HISTORIANS HAVE BEEN SLOW to recognise the importance of Scottish drinking places in the social, economic and cultural life of the country. Scottish pubs and their many variants were closely bound up with issues of national identity which has often been defined in opposition to ‘the other’, those who do not share the cultural, linguistic, religious or ethnic backgrounds of the host country. They were often the places where Scots first encountered ‘the other’ in the form of English, French or German visitors to the country, and where visitors encountered Scots for the first time. Sometimes, ‘the other’ simply described encounters between land dwellers and seafarers, as in the scene in Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, where Davy Balfour, who has never seen the sea in his life, is taken to the Hawes Inn at South Queensferry by his rascally uncle Ebenezer, then lured aboard the brig Covenant by Captain Hoseason, drugged and kidnapped for a life of servitude in the Carolinas. This fictional scenario must have had many real-life equivalents, when young men were plied with drink in dockside or harbour pubs and then press-ganged for the navy, or when indentured servants or petty criminals were transported to the colonies. A less emotionally charged encounter takes place in Walter Scott's Guy Mannering between the English Colonel Mannering and the Edinburgh lawyer Counsellor Paulus Pleydell whom Mannering tracks down to an Edinburgh tavern where he finds him ‘in his hebdomadal carousals’ playing ‘the ancient and now forgotten pastime of High Jinks’ with his drinking companions.

Real-life encounters between different cultures could be particularly fraught in the Scottish Highlands where an aristocratic French visitor, the Duc de la Rochefoucald, was horrified in 1786 to find that, at an inn near Fort Augustus, ‘the whole family (running the inn) has scabies’, so the travellers couldn't face the home-made oatcakes on offer but ate eggs instead. At another inn, at Bonawe on Loch Etive, the landlady had been in Britain for only twelve years and scandalised them with a frank account of her colourful life history. She redeemed herself, however, by serving up, ‘an entire pig and the best port wine I've ever drunk’.