IN THE SUMMER OF 1315, flushed with victory at Bannockburn the year before, King Robert the Bruce led a Scots army across Hadrian’s Wall to attack the walled city of Carlisle. Its defences were marshalled by Andrew de Harcla, a fascinating figure, and, when scouts warned him that the Scots were close, he ordered the bridge over the River Eden to be torn down. When Bruce’s forces reached Stanwix Bank and the old Roman cavalry fort, they saw an awkward obstacle between them and the city. The Eden was running in spate, a roiling, brown torrent of floodwater. But Bruce’s engineers managed to rig up a wooden bridge and eventually they rumbled across.

De Harcla’s garrison of five hundred or so, mainly archers, was massively outnumbered and the very long walls of Carlisle were difficult to defend against simultaneous assaults in several places. But that did not matter. Throughout an eleven-day siege, the Scots were never able to reach the walls. The weather defended Carlisle. Here is an extract from the Lanercost Chronicle:

Moreover the Scots had many long ladders, which they brought with them for scaling the walls in differently places at the same time; also a sow for mining the town wall, had they been able: but neither sow nor ladders availed them anything. Also they made great numbers of bundles of corn and herbage to fill the moat outside the wall on the east side, so they might pass over dry-shod. Also they made long bridges of logs running on wheels, such as being strongly and swiftly drawn with rope might reach across the width of the moat. But during all the time the Scots were on the ground neither bundles sufficed to fill the moat, nor those wooden bridges to cross the ditch, but sank to the depths by their own weight.

This was one of many reports of the beginning of another Ice Age, which historians have come to call the Little Ice Age. For a long time, in more or less extreme episodes between 1300 and 1850 there was a substantial deterioration in the weather, characterised by cold winters and wet summers. When Bruce’s men were floundering in the mud at the foot of Carlisle’s walls, the corn was rotting in the fields, soaked and green, deprived of the ripening sunshine. The harvest failed again in 1316 and famine spread like a cancer, killing first the old and sick and then the children.

Conditions grew steadily worse in the fourteenth century and the Norse colonists were forced to abandon their settlements in Greenland, those they had established in the sunlit centuries before 1300. Measurements taken from ice cores pulled out of Alpine glaciers show significant surges of bad summers and very cold winters in the 1590s, 1690s and 1810s.

Pieter Bruegel’s famous painting The Hunters in the Snow shows a memorable winter landscape, a scene familiar to all who looked at it and shivered. In the foreground, a band of hunters trudge through deep snow with their dogs. They look out on a frozen lake where skaters skim across the surface. Beside a river is a watermill, its wheel stiff with frost.

When William Shakespeare’s plays were first performed at London’s Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames, it was possible to walk across the frozen river to see them. So intense was the cold in the winters around 1600 that frost fairs were held on the Thames even though the tidal river has a high salt content as it flows through London.

Poor harvests and dismal weather no doubt made a hard life for Scotland’s ordinary people even harsher. But much worse was to come. By June 1348, the Black Death had reached the southern coasts of England, taking its first victims at the village of Melcombe in Weymouth Bay. Fleas from black rats and humans carried the deadly bacillus and when they bit they regurgitated it directly into the bloodstream. With swollen lymph glands under the armpits and in the groin, those infected died in agony – but mercifully quickly, usually after only four days.

By 1349, the Black Death had yet to reach Scotland and the less sensible believed that it did not affect Scots, presumably because … they were Scots. In order to take cruel advantage of the stricken English, an army mustered at Caddonlee near Galashiels. But around the campfire several men suddenly became ill, the plague erupted in the midst of the muster, probably brought by mercenary soldiers, and the army panicked and fled.

After that initial outbreak, the disease spread like wildfire as soldiers returned home. At least a third of the population of Scotland died, the densely settled agricultural districts as badly affected as the towns. Only in the isolated glens of the Highlands and in the islands did communities escape – at least for a time. The devastation of 1349 was the most severe visitation but not the last. The Black Death stalked Scotland again in 1361, 1379, 1392, 1401–1403, 1439 and 1455. It is highly likely that Scotland’s collective DNA was altered by such an extreme death rate and several lineages may have died out. The impact of such carnage, unlike anything sustained in war, coupled with sustained climate change was, of course, catastrophic. As agricultural output declined so did trade and a long recession descended on Western Europe.

In Scotland, power politics made matters worse. After the death of Robert the Bruce, a long civil war festered as the heirs of John Baliol pressed their claims to the throne with the backing of meddling English kings. As a succession of weaker monarchs attempted to assert authority, local lordships waxed stronger. The Douglases, the Kers and others compiled large fiefdoms and regularly ignored or challenged kings. With the beginnings of the Stewart dynasty in the ineffectual shapes of Robert II, his son Robert III and the governorship of the Duke of Albany until 1420 (while James I was a minor and uncrowned), Scotland seemed to stand still, perhaps even regress. On his death in 1406, the miserable Robert III left an astonishing, self-pitying epitaph: ‘Here lies the worst of kings and the most wretched of men in the whole realm.’ The impression is of a backward, colourless corner of north-western Europe.

As the fifteenth century wore on the population of Scotland began to recover, although it took a long time to reach the early medieval optimum of around a million souls. And the Stewart kings embarked on a long war with some of their own subjects. Highlanders were seen as very different – primitive, savage speakers of another language, often called ‘Irish’. Walter Bower related a remarkable incident that took place on the North Inch, an island in the Tay at Perth. Two Highland clans had been unable to resolve a dispute amicably and it was agreed that the affair should be decided by judicial combat in the presence of the king. Grandstands were built, English and French spectators flocked to Perth and the events of the day were widely reported. Thirty armed men from each side came to the North Inch and none were allowed armour. This was to be a fight to the death:

At once arrows flew on either side, men swung their axes, brandished their swords and struggled with each other; like butchers killing cattle in a slaughter-house, they massacred each other fearlessly; there was not even one amongst so many who, whether from frenzy or fear, or by turning aide from a chance to attack another in the back, sought to excuse himself from all this slaughter … and from then on for a long time the north remained quiet, and there was neither evil nor upset there as before.

