When I was very young, my mother would take me out, up the country road towards the village of Spott, at the foot of the Lammermuir Hills.

Later, I would walk or bicycle there myself, coming home with jars of frog spawn dangling from the handlebars, scooped from the burn beneath glowering Doon Hill.

Thanks to my father, who devoured history books as if they were made of chocolate, I never saw that hill without thinking of what had happened there. It was the site of the dreadful first battle of Dunbar, in 1296, when Edward I's men routed the Scots. Then, in 1650, Scottish troops once more gathered there, to take on Cromwell's roundheads. Again, the honours went to England.

It takes little imagination to picture the scene and what the soldiers must have faced. Indeed, a far-from-fanciful friend of mine is adamant he once saw the ghost of an army chaplain, near where the bodies would have lain.

Wherever you go in East Lothian there are similar tales. Inch for inch, few places in Britain have seen more battles: Athelstaneford, Prestonpans, Haddington, Pinkie, Carberry Hill ... the place is littered with bones. Meanwhile, just over the Border near Branxton is the scene of our worst ever defeat, though the competition for that title is stiff. The tranquil beauty of Flodden field, where so many Scots died, made a great impression on me as a child, so much so that I eventually wrote a novel about it.

Anybody who has visited Flodden or Bannockburn, Culloden or Harlaw, will agree they have an atmosphere all their own. Few are more aware of this than the former children's laureate Michael Morpurgo, author of War Horse. On the eve of Armistice Day, Morpurgo said that all British schoolchildren should be given the opportunity to visit the battlefields of World War One in France. "It should be something everyone does regardless of their ability to pay, just like the NHS", he remarked.

In some ways it is a good idea. Not only would such a trip give pupils a chance to see the land on which their forebears fought but it would also make the point, which Morpurgo is keen to stress, that Muslims and Jews and all ethnicities stood shoulder-to-shoulder in that conflict. In the face of such danger, there was no "them and us". Only in peacetime, you could argue, do such poisonous attitudes take hold.

Yet you don't need to cross the Channel to understand what warfare involves. Any battlefield would suffice. Of course, attention is trained on France and Belgium just now, and for the history tourist eager to understand the 1914-18 war, nowhere else will do. But while the Great War saw casualties on a horrific scale, so too did many other military encounters.

In Musselburgh, near Tesco, for instance, 6000 or more Scots died in a single day in 1547. As a percentage of the able-bodied male population, their loss was as terrible as that suffered on the Western Front. The sole difference is that, until a century ago, it was accepted that men would regularly go to war, and risk being slaughtered or maimed. Not until the carnage of the trenches did that outlook begin to shift, and only then because of a changing political climate in which more thoughtful observers could finally make themselves heard.

Rather than send schoolchildren to Europe, would it not make sense to show them history on their doorstep? Even though there has not been a pitched battle on British soil since the Jacobites' final defeat, they would appreciate the ugly truth that centuries on we have not learned much from the past. The Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, English and Scots settled disputes, grabbed land, and defended their own in exactly the same way as the British have done in two world wars, and Iraqis, Syrians and Afghans are continuing to do today.

For all our technological prowess, the purpose of war is as primitive in our own times as it was in the dark ages: to kill as many of the enemy as possible, soldiers and civilians alike. We should take a few minutes to stand on Doon Hill or Culloden Moor, or any of countless such sites around us. Perhaps then we'd realise how alarmingly close to home the killing fields once were - and in many ways still are.