ROGER HUTCHINSON Scotland's inhabited islands are a tiny part of the national population but a huge part of the national psyche. From Unst, at the northern tip of Shetland to Arran, off the Ayrshire coast, their diversity is their strength.

ROGER HUTCHINSON

Scotland's inhabited islands are a tiny part of the national population but a huge part of the national psyche. From Unst, at the northern tip of Shetland to Arran, off the Ayrshire coast, their diversity is their strength.

Lowlanders and north-easterners may have a traditionally ambiguous relationship with their few insular compatriots but it can be called an active and ongoing relationship.

Envy of a perceived idyllic existence led too many 19th and 20th century hard-faced Aberdonians and Glaswegians to denounce Hebrideans as feckless ne'er-do-wells dependent on subsidies from resourceful southern taxpayers. (Shetlanders and Orcadians, who at least spoke a form of English, got off lightly.) But as they carped, they never stopped looking, with confused or fond or frustrated expressions, north and west, to the lonely soul of their country.

It became slowly apparent the root of the urban Scot's pixelated attitude to the islander was a variety of thwarted love.

And as the 20th century turned into the 21st, it became as common to find a Lowlander with his or her own preferred, adopted island - her home from home, his place of grace - as one who dismissed the archipelagos as unnecessary burdens on the public purse.

At about the same time - not coincidentally - the islands of Scotland ceased to have a democratic deficit. By 2007, those peripheral communities which a century earlier had attracted a steady stream of government commissions to discover what on earth was happening out there in the North Atlantic were arguably, person for person, better-represented than any comparable parishes in the UK.

Some of the smaller islands now have an elected MSP, MEP, MP, and councillor for each inhabitant.

Can any one body aspire to talk simultaneously for the farmers of Arran and the crofters of Uist; the Gaels of Barra and the Norse of Yell; the fishermen of Lerwick and the hoteliers of Bute; the philosopher-poets of Orkney and the civil servants of Stornoway?

They have essentially just one thing in common. They cannot be approached on foot. Otherwise each one is proudly, kaleidoscopically unique. And neither they nor we would want it any other way.

• Roger Hutchinson is a columnist with the West Highland Free Press and the author of many books, most recently Calum's Road. He lives on Raasay.