There is an unmistakable sense here of Highlanders as lesser beings – like animals, in fact, as only 12 men were left standing amongst the terrible carnage and the groans of 48 dying men. The horrors of the Colosseum in Rome come to mind.

The Stewart kings were ruthless in their ‘daunting’ of the clans and none more so than James VI. His Statutes of Iona in 1609 forced chiefs to have their eldest sons and daughters educated on the mainland and it attacked Gaelic language, manners, dress and customs. Nine chiefs had been tricked, abducted and compelled to sign the document. It was the beginning of a shift in power from the Highlands and, eventually, a shift in population.

Fifty years before the Iona Statutes were enacted, an even more far-reaching revolution convulsed Scotland. After 1560, the Reformation had succeeded and Catholicism was in widespread retreat. The abbeys and convents that had first developed and then owned much of the Scottish countryside were taken over, many by secular lords who set about building up large estates. The patrimony of the Dukes of Roxburghe, for example, is largely the estate owned by the wealthy abbey of Kelso.

The reforms of John Knox and others began to acquire momentum and, by the end of the sixteenth century, clergymen were proclaiming the Scots as a chosen people who lived in Christ’s Kingdom of Scotland. 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.

As well as a tendency to hector, a central tenet of the reformed religion was the priesthood of all believers and this involved a huge national commitment to literacy. The members of Christ’s ‘Kingdome in Scotland’ had to be able to read the Bible, the Word of God, for themselves without the need for the ‘mumbo-jumbo’ of a priest. Schools were eventually built in every parish in the land and, in order to train enough ministers, there were five universities (two in Aberdeen) while England had only two. For once, politics reached down to ordinary people and, with the advent of mass literacy, changed their lives for the better. The traditional Scottish reverence for education and literature is a lasting legacy.

By the time schools were well established in the seventeenth century and the five universities were producing graduates, a surplus of highly educated Scots emerged. A brain drain began. Many left Scotland to find work in England; some sailed east to the Baltic and, of those, significant numbers settled in Poland. It is thought that by 1800 more than 30,000 lived there, mainly in the cities of Gdansk, Krakòw and Warsaw. They formed Scottish Brotherhoods and maintained links with their homeland but most never came back. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Poland was to return the compliment.

As a separate nation under a united monarchy, Scotland had, in some ways, the worst of both worlds. England developed its colonies in North America with growing success but Scots had very limited access to all that potential. After the convulsions of the Civil War, the invasion of Cromwell and the bloodshed of the Wars of the Covenant, some Scots were much moved to seek a life elsewhere. Many went out to Virginia, but not as colonists. Most were indentured servants, virtual slaves obliged to work for only food and shelter for a set period, usually seven years. On their release from these punitive contracts, some Scots succeeded in the New World. In 1684 a former messenger from Selkirk, Peter Wilson, wrote home to his cousin, ‘Poor men like myself live better here than in Scotland, if they will but work.’ He rented 25 to 30 acres at an annual rent of around five shillings and had a share of the crops.

Access to England’s colonies became more problematic at the close of the seventeenth century as Scotland’s parliament maintained her independence. In the 1690s, Scots attempted to take matters into their own hands. A ‘Company of Scotland tradeing to Affrica and the Indies’ was formed and a plan made to found the first colony of the Scottish Empire on the Isthmus of Panama, at a place called Darien. It was hoped that the venture would re-animate the moribund economy and it attracted widespread backing. Almost a quarter of the nation’s liquid assets was poured into the Darien Scheme, and as ships cast off from Leith, spirits were high.

Darien was an immediate disaster. New Caledonia turned out to be a coastline of mosquito-ridden swampland peopled by hostile natives. Three quarters of the colonists died, the Company of Scotland was bankrupted and the nation plunged into despair and economic crisis. A series of poor harvests in the rain-soaked 1690s added to the atmosphere of gloom.

With the expulsion of James VII in 1688, King William of Orange and Queen Mary had acceded to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland. A year later there was a serious rebellion in the Highlands led by Viscount Dundee, a Stuart supporter. He was a charismatic general but was killed at the moment of victory at Killiecrankie. Jacobitism was seen as an ever-present threat and fear of it led King William into criminal excess. The royal signature appeared on orders that led to the commission of an atrocity in the north. In 1692, Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, acting on secret orders, massacred 38 members of the MacDonald clan of Glencoe. Women and children, stripped naked by the government soldiers, it was said, later died of exposure in the snows as the houses of their settlements blazed in the glen below.

The incident sparked outrage and fuelled Jacobite sympathies. Highlanders could be slaughtered like cattle and attitudes appeared to have changed little since the carnage on the North Inch at Perth. The Glencoe atrocity added to a momentum gathering behind political as well as dynastic union with England. The economic problems heightened by the Darien fiasco also propelled Scotland to seek a brighter future as part of the state of Great Britain as well as the kingdom. Despite popular objection, especially on the streets of Edinburgh, the Scottish Parliament voted itself out of existence in 1707.

Those who plotted and were bribed to ensure the passage of the Act of Union hoped that the Scottish economy would prosper in the wake of England’s imperial ambition. It took time for output and trade to revive as they found markets in the south, but one of Scotland’s most significant exports was her people.

