One of the comments above suggests the important point that what Gibbon was seeing is an east of Scotland more than a west of Scotland feature. While that would be hard to establish objectively, I think the east-west divide has roots deep in the nature of the land. The fact that the east is mostly fertile agricultural soil long made it a magnet for consolidated feudal power, based on coercion and the normalisaiton of violence. That’s not to say that there wasn’t also violence on the west coast. There was plenty, and brutally so like the Eigg massacre. But this was more within an indigenous framework where matters were easier to process locally through time – a case more of lateral violence (equitably, from the side) than vertical violence (from top down, and hard to engage with, thereby the pressure spilling out laterally). In the west, indigenous communities could be more themselves for longer because, until the Cheviot came in and the clearances began, the land was not worth grabbing and settling in for anything much other than subsistence. I suspect that in the west with Iona etc., Christian influence was also stronger, and the bardic tradition that it built on carried a kind of immunity in conflict that gave the culuture richer roots through which reconciliations might be effected.

After a few weeks I reread it. I was stunned. Sunset Song is much more like Davies’s version than the romantic one I held in my head or advanced by admiring readers like First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, who championed the novel in that BBC poll. Behind the warm glow Is it meant to make us less unenthusiastic about the promise of being ruled by Boris Johnson and King Charles? Because, you know, Scotland is just rubbish, you only have to focus on the negative aspects of one of its favourite books written only 100 years ago. The thing to understand is that It was less wage slavery than a way of life. Despite the itinerant nature of this way of life, social relationships were maintained through the farm households and bothies, the weekly markets, and the quarterly fairs. Countries were much smaller: for example, I once worked out that my grandmother had lived her entire life within a sixteen-mile radius of where she was born. My grandfather was only ever displaced from his native country in Stirlingshire by the First World War and its aftermath, which disrupted rural populations in Scotland in ways that Robert Colquhoun eulogises in Sunset Song. Strong and abiding relationships were maintained in the smaller worlds of the farming communities of the time, as evidenced by Robert McLellan’s Linmill Stories. Burns wrote ‘My Heart is in the Highlands’ for James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, to which he was a contributing editor. According to Burns’ notes that accompanied its publication, his song is a remix of ‘a string of shreds and patches from various sources’, including ‘The Boys of Kilkenny’ and ‘The Strong Walls of Derry’, a couple of Irish anti-Jacobite songs. He lived with no rights whatsoever, as all tenant farmers did, and woe betide the man who failed to doff his cap. This has had a massive negative effect not only on farmers but also their workers who depended on them.There have been several adaptations, including a 1971 television series by BBC Scotland, a 2015 film version, and some stage versions. It presumes that particular nations have distinctive psychological make-ups which are culturally reinforced by a common language and/or heritage, which of course they don’t. Nowadays, we’re more accustomed to thinking of nations as ever-changing pluralities of language and/or historical communities.

As she said: “There is a universality about Sunset Song which strikes a chord in so many different places.

Sunset Song ‘had a profound impact on me’

I was from Glasgow so I had to learn to speak the (Doric) language, because it was so important, but some of the cast were from the north-east and they helped me in every way they could.

The central character is a young woman, Chris Guthrie, growing up in a farming family in the fictional parish of Kinraddie in the Mearns at the start of the 20th century. Life is hard, and her family is dysfunctional. If this new edition is prompting you to re-read Sunset Song after many years, as I have just done, you will find it has lost none of its appeal and emotion. And if you are about to read this remarkable novel for the first time, you are embarking on a profound journey” Fine words in defence of the Garden City, not just a town but an ideal, a movement even, with a better life for all as it’s goal. He developed – maybe invented is not too strong – a kind of word music of his own, without becoming as iconoclastic as Hugh MacDiarmid, who was writing poetry at the same time, in which he tried to re-invent a whole lowland Scots language that was consciously set up in opposition to English (which I once heard him describe as “a linguistic disease”, though admittedly he was drunk at the time). Grassic Gibbon’s prose, sometimes glorious, is stamped with individuality: he never seems to be imitating anyone else’s style, but going his own way.Of course, in so many ways, the lives and experiences of the characters in Sunset Song are worlds away from my own. I grew up in a very different place and time. The harshness of rural life in the years leading up to and through the First World War was beyond my direct ken. That, though, is part of the appeal. The book quite literally introduced me to a part of my own country – Aberdeenshire – that until then had been as alien to me as a foreign land. It opened my ears to a language – an echo of the speak of the Mearns – that was of my country, but not really mine. It seeded in me a fascination and deep affection for the names, places and people of the North East of Scotland. To this day, a journey to Aberdeen past the road signs for the towns and villages of the Mearns always makes me think of Sunset Song – of Kinraddie, Blawearie, Peesie’s Knapp. It’s not your intentions I am questioning, Mike. I am fairly comfortable that you are not longing for Boris to survive to be joint king with Charles. Sunset Song: watch the exclusive trailer for the first world war tragedy starring Agyness Deyn – video Guardian The Mill of Benholm in Kincardine, which was chosen by the BBC team filming the serial of Sunset Song. Years later Mitchell dedicated his exhaustive analysis of the history of the Mayan civilisation to his headmaster, Mr Alexander Gray of Echt.