A cut-glass BBC broadcast voiceover begins over a roaring fire, before panning to a rugged, tartan-bonneted man of middle to late years. It is Big Jim Collie, a Scottish crofter, who ‘starts the day as he means to continue, with a wee dram’. He then has a wee puff on a cigarette before he leaves his tiny bothy to make a 22-mile cycle trip to Braemar to visit Annie Macdougall, the widow of a friend of his. Along the way, he picks up several more glasses of whisky, diluted with highland spring water. Before nipping the 22 miles back in the other direction, Jim stops off at ‘Mar Lodge’ for a drink: ‘You drink the first one, you don’t get the taste of it. But you find you get the taste by the third pint. Then you’re set for the night.’ When he arrives at Annie’s house, she isn’t in. Originally released in 1976, the footage, now rereleased, has over 2.5 million views on the BBC Archive YouTube channel.

BBC Archive’s most popular videos date overwhelmingly from before the 1980s. To browse through them is a powerful exercise in nostalgia, a portrait of a Britain that was impenetrably eccentric, certainly more cheerful, a great deal dirtier than it is now, but somehow more spirited. And yet, the present still contains echoes of that world gone by. Jim Collie speaks in the register characteristic of Scotland’s north-east. Thicker variations of the ‘Doric’ tongue rose to prominence on social media during the snowstorms that hit the UK in the first couple of weeks of 2026. From Insch in Aberdeenshire, one resident, looking out at deep drifts, exclaims: ‘I’m jist nae even attemptin ti yoke a spad ti that coz it’ll jist blaa back in!’ ‘Yoke’ in this context, explains Jamie Fairbairn, an expert in the local dialects, ‘literally means to attach horses to the plough, but also means to begin something, get started. For farm workers the beginning of the working day was yokin time’.

The farming way of life runs deep in the north-east, inflecting and modifying the language of the everyday. Alongside farming, the reduced fishing industry has also left its mark on regional dialects. The fisherfolk of Burghead, Hopeman, Banff and Peterhead speak in their own manner, and with their own words, quite different from the farmers.

Big Jim Collie’s hill farm is the exception in that farming world, rather than the rule. For in the sandy soil that extends in a great arc from Aberdeen to Inverness is some of Scotland’s best land, fertile and green. Comfortable, clean farmhouses surrounded by large tracts of estate are the pattern here, even though only around 20 per cent of Scotland’s land is suitable for arable farming; these fertile regions have been settled and cultivated for hundreds of years. Many of the region’s principal towns, such as the port of Nairn, and the market towns of Forres and Elgin, were at the centre of dense, sophisticated trade networks as early as the 12th century, and even the long-ruined Elgin Cathedral evokes a proud and prosperous region at the heart of medieval Christendom.

Its culture is stolidly ‘lowland’, its character irrevocably shaped by the late 18th century, when Scotland was bound into England’s commercial and political networks. The ‘lowland’ idea is a complex amalgam. It combines steadfast allegiance to the union with England with a keen sense of cultural distinctiveness, rooted in a selective reading of Scottish history – enough to accommodate the turmoil of Scotland’s medieval past, now, in retrospect, transcended. It also celebrates long-established facts of Scottish society that distinguished it from England: the unique quality of its education system, with its five ancient universities, and the distinctive institutional structure of its religious observance, both thoroughly interlinked. Its language was a vernacular Scots in which genuine pride was taken. When Lord Rosebery, speaking in 1897 on the centenary of Robert Burns’ death, praised ‘the Scottish dialect’ found in his poetry, and his ‘Scottish notes’, he echoed a powerful set of lowland assumptions: we speak English, yes, but an English perfected, richer, earthier, more musical.

In the same speech, Rosebery said that the Scots language was ‘in danger of perishing’, and that Burns had rescued it so that it might exist ‘forever’. This is an exaggeration – although some members of the Scottish intellectual elite, including David Hume, worried that ambitious Scots needed to anglicise their speech to be heard and respected across the border, the Scots dialects continued to flourish. Three hundred years on, Doric has evolved considerably, but it is still mightily difficult for southerners to understand, and indeed for people brought up outside the north-east. Burns’ poetry was once a true common reference point in lowlands culture, an ever-fruitful fount of quotation and popular wisdom, to be learnt and treasured alongside the Scottish Metrical Psalter, the style of hymn promoted throughout the Kirk. The ideal of the ‘lad o’ pairts’ – often mistranslated as a forefather to the American mythology of bootstrapping – expresses well-roundedness, a man of many talents. In this world, it was certainly not seen as a sin, or a betrayal of class, for a son or daughter to leave the farm and go to university. Yet, today, farms now employ only a handful of people, and Scotland’s religious observance is a shadow of its former prominence. The dim echoes of the psalter still sound in modern Scots, in its special timbre and musicality. A direct, forceful translation from the Hebrew, the psalms were set to the meters of the folk ballads that circulated throughout Scotland, with each note matched to just one syllable.

The peculiarities are revealed on comparison of the Psalter and the King James Version of 1611. The opening of Psalm 13 in the Psalter goes like this, ‘How long wilt thou forget me, Lord? shall it for ever be? / O how long shall it be that thou wilt hide thy face from me?’ while the KJV runs: ‘How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? / How long will you hide your face from me?’. The Psalter is designed to be singable – and therefore syncs directly with the vernacular style that was circulating throughout lowland Scotland. Kirk personalities championed the introduction of a unified prayer book, commissioning new melodies or adapting existing sacred chants, believing that these new songs would eventually replace older ones. Yet, over time, many psalms came to be sung to the tunes of popular folk songs.

Traces of Scotland’s past – marked by moral rigour and musicality – still echo in one of the 20th century’s most popular and enduring songs. The potency of Bob Dylan’s opening to ‘A Hard Rain’s a gonna fall’, ‘Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? / Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?’, comes from this dual inheritance. There is here the atmosphere of the auld, weird world of the Scottish folk imaginary. The border ballad ‘Lord Randall’ begins ‘O where ha’ you been, Lord Randal, my son? / And where ha’ you been, my handsome young man?’. Alongside Dylan’s vast and hyper-literate awareness of the European intellectual tradition, ‘black branch with blood that kept drippin’ is straight from Dante’s Inferno, rings the Calvinist sense of moral challenge – a ‘hard rain’ that seems to sweep in from Scotland’s north country.

My grandmother, Mabel Blain née Davidson, grew up in that north country, on a farm, Sandown, a strip of land to the west of Nairn and east of Inverness. The farmhouse is within walking distance of the beach. When the lover in ‘Scarborough Fair’ commands his true love to ‘find me an acre of land… between the salt water and the sea strand’, he must have been thinking of here – a mysterious, magical zone, halfway between the horizon and the sea. She is buried a couple of miles away. She lived in that old lowland world before it disappeared forever – with its stories, its religion, and the Burns worship. Her forefathers worked the land through the hard, bitter winter, while second sons sought their fortune in sunnier lands. My mother told me a story once, of seeing a photograph of her grandfather with his Clydesdale horse, and the farmhands alongside him. Their faces were lit up with the kind of pride that is felt deep in the heart, that wells out through the eyes. In the summer months with their short Nordic nights, as you look out over the fields and the sea, the sunset seems to last forever, each ray dipping slowly behind the mountains in the west. When the last ray fades over the lowest hill, the Cromarty Firth burns like fire – bright and fierce – before it goes out.