Emigration often took place in stages. The eighteenth century is usually characterised as an age of agricultural improvement. This certainly involved the invention of new and better machinery, most notably the revolutionary swing plough first used in Berwickshire, but it also meant what would now be called rationalisation. Land ownership and land use both changed.

Many of Scotland’s small towns and villages enjoyed the use of common land and indwellers had ancient rights to pasture domestic cows, sheep and goats on these large communal holdings. They also cut peats, brackens and other useful items. But, as land values rose and utility was improved, private landowners often claimed and sometimes simply seized common land. As Baron of Hawick, the Duke of Buccleuch asserted that he owned the entire common. Legal arguments were wearily exchanged over a long period and eventually he was awarded a third of what the people of Hawick held in common. The remainder was enclosed with fences and dykes and some of it rented to individuals.

Not far away stands a poignant memorial to the enclosure of Scotland’s arable land and its passage into largely private hands. In the seventeenth century, the prosperous Roxburghshire village of Longnewton had applied for burgh status. Now all that remains is a burial ground. Surrounded by a drystane dyke and sheltered by a stand of ancient trees, a few tumbledown headstones can be found in the long grass.

Longnewton disappeared in the eighteenth century when the Earl of Lothian decided to combine a number of smallholdings around the village into a new and much larger farm. Production would be much improved and value added if agriculture was conducted not for subsistence but on a more expanded, more practical scale. John Younger was born in Longnewton and he later recalled what happened. His father had 14 acres when his tenancy was terminated by the Lothian estate but they allowed him to stay in his house because he was a shoemaker, a useful trade. The dykes of the smallholding were thrown down and the land ploughed right up to the walls of the shoemaker’s house. He had no garden and even his hens were shot.

Twenty families lived at Longnewton and, in a very short time, they dispersed. All over eighteenth-century Scotland similarly convulsive changes were being forced through as country people began to migrate to larger towns and cities in search of work. These early clearances took place in the Lowlands, beginning almost a century before the Highlands was seriously depopulated. What made this population shift less dramatic and less clearly remembered in history books was the fact that it seemed less drastic. Most people did not, like the former messenger from Selkirk, Peter Wilson, leave Scotland but were able to maintain family connections and community links, albeit over a distance.

The First Statistical Account was compiled by parish ministers in the 1790s and it mourned the passing of smallholders, people they called cottagers. At Kilmany in Fife, the account did record what seemed a profound change – ‘the annihilation of the little cottagers’ – and in Angus the effect was seen as even more emphatic – ‘many of the cottagers are exterminated’. In a less overstated reality, there was employment available and few will have been rendered destitute. The new agricultural methods, particularly the swing plough and the management of the heavy horses needed to pull it, called for year-round contracts or fees, as they were known. And, further afield, there was a great deal of construction work beginning all over Scotland as the country began to urbanise. The most dramatic cumulative impact of the clearances across Scotland was seen in Glasgow. From the end of the eighteenth century until 1825, the city’s population exploded, rising from 70,000 to 170,000 in a generation. The hardy sons of the soil who had grown up on the smallholdings disappeared into the streets of Scotland’s large towns and cities as the old life on the land passed into memory.

The enclosure movement had driven up the cost of rural rentals for many larger-scale farmers, in some places by as much as 400 per cent. To many, emigration seemed a better option than labouring work digging ditches or making roads or moving in to the growing towns and cities. Friendly Societies were founded and by 1750 they were enabling emigration in numbers from Galloway, Ayrshire, Stirlingshire and Perthshire in particular. Undertakings were signed and promises made. The societies employed agents in North America to find good land and negotiate for it. Once a deal had been struck, farmers boarded ships with their families and set sail for a new life. An advertisement in The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1749 painted an attractive picture:

Let’s away to New Scotland where plenty sits Queen

O’er as happy a country as was ever seen

And blessed her subjects, both little and great

With each a good house and a pretty estate.

No landlords are there the poor tenant to tease

No lawyers to bully, no Bailiff to seize.

But no pretty estate awaited a group of 300 emigrants from Killin near Stirling. On landing in Nova Scotia in 1776, they discovered that their fertile farmland was uncleared forest. If parties of emigrants arrived in the autumn or winter, too late to plant, they often had to depend on the kindness of their neighbours, if they had any, for food and shelter.

In the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, Highlanders could scarcely expect much sympathy from their neighbours in Lowland Scotland. After the defeat at Culloden, the government army itself evicted supporters of Prince Charles and ministers at Westminster attempted to defuse any further trouble in the north. A blood price for rebellion was extracted when clansmen were recruited into the British Army. Between 1756 and 1815 at least 40,000 and perhaps as many as 75,000 clansmen marched to war in Europe, America and India in the great drive for empire. William Pitt, the Prime Minister, took a cynical view of the new recruits: ‘The Highlanders are hardy, intrepid, accustomed to rough country, and it is no great mischief if they fall. How can you better employ a secret enemy than by making his end conducive to the common good?’

As their young men departed for foreign fields, the clansmen and -women left at home were serially betrayed by many of their chiefs. A bard of Clan Chisholm made an unequivocal point: ‘Our chief has lost his feeling of kinship, he prefers sheep in the glen and his young men in the Highland regiments.’ Not the most brutal but perhaps one of the most cynical was the grandly named Colonel Alasdair Ranaldson MacDonell of Glengarry, a MacDonald chief. In 1812, Henry Raeburn painted him resplendent in his plaid, kilt and feathered bonnet, holding a musket and staring into the middle distance. There, he might have seen his bailiffs evicting his tenants, families who bore his name and had lived in Glengarry since time out of mind. Despite forming The Society of True Highlanders, MacDonell was anything but, felling the ancient oak forests of his patrimony, clearing the land of its people and leasing it to sheep farmers.

