrant workforce
has grown into the eclecticism of a truly international city.
The collective determination nurtured through past poverty has, following industrial decline,
produced a civic determination to adapt to new circumstances.
But once it was the Clyde that was the main artery of trade,
today it's the phone and fax lines that feed Glasgow's finance and commercial sector.
George Square at the very heart of the city epitomises the new spirit of Glasgow.
If the statuesque figures of Watt, Scott and Burns that gazed down on the proceedings below were permitted thoughts,
they would doubtlessly reach different conclusions.
Perhaps Watt would lament the shift from manufacturing to the new service industries.
For his part, Scott could hardly fail to appreciate the showmanship evident in a city still priding itself
in being nominated cultural capital of Europe for 1990.
Burns, on the other hand, might take pleasure in the way that the creative expressions of Glasgow's past wealth
are now available for public rather than privileged pleasure.
One such expression of wealth is situated in the 85-acre Kelvin Grove Park,
a timeless echo of the dear green place from which Glasgow sprang.
The magnificent Hunterian Museum takes its name from William Hunter, an 18th century physician
who bequeathed his entire collection of art and artefacts to Glasgow University, where he studied.
Opened in 1807, this was Scotland's first public museum.
A symbol of mercantile wealth and his aspiration, the Hunterian Museum contrasts sharply with the plight of the poor,
from which Glasgow's wealth was being fashioned at that time.
It was a plight that continued into the dawn of the 20th century.
By then, Scotland's metamorphosis was complete.
A nation of scattered people divided by mountains had acquired an industrial culture,
with a huge majority of people concentrated in the towns and cities of the lowlands.
But the independence of spirit that stemmed from the highlands and a history of struggle lived on.
Urban Scotland was a breeding ground for political radicalism.
However, more distant battlefields beckoned.
To the despair of left-wing leaders, the working people of Scotland flocked to fight for king and empire.
Although only 10% of the British population, they accounted for 20% of all Britons killed in the First World War.
And so, the story that began in part one with the battles against the Romans ends with yet another bloody battle.
What happened next is another story.
To countries afar with traditions so strange.
For the dark races and interesting places, there's nothing about you that I'd ever change.
Scotland, you'll always be with me. We'll never say goodbye.
I'll always be yours, you'll always be mine, until the day I die.
Majesty of your steep mountains and stills, a sense of belonging though I'm far away.