How “Scottish” Does a Scottish Romance Have to Be?

Margaret Amatt

3 days ago

9 min read

A few thoughts on kilts, castles, porridge, Scottish stereotypes, and the rather complicated business of writing about the place you actually live

So, a while back I got a review on one of my books. It was quite a nice review overall, but the reader commented that the setting "needed work because there was nothing particularly Scottish about it".

I disagreed with it. Not because I think I’m a flawless writer - God, no. I’m totally fine with a reader experiencing a setting differently from how I meant it.

But the comment stuck with me, and it got me thinking.

What makes a setting “Scottish”?

And more to the point, what does a reader actually need to see before they’ll believe it?

I’m not bothered by that particular review. But the question it raised is still rattling around in my head. Because I’ve started to wonder if there’s a weird, specific problem with writing contemporary romance in Scotland. One you probably don’t run into quite the same way if you’re writing about somewhere else.

The “prove you’re Scottish” problem

Picture this: a contemporary romance set in England. Would anyone say the setting wasn’t “English enough” because nobody ate a Cornish pasty? Would we need the characters drinking Yorkshire tea, Morris dancing, and quoting Shakespeare before we accepted they were in England?

Doubt it.

Same for America. A US-set romance doesn’t need a diner, a pickup truck, baseball, apple pie, the Stars and Stripes, and someone saying “y’all” every few pages just to prove it’s American.

But Scotland? Oh, there’s definitely an unofficial checklist.

☑️ Kilts
☑️ A castle
☑️ Whisky
☑️ Tartan
☑️ Bagpipes
☑️ Haggis
☑️ Nessie
☑️ Maybe some porridge, shortbread, or oatcakes if we’re being thorough
☑️ A Rabbie Burns reference
☑️ A “See You Jimmy” hat if we’re really going for it
☑️ And ideally, a rugged Scottish man with an extremely obvious accent

Tick enough boxes and-congratulations! Scotland has been successfully identified.

But here’s the thing.

That’s not necessarily Scotland.

It’s a collection of things associated with Scotland.

And there is a difference.

Scotland the destination

I get why this happens. Scotland is ridiculously easy to romanticise. We’ve got dramatic landscapes, castles, lochs, islands, fascinating history, folklore, ancient ruins, and some genuinely spectacular weather. Stick two attractive people in the middle of all that and you’ve got a banging romance setting.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

If a reader wants to escape to a misty Highland castle and fall in love with a kilted Scotsman? Then fabulous. Romance is fantasy. Settings can be part of that fantasy.

The problem is when that version of Scotland becomes so familiar it starts to look like the only version of Scotland.

Because there is another Scotland.

The one where people actually live.

Scotland as somewhere people live

People in Scotland have jobs. They take their kids to school. They go shopping. They sit in traffic. They moan about the weather. They live in cities (yes, we have them too). They get the ferry. They argue with their families. They go to the pub. They drink coffee. They watch Netflix. They worry about money. They go to football matches. They go to concerts. They have boring Tuesdays. They have disastrous Saturdays. They fall in love. They break up. They’ve got complicated families, embarrassing parents, annoying neighbours, and friends who know way too much about their personal lives.

In other words: they live ordinary lives in a country that happens to be Scotland.

That’s the Scotland I want to write.

Personally, I think it’s a much richer setting.

When Scottishness becomes a marketing device

There’s a reason these stereotypes stick around. They’re recognisable. Slap a kilt on a book cover and an international reader instantly knows where they are. Add a castle and some misty mountains and the message is even clearer.

Scotland has become an extremely marketable romantic fantasy, and that’s not even new. The romantic image of the Highlands has been shaped and exported for centuries, through literature, tourism, and the international fascination with Highland dress and landscapes.

I don’t blame authors or publishers for knowing those images sell. And I don't deny these things exist - of course they do. It's part of Scottish culture. But there’s something slightly uncomfortable about the idea that the more recognisable the stereotype, the more commercially “Scottish” a book becomes.

Because what happens to the Scotland that doesn’t fit neatly on a souvenir tea towel?