Sheep were thought to be much more profitable than people and 1792 became notorious as Am Blaidhna nam Caorach Mora, ‘The Year of the Big Sheep’. Imported from the south (and often accompanied by experienced Border shepherds), large flocks of Cheviot sheep were hefted to Highland pasture. Tough and much bigger than the native breeds, they thrived, especially in the cleared crofting townships of Sutherland and Ross. The people, however, did not fare so well.

Between 1811 and 1820, a brutal aristocracy did not hesitate and evictions were forced at an astonishing speed. More than 500 families were turned out of their houses in one day. It was pitiless, callous. In a letter to friends in England, Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, the Duchess of Sutherland, wrote about the starving crofters on her estate: ‘Scotch people are of happier constitution and do not fatten like the larger breed of animals.’

One of the lean – but eloquent – crofters, Donald McLeod, wrote an account of what he himself saw. By ‘terrific’ he meant terrifying.

The ships that found their way to shore and the emigrants waiting at the landing places took them away from all that shock and devastation and scattered them to the corners of the earth. In the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, there are many more people of Highland ancestry than now live in the Highlands.

Even after the War of Independence of 1775–83, most emigrants sailed to the United States – perhaps precisely because it was independent of Great Britain. Between 1815 and 1914, more than 13 million Scots arrived in the USA (4 million went to Canada and a million and a half to Australia) and these settlers were very influential. The census of 1790 showed that 12 per cent of the new nation was of Scots or ‘Scotch-Irish’ descent. The latter were also known as Ulster Scots and were the descendants of communities planted in Northern Ireland, mostly from the Scottish Borders and the Lowlands. The fifth American President, James Monroe, was the direct descendant of a minor clan chief and the seventh, Andrew Jackson, hailed from hardy Scotch-Irish stock. In all, a staggering 23 of the USA’s presidents, more than half, have had Scots or Scotch-Irish lineages in their family tree.

This statistic is all the more remarkable when thought of in terms of the background of mass emigration. As a result of the arrival of many more ethnic groups and the effects of slavery, the proportion of people claiming Scots descent in the USA has declined to 1.7 per cent. The very definition of a melting pot, the dynamism of American demographics inevitably meant a dilution and mixture of the DNA of early incoming peoples. For example, 30 per cent of the Y chromosomes of African-Americans are European, reflecting the legacy of the slave generations. A considerable proportion of these are likely to have been Scots in origin. Amongst the Cree people of Canada, there are Orcadian surnames such as Linklater, Flett and Foubister. Many men from Orkney worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Despite the complex genetic mixture in all of these former British colonies, there can be no doubt that Scottish lineages which are now extinct at home carry on in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Surname evidence alone shows this to be the case. Whatever may happen in Scotland, Scottish DNA is still on its journey to the future.

In Scotland, it is changing – our collective DNA has been enriched and somewhat altered in the recent past by a series of immigrations of significant scale and character. After centuries of population loss, the trend has reversed, and since the late 1980s there has been a net migration gain. The Scottish population rose from an estimated 5,083,000 in 1991 to an estimated 5,194,000 in 2009. The census asks respondents to define their own ethnicity and the overwhelming mass reckon themselves White Europeans at 98.19 per cent and, of these, 88.09 per cent see themselves as Scots. Other White British, mostly English immigrants, account for 7.38 per cent, and Other Whites and Irish people make up the balance at 2.71 per cent. But inside these blunt numbers are some fascinating stories.

Emigration from Ireland to Scotland did not cease with the arrival of the descendants of Niall Noigiallach and their compatriots. Sea travel across the North Channel was frequent and easy. A deck passage for the short voyage between Ireland and Greenock cost only sixpence and substantial seasonal waves of immigration took place every year. Within living memory, squads of Irish ‘tattie howkers’ came to work in Scotland at harvest time, earning cash wages and sleeping in very basic bothy accommodation or even in hay barns. This pattern was well established as early as the 1820s when 6,000 to 8,000 Irish labourers came across for the harvest season, beginning with soft fruit and cereals in late August and ending with potatoes in October. Numbers increased steadily and, by 1841, almost 58,000 temporary workers from Ireland were living in Britain. The economy was booming and railway construction drew many gangs of Irish navvies (a shortened version of ‘navigator’, it was a term coined for the men who dug Britain’s canal network in the late eighteenth century) to dig the cuttings and tunnels and pile up the embankments needed to carry the trackbed. In an age before earth-moving equipment, a navvy’s shovel and barrow shifted millions of tons of soil and stone.

These men lived in notoriously squalid temporary accommodation. Some who worked on the railways of southern Scotland were in the habit of digging shelters into embankments or taking refuge from the elements in shored-up tunnel entrances. It was a very hard life and many blew their cash on weekend drinking bouts that sometimes ended in violence. In areas where railways were being laid, local newspapers often carried advertisements warning people of the date navvies were due to be paid. Nevertheless the press refused to stir up resentment. Here is the measured and liberal reaction of the leader writer in The Glasgow Courier in 1830:

In our opinion, the Irish have as much right to come to this country to better their lives as the Scots and English have to go to Ireland or any other parts of Britain … Let us hear no more complaints about the influx of Irish …

Two years earlier the sensational trial of two former Irish navvies, William Burke and William Hare, failed to persuade the volatile Edinburgh mob to turn out and give vent to anti-Irish sentiment. Despite their high visibility and mobility, the immigrant workers produced the opposite of animosity from the other end of Edinburgh’s social scale. Here is an entry from the diary of Henry Cockburn, the judge and littérateur:

The whole country was overrun by Irish labourers, so that the Presbyterian population learned experimentally that a man might be a Catholic without having the passions or the visible horns of the Devil. New chapels have arisen peaceably everywhere; and except their stronger taste for a fight now and then, the Irish have in many places behaved fully as well as our own people. The recent extinction of civil disability on account of the religion removed the legal encouragement of intolerance, and left common-sense some chance; and the mere habit of hating, and of thinking it a duty to act on this feeling, being superseded, Catholics and rational Protestants are more friendly than the different sects of Protestants are.

