AROUND THE WORLD, SOME 40 million people claim Scottish ancestry. Every year thousands of members of the Scottish diaspora travel to their imagined homeland. They come to Scotland to experience the culture of their ancestors and to walk in the places where their forebears walked. They come to Scotland because, like many diasporic populations around the globe, they imagine that their home is somewhere other than in the place they reside, and they travel in order to connect with their roots. Scotland is, of course, not the only country with a strong tradition of roots tourism. Cultural heritage trips, in which participants seek out an embodied experience of culture and connection, are part of a growing global fascination with heritage and genealogy. Nations with significant migration histories, including Israel and China, have, like Scotland, recognised the power inherent in their global communities and actively promote heritage tourism programmes.

Coming from distinctive ethnic traditions and migration histories, roots tourists in these different national contexts are united by their identity relationship to the homeland as a place. According to Paul Basu, the homeland is ‘situated at the centre of diasporic consciousness, anchoring it spatially and temporally’. Unlike some diasporic populations, most global Scots are several generations removed from the migration process (if they have any tangible genealogical connection at all), so they have no first-hand experience of place. They therefore imaginatively construct Scotland through family traditions, material culture and society and clan gatherings. Scotland is nostalgically imagined as a place of living history and a land lost in time, or in the words of G. M. Trevelyan, a ‘familiar spot of ground’ connecting them to past generations. The imagined Scotland is dominated by a romanticised Highland landscape punctuated by images of clans, castles, tartan and bagpipes. The individual's own relationship to that space is conceptualised through narratives of Clearance that may have very little basis in academic historical understandings of Scotland's past.