When the Atlantic was a much narrower sea, the North American and Baltic landmasses had offshore islands with the same geology: granite, the world’s oldest rock, and granite volcanically mixed with newer stuff, which is called metamorphic. The Eurasian landmass edged up from the south west, with offshore islands made of mainly sedimentary rock: chalk, clay and limestone. Slow convulsions jammed the north eastern islands together and rammed them onto a larger, more level coalition of the southern islands, creating an archipelago visited in the 4th century BC by Pytheas, a Greek explorer who gave it a Greek name. Nearly sixty years before Christ’s birth it was invaded by Romans who learned most of their science from the Greeks and Latinised the name into Britannia. This happened because an unusual beast had appeared half a million years earlier.
Different thinkers have called Homo Sapiens a featherless biped, a tool-using animal, and “the glory, jest and riddle of the world”. We are the only creature who drink when not thirsty, eat when not hungry, and take twelve years or more to become adult. One year old humans totter on unsteady legs when horses of that age walk, gallop and feed themselves in open fields. One year old birds have hatched, learned to fly, mated, built nests and begun feeding their own children because birds, bees, ponies etcetera mostly act instinctively; human instincts are so weakened that our actions have to be learned through imitation of adults (starting with mum and dad) who act differently from each other. This forces self-conscious choice called learning upon us, hence our prolonged immaturity. Adults are usually compensated for this by being ready for sexual intercourse all year round. Conscious choice has made us capable of new inventions — lighting fires, shaping sharp-edged tools, and sewing needles — so since homo sapiens learned to stand upright and use our hands in Africa we have kept a common body pattern by changing our minds, habits and societies. The Arctic ice cap once expanded south until most of Britain and adjacent lands were under a mile-thick layer of it. This thawed, retreated and returned, altering climates and sea levels. Other species were killed off or survived by evolving different bodies and instincts. Our kind survived by killing other creatures, roasting their flesh, turning their bones and skin into tools and clothing. As we spread around the globe some details of our physique changed a little. Hunters in the frozen north grew paler and plumper, those in the south leaner and darker. Where food was abundant the average human height grew to six feet or more. Poor food supplies made us dwarfish, led to immigration, warfare and murder, for we lacked the instinct that stops other beasts killing helpless members of their own species. Settled farmers on Chinese plains grew extra inches of gut to draw more nourishment from their rice, yet they too are of the same species as Inuits in Alaska, Pigmies in the Congo, Cleopatra, Robert Burns, Mahatma Ghandi and Condoleezza Rice. The big differences between races, nations and tribes come from folk learning to live in very different landscapes. A vast plain watered by three rivers explains why China is the largest, most peopled and most ancient nation. A smaller, equally self-centred nation was made by layers of limestone, chalk and clay forming a saucer of land with Paris in the middle. The Baltic sea explains why such close neighbours as Norway, Sweden and Denmark have different governments though a similar language.
Like all efficient imperialists Romans divided lands they invaded along natural borders. They called the south mainland Albion, the north mainland Caledonia, the western island Hibernia. Albion was very woody and marshy but had few natural barriers impeding the march of Roman legions. The tribes of Albion that joined to fight those were defeated, then the level parts of the south British mainland (all Albion except Wales) were planted over by Roman camps. These were connected by well-built roads to each and to Londinium, Britain’s first big city. The camps were sited in fertile places and grew to be centres of still-thriving towns: Bath, York, Lincoln, Carlisle and other cities with names ending in chester or caster. The broad, fertile, generally level nature of Albion with its road network explains why it fell quickly to later invaders after Rome pulled out — first fell to Saxons and Angles who renamed it Angle-land or England, then to King Canute’s Danish empire, then in 1066 to the Norman French. It explains why London-on-Thames became the capital of the English state, and why the the Bishop of Canterbury has been the High Priest of England since 598, and why England had only two universities in market towns near London until 1828.
Any map shows Scotland’s difference from England what it originally was — several different islands jammed together. They are so narrowly joined that the Romans found it convenient to wall Caledonia off. Scotland’s grotesquely irregular coastline shows the tip of the most southerly peninsula is only twelve miles from the Irish coast; the nearest neighbour on the European mainland is Norway, with the Orkney and Shetland islands like stepping stones between. Inside Scotland’s ragged coastline the glens and plains are so separated by highland sea-lochs and mountain ranges, by lowland moors and firths, that cultivation produced very little surplus wealth before the mid 18th century. The natural barriers made conquest of the whole impossible for invaders, and a united Scotland almost impossible for the natives. It was four kingdoms, each an unstable union of fiercely independent clans, each with a capital city on the rock of an extinct volcano. Dumbarton (meaning Fort of the Britons) was capital of Strathclyde, a mainly Welsh-speaking kingdom that included Galloway and the west coast down to Barrow in Furness. Edinburgh was capital of a nation in east Scotland, south of the Firth of Forth and partly English-speaking, for it had been part of Northumbria before Duke William conquered all England up to the Tyne. Fife and the north west, with much of the Highlands, belonged to a people called Picts whose language is unknown and whose capital was on Craig Phadraig, Inverness. The Scottish king’s nation, Dalriada, had its capital on Dunadd in Argyllshire, where the Scots tribes, Gaelic-speaking incomers, had arrived from Ireland. It is also pertinent that Shetland, Orkney, and Sutherland for centuries belonged to Norway and there were Scandinavian settlements all round the place, though that was also frequent in England.
In days when kings were hardly anything but warlords, King Kenneth mac Alpin of Dalriada gave the Caledonian clanjamfrie the name of Scotland by conquest of some neighbours and alliances with others. That Scotland continued as a nation, however, is an English achievement, because ever since then the government of the bigger, richer nation tried and usually failed to make Scotland one of its counties — a kind of Cornwall or Yorkshire. Scotland’s people have never been more than a tenth of England’s, so why did England’s far greater military power fail to incorporate us before Oliver Cromwell’s brief success under the Commonwealth? Why did Scotland’s three centuries of being Scotlandshire never quite destroy her independent culture? Why is she at last bound to win the same freedom as Portugal from Spain, Austria from Germany, Iceland from Denmark?41