The 1841 census counted 126,321 Irish-born people in Scotland, around 5 per cent of the population. Almost a third settled in Glasgow and found work in the growing heavy industries of Clydeside. Many were dockers or labourers in the huge foundries at Parkhead Forge or Beardmore’s. With the devastating potato famine of 1845–51, when more than a million Irish people died, emigration accelerated. Of the 3 million who left, 75,000 came to Scotland. At its peak in 1848, the average number of weekly immigrants disembarking at the quays in Glasgow was estimated at more than a thousand but, between January and April of that year, 42,860 came from Ireland. Even in a city as large as Glasgow and one used to spurts of spectacular growth, this influx must have made an immediate impact. It was probably the most intense episode of immigration into Scotland for a thousand years or more and the visibility of the incoming Irish settlers was greatly magnified by their concentration in Glasgow and North Lanarkshire. Coal mining and the heavy industries clustering around the coalfields were growing fast, and in the factories and forges of Airdrie, Coatbridge and Motherwell, many immigrants quickly found work. It was hard, menial and often frustrating. Many Irish Catholics found it difficult to rise into the ranks of skilled workers because of religious and racial prejudice but the steel makers and manufacturers paid wages and men could put bread on the table and a roof over the heads of their families. After the horrors of the Great Famine, arrival in industrial Scotland must have seemed to many like a deliverance.

Not all immigrants disappeared into the smoke and soot of North Lanarkshire. Poverty persuaded many to take the shortest passage from Ireland to Scotland. By 1841, Wigtownshire and Kirkcudbrightshire had large Irish populations and almost all were farm workers. These jobs needed the kinds of skills the immigrants already had and, as settlers, they moved from being seasonal harvesters to more permanent jobs, often with accommodation attached. To feed the growing towns and cities to the north, farming in Galloway was also expanding, trying new and better methods to drive up yields. By 1851, Wigtownshire had a large Irish-born population at 16.5 per cent of all the people living in the county.

The overwhelming majority of the immigrants came from Ulster and their DNA echoed that of the Dalriadans 15 centuries before. While M222 and other old markers will have paid the sixpenny passage to Scotland, their addition does not confuse the overall historical picture. The great immigrations of the nineteenth century lie within family memory and most of the descendants of those who left Ulster will know something of their origins.

Around 75–80 per cent of the new arrivals were Catholic. The rest were Protestants who had also been driven by poverty and a lack of opportunity to seek new lives. Old hatreds formed part of the baggage of the immigrants as the orange and green divide took shape, especially in North Lanarkshire, Ayrshire and Glasgow. Many Orange Lodges were founded and annual parades began to be seen on 12 July, the commemoration of the Battle of the Boyne.

The battle lines of sectarianism mustered in Scotland. Protestant Ulstermen tended to monopolise the better-paid and more highly skilled jobs while Catholics set about creating their own institutions. Chapels and Catholic schools were funded and built and the community turned in on itself somewhat. In 1851 in Greenock, records show that 80.6 per cent of Irish-born men and women found marriage partners amongst the existing Irish community.

The surge in immigration after the Great Famine not only drove up the percentage of Irish-born to 7.2, it also fuelled resentment and religious bigotry. Fearing the growing power of the Catholic Church, the Church of Scotland attacked immigration but the Irish communities grew strong, well organised and settled. Dundee was exceptional in welcoming Irish women to work in the expanding jute industry. Hibernian Football Club came into being in Edinburgh in 1875 and 13 years later Celtic Football Club began playing matches in Glasgow.

Bigotry had deep and durable roots and as recently as 1923 the Church of Scotland published a pamphlet in which it described its anxiety about ‘the menace of the Irish race to our Scottish nationality’. When, in the late 1920s, the Great Depression began to bite hard, causing widespread unemployment, two anti-Irish organisations sprang up – the Scottish Protestant League in Glasgow and Protestant Action in Edinburgh. Under the leadership of John Cormack, the latter incited a mob of more than 10,000 to attack participants in the Catholic Eucharistic Conference which was being held in the city in 1935. Buses carrying children were stoned and Catholics organised all-night vigils to protect their churches from vandalism. The Second World War put an abrupt end to these ugly incidents, and since 1945 the most visible spur to sectarian behaviour has been the football teams supported by opposing factions.

When immigrants arrive in groups, their instinct is for cohesion, a cooperative effort to make sense of and survive in a new environment. Everything is foreign to them and they are foreign to the natives. The first Jewish congregation gathered for worship in Edinburgh in 1816 and a second synagogue was founded in Glasgow in 1823. During the nineteenth century, more Jews arrived, many fleeing from persecution in the Russian Empire.

More than 5 million Jews lived in a large area known as the Pale. It comprised much of Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine and western Russia. Established in 1791 by Catherine the Great, it was intended as a clearly demarcated region where Jews were permitted to live and work – and be taxed. Exceptionally, some were given dispensations to reside elsewhere but the Russian Empress wished to contain all Jews in one sector of her vast dominions. Part of her motivation was to allow the rise of a native Russian middle class, people who did not fit into the ancient and rigid hierarchies of aristocrats, serfs and clerics. Catherine wished to encourage a new group whose dynamism might modernise and create wealth.

