ABSTRACT
Scotland as dream-time; a `land out of time'; an `enchanted fortress in a disenchanted world' (Rojek, 1993: 181): what if Scotland only exists in the imagination? ± if its potent imagery has overpowered a puny reality? After all, for almost 300 years it had no parliament, no formal political reality of its own; yet its iconography is virtually universal: tartan, kilts, heather, haggis, misty landscapes. There is a story told by the ®lm historian Forsyth Hardy about the making of a Hollywood production of the escapist romance Brigadoon in the 1950s. While ®lm correspondent of The Scotsman newspaper, he was visited by its producer who was looking for a suitable site for the movie, preferably a village in the Highlands which would look unchanged after a hundred years. Hardy took him to Culross in Fife, Dunkeld and Comrie in Perthshire, and Braemar and Inveraray in the Highlands. The producer returned to Hollywood, deeply disappointed: `I went to Scotland,' he said, `but I could ®nd nothing that looked like Scotland' (Hardy, 1990: 1).
