THE past may well be a foreign country, as an English author once wrote.

But if true it is a ­country which retains strong connections to the present and to the country we live in today. Accordingly, anyone who thought we could mark the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn eight weeks before the referendum on Scottish independence without the two events becoming conflated has obviously never heard the phrase "political football".

The task of organising the Bannockburn Live centrepiece, a re-enactment of the 1314 battle at which the forces of Robert Bruce triumphed over Edward II's English army, should have been fairly simple for Norwegian-born Malin Heen-Allan and Clanranald, the "living history" organisation she runs with her husband, Charlie. They may never have done anything on this scale, but they feature regularly in films and on television.

But persistent newspaper stories about poor ticket sales for Bannockburn Live, Scotland's official commemorative event, and a controversial clash with the Armed Forces Day celebrations centred on nearby Stirling Castle, were a constant reminder to Heen-Allan that a highly charged project lay ahead which was going to be more minefield than battlefield.

"There was so much going on behind the scenes with the referendum, so it was truly a fight for the right to celebrate something that was kind of special," she says. "It took a lot out of all of us, it really did. But I think we all managed to make it the Scottish anniversary that it was rather than a politically charged celebration about the death of English people. Honestly, I had all that thrown at me."

For a lot of people involved, she says, the political sideshow became a serious distraction.

"But we just stayed focused and did what we set out to do. We were recreating a bit of history, just bringing it to life because it was the 700th anniversary. And we were bringing a bit of Hollywood to the battlefield because Bannockburn was a two-day battle that we had to condense into a 40-minute show that we would then run three times a day over two days."

It is certainly true that the event was not trouble-free. For a start, it was cut back from three days to two, though the organisers Unique Events said at the time this was because of the fact that Armed Forces Day had been awarded to Stirling. It is also true that ticket sales were initially slow, a fact that was recounted with glee in some quarters.

"Armed Forces Day did cause a lot of problems for us as there was an unprecedented number of flyovers, which freaked out our horses, so we had to cut down the number we used," says Heen-Allan. "And to ordinary people the effect [of stories about poor ticket sales] was that by the Saturday morning we had a three-mile queue of people at the gates, people who had believed what they had read in the papers about the show underselling, about it not going well, about there being problems and about it having hardly any ticket sales. None of this was true of course. We had sold out."

More than that, she adds: "We knew we would sell out. We always knew people would come."

And come they did. If anything, the event was a victim of its own success, with most of the complaints being about the inability to buy tickets on the gate and the queues to see the battle re-enactment.

But for Heen-Allan, it was in its own way a historic event and one which will remain long in her memory.

"It was a fantastic experience. We were all very, very happy that we got to take part in it," she says. "And I am very happy with the work we did. I would say our medieval encampment was amazing and did exactly what it set out to do. And I take my hat off to Unique Events as well. They are ­brilliant at organising things, big parties for the public. They did a great job."

So as she looks back on the year, how does she view 2014?

"Without doubt, it was our busiest year to date," she says. "It was special because it was all about Bannockburn. We started work on various documentaries about the battle in 2013. Then we got to be part of making the battle re-enactment happen, which is a new thing for us. Although we fight a lot we do it in front of TV cameras, we're not used to doing it in front of an audience. But it was great fun."

Despite having lived in the UK for the past 20 years, Heen-Allan's Norwegian citizenship means she can't vote here. Ironically, then, she had no say in determining the outcome of the political event which often threatened to overshadow Bannockburn Live: September's independence referendum. So how would she have voted if she was enfranchised?

"I would have definitely voted Yes because I'm Norwegian. I know what independence looks like," she says. "I did find the result a bit hard to comprehend."

Likewise, her friends and family back in Norway were equally bemused. "For them there was a sense of disbelief. They cannot understand at all how anyone could vote against their own sovereignty and their own independence. In Norway it's unthinkable."

But Norway, of course, really is a foreign country.