As the greatest concentration of Jews anywhere, the Pale of Settlement was also a target. Anti-semitic violence broke out regularly as mobs rampaged through the Jewish towns known as shtetls. But, until the late nineteenth century, there were also periods of relative peace. For religious and cultural reasons, as well as the instinct for mutual support and protection, shtetls were mostly inward-looking and conservative. The Barbra Streisand film, Yentl, in which she played a young tomboy who wanted to enter religious training, something usually reserved for men, was seen in its context as very shocking – although it did give a strong sense of what life was like in the shtetls.

Bouts of anti-semitic rioting and violence known as pogroms began in earnest in 1881 and for two years all across the Pale, Jewish houses and businesses were burned. Many were killed. The pogroms sparked immediate emigration and many Jews fled the Pale forever. Because their nearest points of embarkation were the Baltic ports, families and individuals found themselves landing at Scottish and eastern English quaysides. Most sought sanctuary in die goldene medine, ‘the Golden Land’ of the United States, and Scotland was only a staging post. But some got no further and a sizeable Jewish community grew up, especially in Glasgow.

Unlike the much earlier immigrant conquerors who crossed the North Sea and the North Channel many centuries before, the Jews (and the recently arrived Irish) found themselves at the very bottom of the social scale. Many Jews settled in the Gorbals, a district of high population density on the banks of the Clyde, where tenements were packed with families living in slum conditions. But no one persecuted the new arrivals and, while there was some prejudice, blood-thirsty mobs were not about to attack and burn the Gorbals to the ground.

In a pleasing irony, the only political institution committed to a policy of anti-semitism, the British Union of Fascists, were not welcomed in Scotland – but for all the wrong reasons. When the BUF leader, Oswald Mosley, swaggered into Edinburgh in 1934, he and his followers were attacked on Princes Street by the Protestant Action group. John Cormack believed that the fascists were Italians and therefore dangerous Roman Catholics.

From the shtetls, Jews had brought skills and some quickly found niches in the local economy. Cigarette and cigar making was one specialism, while other families began to create retail businesses that would grow and flourish into the twentieth century. Some historians are of the view that Jewish self-betterment was not hindered in Scotland because bigotry was obsessed with the imagined threats of Irish Catholicism.

In 1905, an unprecedented 8,000 Jews arrived in Scotland from Eastern Europe. They were seeking sanctuary from a new outbreak of pogroms and government-sponsored oppression. The plot of the famous musical, Fiddler on the Roof, turns on the Tsarist decree evicting people from their shtetl. The Jewish economist and writer Ralph Glasser was born in the Gorbals and he remembered the aftermath of the refugees coming to Scotland from the shtetls:

The new arrival was quickly spotted. A man with a week’s growth of beard, eyes bleary from wakefulness in his long journey, would shuffle wearily through Gorbals Street with his ‘peckel’, his belongings, strapped in a misshapen suitcase, listening for the familiar tones of this lingua-Judaica from the East European Marches, and approach such a group with the sureness of a questing bloodhound. He would fumble in the pocket of a shapeless coat and show them a much-thumbed envelope.

‘Lansmann! Sogmer, wo traffic dos?’ (‘Fellow countryman. Tell me, where can I find this address/person?’).

This example shows step-migration in action, with those who arrive first in a new place bringing others in their wake. As the cancer of anti-semitism grew in the first half of the twentieth century, many more Jews came from Eastern Europe. By 1950, the Jewish community in Scotland had grown to 80,000. The writer and academic David Daiches believed Scotland to be a haven when he noted that, of all the countries of Western Europe, it had no history of institutional anti-semitism.

Now the Jewish community is much reduced. Glasgow was its centre for many years, but according to the 2001 census only about 5,000 live in and around the city. Most of the remainder of a tiny remnant of 6,400 live in Edinburgh and Dundee. The reasons for decline are straightforward. When individuals marry outside their faith (and Jewish custom is clear about this), they usually cease to be formally Jewish. After integration, emigration has caused the Scottish community to shrink. Many have gone south to Manchester or London, some to settle in Israel. Genetically the numbers are too transient and small to be significant but the cultural contribution of Jews to Scotland was and continues to be immense and disproportionate.

An attractive footnote to Scots-Jewish history is the story of the sons of Aaron. Some men carrying what is known as the Cohen Modal Haplotype will be found in Scotland. This is a Y chromosome in the P58 group which is highly enriched amongst the Cohanim, the Jewish High Priests, and which confirms that a very large proportion descend from one man who lived about 2,000 years ago. According to oral traditions, this may have been Aaron, Moses’s brother.

Some recent Eastern European immigrants saw their identity submerge very quickly. Between the 1860s and 1914, 650,000 Lithuanians left their Baltic homeland, a quarter of the entire population. An aggressive programme of Russification threatened many of their most distinctive characteristics. Lithuanian Catholicism was to be replaced by Russian Orthodox rites, young men were to be conscripted into the Tsarist army and their agrarian economy was seriously disrupted. When the Tsar emancipated Russia’s serfs, this seemingly enlightened measure had the effect of driving up the rents and taxes to be paid by Lithuanian farmers.

Scottish coal-owners and steel makers such as Dixons and Bairds had, in any case, been recruiting Lithuanians and when persecution drove many to board ships sailing to the west and relative freedom, employers quickly found jobs for the new immigrants. Settlement concentrated in North Lanarkshire, especially Bellshill and Coatbridge, and in Ayrshire, Fife and West Lothian. At first, trade unionists were antagonistic to men brought in to undercut their members’ wages and even to break strikes but the incomers soon joined unions and subscribed to their social and political aims.

