Of the many characteristics Scots have tried to find in themselves and in their country, little approximating to charm or sweetness is sought, found or regretted. An endemic brusqueness and rationality is widespread and assumed, while the scenery consistently rises above or falls below prettiness. The notion of sentimentality that ‘kailyard’ evokes is un-bosky, anti-Arcadian: a perverse nostalgia for thin comforts, a rather clodhopping gaiety, a less aspiring society, all this against a background of extreme physical beauty - an awkward and not entirely matching set of ideas, only in the last instance romantic. Yet its very meagreness, its contrariness, its persistence into the present day, carries a powerful appeal to a number of modern writers of romantic and light fiction, and, more to the point, their readers.

Today's Designer Kailyard does not emerge as a coherent and unified literary style but is, rather, a series of consumer-conscious stabs at intuited Scottishness on the part of some very different storytellers for whom Scotland is a deliberate, never a random setting, with bulky connotations that can be used but not ignored. In Kailyard, his study of the McLaren/Crockett/Barrie school, Ian Campbell notes, ‘The Kailyard looks back to a just vanished comfortable certainty: to read it from the cities, from overseas, is to be aware of something remembered at first hand … still fully credible, possibly discoverable in remote parts of Scotland’. The call of a dream certainty: for a romantic writer and her oeuvre this thing is bigger than both of them and, no creature of glade and bower, may turn wrecker if handled carelessly. Nourished by memories, first or second hand, of those who seek assurance above enlightenment, it is unevolved, unmalleable and market Jed.

On the reader's part there is a strong comfort factor in recognition. Even a non-native reader may find security in a parochial Scottish setting: neutered by diminutives, walled in by teacups, the cad does not flourish. Metropolitan philanderers are plucked out of their interiors and put down on moors or in manses, and so badly do the bogus, the egotistical and the unprincipled fare in the reader's immediate interpretation of this society that there can be little or no redemption for them until they submit to its values.