A stereotype isn’t necessarily false. It’s incomplete.

This is an important distinction.

Scotland really does have castles. There are people in kilts. Whisky is Scottish. Tartan is Scottish. Bagpipes are Scottish. Haggis is Scottish. Robert Burns is Scottish.

None of these things are invented stereotypes.

The problem is when they become the entire definition of Scottishness.

A man wearing a kilt isn’t unrealistic. A man wearing a kilt to walk the dog because the author needs to remind the reader he’s Scottish? That might be.

And yeah, there are men who wear kilts regularly - tour guides, pipers, wedding guests and bridegrooms, Highland regiment members, people at formal events, ceilidhs, all sorts of occasions where Highland dress is perfectly appropriate.

But most Scottish men don’t wander around in kilts every day. Just like most Scottish people don’t spend their evenings drinking whisky while discussing Rabbie Burns beside a roaring peat fire. And if someone genuinely does live like that, fair enough. That's their choice, but it's not indicative of the majority of Scots.

The richer Scotland

The irony is, once you stop worrying about ticking those boxes, Scotland gives you so much more to play with.

You could write about history (and there's a whole lot more than William Wallace and Bonny Prince Charlie), local folklore, Gaelic place names, Scots vocabulary, island communities, Highland towns, fishing villages, farms, cities, ferries, train journeys, Scottish humour (all the craic and bants!) and of course the weather doing whatever the hell it wants (four seasons in one day!). I could go on and on.

Plus, there's that particular experience of living somewhere tourists think is breathtaking while you’re standing in the rain wondering if the washing will ever dry.

And there are all the tiny things that make a place feel real.

The shops, cafés, the backroads to villages with unpronounceable names, the local landmark visitors think is fascinating but locals barely notice.

That's where authenticity lives.

And then there’s the question of how Scottish people sound

This is an area where I have a slightly complicated relationship with expectations around Scottish fiction.

I don’t write my characters’ accents phonetically.

That’s a conscious choice, but it’s not because I think Scottish speech should be “corrected” into English. Quite the opposite. Scotland has a rich range of accents, dialects, and linguistic traditions, and I’m very aware that the way Scottish people speak has been shaped by centuries of attitudes about what counts as “proper” English.

In fact, I grew up in a time when children were still being corrected at school if they sounded “too Scottish.” Certain words were unofficially banned in classes, such as the Perthshire favourite "jamp" (meaning "jumped"). So I’m definitely not about to suggest Scottish speech needs tidying up or anglicising.

That’s not my point at all.

My point is much simpler:

I don’t enjoy reading heavily phonetic representations of accents in fiction.

So I don’t write them that way.

There’s a difference between letting a character’s voice come through naturally and writing every word like the reader needs a pronunciation guide.

A Scottish character might use words and expressions that are natural to them. Their vocabulary, sentence rhythms, and turns of phrase can all shape their voice. And a reader can bring an accent to those words in their own head.

But when every sentence becomes something like:

“Aye, ye wee lassie, Ah dinnae ken whit ye’re daein…”

I find myself concentrating on decoding the spelling rather than experiencing the story.

And once I’m thinking about the spelling, I’ve been pulled out of the book.

That’s a personal reading preference. It’s not a statement about how Scottish people should speak or how Scottish writing should look.

And it certainly isn’t a criticism of Scots as a language.

Books written in Scots are a completely different matter. Scots has its own vocabulary, grammar, history, and literary tradition, and writing an entire work in Scots is not the same thing as taking English dialogue and spelling it phonetically to indicate a Scottish accent.

What I’m talking about here is contemporary English-language fiction where a Scottish character’s accent is represented through exaggerated phonetic spelling.

I just don’t want to do that in my books.

Partly because I don’t think I need to.

Readers are remarkably good at hearing voices in their heads. We don’t routinely spell every word phonetically when an Australian character speaks. We don’t need to turn every London character’s dialogue into deliberately distorted spellings either. Sometimes, when it's done badly, it can feel caricatured rather than authentic.

The accent can be there without being written on the page.

