Scotland, which is currently celebrating the Year of Stories 2022, is steeped in history and legend. It’s also a most exciting country, with formidable landscapes, exciting cities and, most importantly, great imaginative wealth. Countless writers, songmakers and poets have been inspired by its mountains, its castles, its heroes and battles, its fairies and monsters. The line between the past and the present, and between what is real and imaginary, feels more porous here. My sons, who came north frequently on family holidays, loved the sense that history in Scotland somehow feels more present and real – you can see armour, you can climb around old moats, you can touch portcullises. Really, there is nowhere quite like Scotland for living myth. When I was a child growing up in Edinburgh, my zoologist father was fairly regularly fielding perfectly serious questions about Nessie, the Loch Ness monster.
I would start any trip to Scotland in Dumfries and Galloway – all of southern Scotland has an extraordinary wealth of stories and attractions that children will love. Some of the country’s greatest writers, such as Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson, had close connections with the area. There would be no better launch pad than Wigtown, a pretty coastal town in the south-west and Scotland’s answer to Hay-on-Wye. Wigtown has more than a dozen secondhand bookshops and the annual Wigtown Book Festival hosts shows and workshops for children as part of the 10-day literary celebration in Scotland’s National Book Town. Just outside the town lies the magnificent stone circle of Torhouse – home to the tomb of Galdus, the mythical Scottish king.