The early settlers enthusiastically maintained their Lithuanian culture. Wedding celebrations took a week, christenings three days, plum brandy was drunk, Eastern European foods like sausage and rye bread were made and the devoutly Catholic community celebrated all the major festivals. But over the span of only two generations, assimilation began. In the jobless decade of the Great Depression, many Lithuanians changed their names, sometimes arbitrarily to Smith or Black, because they reckoned it might help in the search for employment. Many did not wish to employ people with alien names or Catholics. In contrast with the Irish and Jewish communities, there were no Lithuanian schools and English quickly replaced the language of their homeland. At only 8,000 in 1914, the Lithuanians in Scotland were a small group and they could be absorbed easily and quietly in the large towns and cities. Few traces of this colourful and initially vibrant community now remain.

It was agricultural poverty rather than persecution that drove Italians to settle in Scotland. In the 1890s, families left the south of Italy (some of them walked all the way) in particular to escape famine and drought. In a classic process of chain migration, Italians who became established often welcomed more incomers, usually family or people from the same community. Two major sources for immigrants were the towns of Barga in northern Tuscany, near Lucca, and Frosinone in Lazio, south of Rome. Chain migration was much encouraged by the padrone system whereby Italians established in Scotland paid for the passage of young men from Italy and gave them a job. Usually the padroni were businessmen anxious to expand and to recruit Italians, often from the same locality as themselves. They hoped that they would work cheaply and work hard, just as they themselves had done.

By 1914, there were 4,500 Italian-born immigrants in Scotland, many of them working in the food industry. Ice cream and fish and chips were the staples created and marketed by enterprising families. At first ice cream was sold in the streets from barrows or carts. Much cheaper than renting or buying a shop, it was an occupation that gave many a start in business. Italians invented the ‘pokey hat’ or ice-cream cornet and it made the whole retail operation simple in that everything could be eaten, including the receptacle for the ice cream. Fish and chips was the original fast food for ordinary people and it used two ingredients very readily available in Scotland. It appears to have been pioneered in East London by Jewish families but it was certainly made popular and widely available in Scotland by Italians. It too was street food in that it was originally sold to be eaten in the open air and visits to the chippy after the pubs closed at least soaked up some of the beer.

Italians also began to establish cafes and, since these stayed open into the evenings, as they did in Italy, and much longer than other similar establishments, they quickly became busy. The more straight-laced disapproved of young people of both sexes spending time together unsupervised in the evening but the temperance societies approved – Italian cafes sold coffee, tea and soft drinks only.

Italian involvement in the food industry meant that the community had to disperse. Unlike other groups of immigrants who tended to concentrate in particular places, the Italians were forced to settle all over Scotland to found their businesses and avoid competing with each other. Soon almost every small town and city district had its ice-cream parlour, café and chip shop, often all run from the same premises. This meant a widespread familiarity with Italian-Scots and they were popular – at least at first.

Mussolini’s government made a point of reaching out to the Italian diaspora. The first fascist club in Scotland was founded in Glasgow in 1922 and several others quickly followed in Scotland’s other cities. Many Italian-Scots, perhaps 50 per cent, were members of the Fascist Party although their affinity appears to have been more patriotic than political. When Mussolini declared war on Britain in 1940, there was an immediate backlash. Rioting crowds attacked and damaged Italian shops and businesses and all Italian men between the ages of 17 and 60 were arrested and interned. Many were transported to Canada, Australia and elsewhere. In 1940, the Arandora Star was carrying internees to Canada when she was sunk by a German U-boat. The loss of life was severe and 450 Italian internees drowned. For some time after the war, there was bitterness on both sides.

Particularly in small towns where Italian families were part of the social fabric, many Scots were unhappy at their friends and neighbours being locked up. And it seems that the unhappy experiences of the Second World War encouraged assimilation.

The cheaper air travel of recent times has meant closer contact with Italy for both immigrants and their descendants – and for native Scots. One of the effects of better cultural understanding has been to drive Italian-Scottish businesses up market. The wonderful Edinburgh grocery and wine merchant, Valvona & Crolla, began life catering for purely Italian tastes but its customer base is now international.

Recent research reckoned the Scots-Italians at between 70,000 and 100,000. Since DNA around the shores of the Mediterranean is more diverse than in north-western Europe, a group of that size is likely to show up in any collective genetic map of Scotland. Glasgow hosts the third largest Italian community in Britain and their presence is enhanced by a continuing involvement in the food industry with chip shops, ice-cream parlours, delicatessens and restaurants on many high streets.

Poland Street in the Soho district of London was home to an early concentration of exiles. When the November Uprising of 1831 against the Russian occupation failed, many Poles came to Britain to seek political asylum. Immigration to Scotland in large numbers only began after World War Two. After the Nazi and Soviet occupation of Poland in 1939, many political émigrés fled west and they were accompanied by more than 20,000 soldiers and airmen when they arrived in Britain. By 1945, there were 228,000 serving in the Polish Armed Forces in the West, the fourth-largest armed force fighting alongside the British, the Americans and the Russians. They made an immense contribution, most notably in the Battle of Britain and in cracking an early version of the Enigma codes.