And maybe that’s another example of the larger point I’m making here.

Scottishness doesn’t need to be constantly pointed out.

It can simply exist.

The Scotland you imagine and the Scotland I know

There’s nothing wrong with the romantic fantasy of Scotland.

In fact, I get it completely.

If you’ve never lived here, Scotland can be wonderfully mysterious and atmospheric. You see photos of mountains disappearing into mist, castles on the edge of lochs, dramatic coastlines, tiny villages surrounded by countryside, and it’s easy to imagine yourself stepping into a romance novel.

That’s part of the appeal.

But there’s a difference between romanticising a place and reducing it to its most marketable features.

And I think that distinction matters especially when the person writing the book actually lives here.

Because I don’t want to write the Scotland someone thinks they ought to see.

I want to write the Scotland I know.

Does this mean Scottish romance should never use the stereotypes?

Absolutely not.

Write the kilt. Write the castle. Write the whisky. Write the Highland Games. Write the bagpipes. Write the haggis and the Loch Ness monster. Write whatever you like. I've used several of these things in my stories too. If they belong naturally in a story, then that's absolutely fine.

The question I keep coming back to is simply:

Are they there because the story needs them, or because the reader needs proof that the book is Scottish?

There’s a difference.

A man getting married might quite reasonably wear a kilt. A community holding a party might reasonably host a ceilidh. Someone interested in Scottish history might talk about Burns. Someone might genuinely love whisky or visit a distillery. A tourist might absolutely want to visit a castle, and the owner might indeed wear the full Highland regalia when opening the Highland Games.

All of those things can be authentic.

It’s when every character, every chapter, and every setting detail seems designed to shout SCOTLAND! that it starts to feel like a theme park.

I don’t want to write Scotland as a theme park

This is the heart of it for me.

☑️ I want my books to feel Scottish, but I don’t want Scotland to become a costume to dress up every scene in.

☑️ I want my characters to be Scottish people rather than people wearing Scottishness.

☑️ I want history to appear because someone is interested in it or because it's important to the plot and not just the "I'm descended from Robert the Bruce" type history.

☑️ I want Scottish places and landscapes because they’re part of the characters’ world.

☑️ I want Scottish humour.

☑️ I want ordinary life.

☑️ I want the rain and the spectacular days when the landscape takes your breath away.

☑️ I want the slightly rubbish days when you wonder why you live somewhere with this much weather.

☑️ I want people who happen to be Scottish to fall in love.

☑️ And yeah, sometimes the hero might wear a kilt, even if it's a leather one while he sings with a band. That's still Scottish to me!

So, how "Scottish" does a Scottish romance have to be?

Does it need kilts? Castles? Whisky? Bagpipes? Haggis? Nessie? A character saying “Och aye the noo” every three sentences?

Or is it enough for the characters to live somewhere that looks, sounds, and feels like Scotland to the person who actually lives there?

I’m firmly in the latter camp.

Because Scotland is a real place as well as a fantasy. And the real place can be just as romantic, perhaps more so, because it's richer, messier, funnier and much more interesting than a checklist of stereotypes.

About the author

I’m Margaret Amatt, a Scottish romance author living in Perthshire, where I write contemporary romance set in Scotland.

I’ve lived here all my life, and I write about Scotland from the perspective of someone who actually lives here. My books are full of romance, humour, family drama, friendship, cosy small-town life, Scottish landscapes, local history, music, folklore and, inevitably, quite a lot of weather.

I write the Scotland I know: the spectacular bits, the ordinary bits, the slightly ridiculous bits, and everything in between.

The book that prompted this particular train of thought was Love Song at the Music Festival, Book 19 in my Glenbriar series. It’s set in my fictional Highland Perthshire town of Glenbriar. The reviewer felt the setting needed work because there was nothing particularly Scottish about it.

Which is quite funny when you consider that the book is about a Scottish folk-rock band with a hero who has Pictish tattoos and wears a leather kilt while performing.

Like I said in the article, how 'Scottish' does it have to be before it's Scottish enough?