W. Gordon Smith in "This is My Country" (1976), in a piece about romantic Jacobitism, as exemplified by "Ma" Castles, a Miss-Jean-Brodie-like English teacher he had at school:

A few years ago I wrote a song, "Come by the Hills", and it is probably very much in the mainstream of contemporary Scottish songs- a gentle ballad, melodic, wistful, with that flawless Scottish virtue, pride. The Moira Andersons of this world sing it sweetly and sincerely. The last verse is:

Come by the hills to the land where legends remain,
Where glories of old stir the heart and may yet come again,
Where the past has been lost and the future still to be won,
And the cares of tomorrow must wait till this day is done.

I switched on television one night and found a hairy Irishman in a beery folk cellar belting out that verse as if it were a last call to arms. And I realized that my undistinguished song and his even less distinguished performance spoke a simple truth. For the Scots the romantic past has indeed been lost, we publicly mourn it almost every day in one irrational way or another, and the future, notwithstanding oil revenues and the prospects of some form of self-government, is not so important that it is worth going to war about. For the Irish, even more emotionally romantic than ourselves, every injustice, every lost cause of the past has been mounted as another rung on the ladder towards some glorious tomorrow.

When the "Ma" Castles of this world fire young hearts with nationalist ardour it is for lost castles, splendid debacles, scattered chieftains, dead kings, hollow heroes, treachery, murder, squalor, disease and poverty.