I used to stand on the Antrim coast as a youngster looking at the Mull of Kintyre, which seemed so close you had the illusion you could swim across it. No wonder the influence to and fro was great. But much of it relates not so much to the great thorns of history, but bog standard economic migration across a short stretch of water, most recently Irish labourers to Scottish farms and the annual feeing fairs, or to the Glasgow shipyards. But it is wonderful how topics like this always excite old bitternesses. It's a shame our new friends, the Danes (I believe they export bacon and butter) get such a little attention. After all, they went to the trouble of founding Dublin, Wexford, Cork, Limerick etc etc, roughly at the same time they were colonising North East England, large tracks of Scotland, reaching even London in Canute's day. We have so many scary relations in these islands I am suprised people dare broach the subject at all, for fear of turning out, through remote and unsuspected cousins, to be the villain of the piece.