This week a leading contemporary writer considered how one of the foremost literary figures of 20th century Scotland would have viewed the independence referendum.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was convinced Neil Gunn would have been a Yes voter, but it was a fascinating exercise.

Just seven days before the vote James Robertson, author of the acclaimed And the Land Lay Still which won the Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2010, speculated on how the Highland writer would have approached the debate.

Gunn (1891-1973), was the author of 20 novels including The Silver Darlings whose title immortalised the herring which were the economic lifeblood of so many coastal communities. It was acclaimed as a modern classic when published in 1941.

Gunn was born and lived for his first 13 years in the Caithness fishing village of Dunbeath on the east coast. His father was a successful fishing boat skipper although the writer was born at a time when the herring fishery was beginning to decline.

In 1911 he joined the Civil Service and spent some time in both London and Edinburgh before returning to the Highlands as a customs and excise officer. After a short spell in Caithness, he was based in Inverness. He took voluntary retirement in 1937 to become a full-time writer.

It was in that year Gunn won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial prize for his semi-autobiographical Highland River, a novel still seen as an important work today.

James Robertson has published five novels in total including The Testament of Gideon Mack which was long-listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, as well as collections of short stories and poetry.

Yesterday he delivered the Neil Gunn Trust lecture in Inverness's Eden Court. Before he took to the stage he talked to The Herald and was in no doubt how his subject would have voted: "After all he was a life-long nationalist. He would have voted Yes, not for flag-waving reasons, but because he had faith in ordinary people's capacity to run their own affairs if given control over and responsibility for their resources.

"This was something he felt had been denied to the people of the Highlands specifically and to the Scots more generally. Interestingly the arguments for and against independence are almost identical in the 1930s to what they are today."

He said crucially that while Gunn made the case in economic terms, he argued that was not enough. "To him it was more fundamentally about spirit, culture, a sense of identity. These were the things that for him underpinned the prosaic arguments about being better or worse off financially."

Robertson cited a line from Gunn's final novel The Other Landscape (1954) to support this: "For when all aspects of living are narrowed to the economic, the complexity that makes the whole pattern of living… is vitiated if not quite lost."

He also said that there were some today who might identify with a line from Whisky and Scotland (1935) in which Gunn noted that "any effort on the part of any section - such as Ireland or Wales or Scotland - of the Celtic fringe to form itself into a nation is not merely opposed but bitterly resented as if it were something in the nature of a betrayal of human progress".

Politics apart, it is worth reading Gunn again and indeed going to see the memorial to him at Dunbeath Harbour. It was erected by the Neil Gunn Society 1991 to honour the centenary of his birth.

The bronze sculpture is of Kenn the boy "barely nine years old" who was the central figure in the novel Highland River. It shows him carrying home the huge salmon he caught with his bare hands in the Well Pool beside the Telford Bridge over the Dunbeath River.

The first chapter of the book describes the vision which met Kenn's mother who some time earlier had praised one Master Douglas MacQuarrie, a 12-year-old boy who had landed a salmon:

''And now on this busy morning, angered against him for not returning with the well water, she suddenly saw him rounding the corner of the house towards the door of the back porch, face down, hands knotted behind his head, dripping wet and staggering. The salmon's nose was under his right ear, its tail sweeping in the ground behind.

"She gave way to him as he lurched in. Releasing his crooked fingers and heaving with a shoulder, he set the great fish with a mighty thump on the smooth blue flagstone at her feet. Then he glanced up at her and in a voice harsh with ironic challenge, remarked 'There's your Master Douglas MacQuarrie for you!'''