The Polish soldiers who joined the Allied armies had suffered terrible privations on their long journey to the Normandy beaches and the ultimate liberation of Western Europe. Many came from the Kresy region of eastern Poland, in particular the cities of Lwow and Wilno, and when the Nazis and the Russians occupied their country in 1939, they were captured and sent to the gulags. When Stalin was forced to change sides in 1941 and join the Allies in the war against Hitler, the imprisoned Kresy Poles were released and, under the command of General Anders, they marched across Siberia to Persia to link with the Allied Armies in the Middle East. After playing a central role in the defeat of the Germans in North Africa and Italy, where their courage under fire became legendary, the men of the Anders army hoped eventually to return home. But when the Russians were allowed to retain those parts of Poland they occupied in 1939, many tens of thousands of men were devastated, knowing that if they went back to Kresy they would be persecuted and that if they did not their families might suffer.

When the dismal details of the political deal made by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin became clear, the despair of some Polish soldiers became unbearable. Having fought their way through some of the bloodiest battles of the war, 30 officers and men of II Corps committed suicide. As inadequate recompense for those who remained, as another blood price, the British government offered citizenship and the 1947 Polish Resettlement Act recognised a community of 162,000.

When communism at last fell and a freely elected President of Poland took office in 1991, the exiled government in London was dissolved. For old men with long memories, the march through the wastes of Siberia had finally ended.

In 2004 the European Union expanded and the United Kingdom granted free movement to workers from the new member states, including Poland. Possibly in part stimulated by a pre-existing series of personal and cultural links, many came to work in Britain and the size of the Polish community has risen steeply. The Office for National Statistics estimated it at 520,000 in 2009 and some believe it is much higher, perhaps a million strong.

In Scotland the old post-war Polish communities had largely integrated by the close of the twentieth century, their social clubs and shops less frequented by second and third generations, but the new influx has reinvigorated a Polish presence. Now there are thought to be between 40,000 and 50,000 people living in Scotland who were born in Poland and a bilingual Polish–English newspaper is widely read.

DNA links the Poles closely to the final, visible new group in Scotland, the Pakistanis. Surprisingly both Poles and Pakistanis share a very high frequency of the M17 marker with Norwegians of Viking descent. These links were made in the deep past but they are, nevertheless, there, producing one more quirky connection. A Viking descendant in Orkney, Shetland, Caithness or the Western Isles is likely to be more closely related to a Pakistani or a Pole than he is to other Scots in the male line. In the small South Asian community of 55,000, Pakistanis dominate with 31,793, more than double the number of Indians at 15,037. In all, South Asians make up 1 per cent of the Scottish population but their visibility on the high streets and in the catering industry belies small numbers.

The largest immigrant group in Scotland in modern times is also the hardest to detect. The number of English-born people living in Scotland has risen markedly since 1841 when it stood at 1.5 per cent. According to the estimates of the General Register Office of Scotland, in 2006 there were 373,685 English men and women resident, 7.38 per cent of the population.

In terms of their DNA, the English and the Scots share a great deal. But attitudes differ. Many Scots welcome people who actively choose to live in Scotland, who made a conscious decision to come north. Others resent those known as incomers, white settlers, interlopers and a row of other denigrating terms. In his novel Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh put these paradoxical thoughts in the mind of his hero, Renton:

It’s nae good blaming it oan the English for colonising us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? … The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation.

Or not. While that jumble of competing emotions may be very readily recognisable in our dealings with England and the English, there are more measured views on record. In his fascinating study Being English in Scotland, Murray Watson interviewed many for their views and attempted to fill what he saw as a historiographical void – the lack of a decent, extended treatment of English immigration to Scotland. Here is his conclusion:

Generally, throughout the period under review [broadly, the modern period], the media painted a picture of a climate of anti-English feeling. This was not the general experience of the contributors, nor was it evident from other sources. Studies from a number of social scientists, albeit they were mostly restricted to peripheral areas, essentially corroborated the findings of this study. That was not to say that tensions did not exist. There were low levels of anti-English feeling and exceptional extremist activity, but the latter was largely directed against England, the state, and not English people. Compared with prejudicial reactions to other migrant communities, the English were largely welcomed into Scottish society, and this is certainly borne out by the constant growth of English migrants settling in Scotland.

This expansion in numbers came at a time of decline and stagnation in Scotland’s population. At the outset of the twenty-first century civil servants and politicians have been calling for immigration policies to arrest the downturn. And as the nationalist MSP, English-born Mike Russell, put it, ‘Scotland is not full up.’ Throughout the second half of the twentieth century and in the early twenty-first century the English, an invisible diaspora, have played a significant role in Scotland’s demography, society, culture, economy and politics.

The national experience of immigration and emigration in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries has shown something simple – and cheering. DNA is dynamic, always changing, mutating, often producing the unexpected, making a nonsense of stereotypes. The genetic journey of the Scots is not over but is still in train. Over time the pace slackens, accelerates, appears to stall then is jolted unexpectedly into motion. It never stops. The answer to the child’s question about where they come from turns out to have many colourful, nuanced and provisional responses. Scottishness has no set of standard elements; our genetic journeys show that it glints with many facets. We are all immigrants and we are all Scots. 

HOW MANY AND WHO

Population of Scotland estimated in 2009: 5,194,000

Ethnic groups
    White 4,960,334 (98.19%)
  Scottish 4,459,071 (88.09%)
  Other White British 373,685 (7.38%)
  Any other White background 87,650 (1.73%)
  White Irish 49,248 (0.98%)
  Mixed 12,764 (0.25%)
  South Asian 55,007 (1.09%)
  Pakistani 31,793 (0.63%)
  Indian 15,037 (0.30%)
  Bangladeshi 1,981 (0.04%)
  Other South Asian 6,196 (0.12%)
  Black 8,025 (0.16%)
  African 5,118 (0.10%)
  Caribbean 1,778 (0.04%)
  Other Black 1,129 (0.20%)
  Chinese 16,310 (0.32%)