'If you have taken Scotland to your heart I don't see why you wouldn't be considered a Scot'

"In Greenock, what I saw was an entire community devastated by 30 years of neglect,'' he said. "For me, it is not about the money Scotland has but where it is spent.''

Brammer was born in Gosport, but moved to Scotland as a young child and grew up in Kilcreggan, in Argyll and Bute. "If you have taken Scotland to your heart and you consider this your country, I don't see why you wouldn't be considered a Scot," she said.

The activists in the group include Steve West, 52, from Edinburgh, who is originally from Durham and moved north of the Border in 1986.

He said he had not experienced any anti-Englishness personally, although he did know people who had. But he added: "My feeling is that independence would actually address this, in that it would remove some of the fuel in a way.

"Anti-Englishness is partly caused by a sense of frustration at being governed from afar by English people, so I think independence is likely to improve that rather than make it worse."

At the 2011 census, 9% of Scotland's population of 5,295,403 were born in England or 476,586, and around 16% of the near-455,200 people living in the Highlands and Islands are from England ... that's some 71,000 people. It is seven years since Chris Watts, originally from Yorkshire, and his wife, Meena, moved to Skye from London. They had worked in international development, and he, latterly, in sustainable design.

Every year they would head to Skye for their holidays, where they made many good friends and ended up going into business with two of them. For years they watched the debate over devolution then independence as "interested outsiders".

"But this is where we live now," said Watts. "So we wondered how it would be if Scotland was to became independent; whether it could prosper. Our conclusion was it could, although we never felt this was just about economics. It's about whether Scotland has a distinct voice in the world and we think it could have. That's why we will be voting Yes.

"We have never encountered any anti-English feeling and have been pretty warmly welcomed. We have tried to fit in and be sensitive to the culture. But we are what we are. I am from England while Meena was originally from India and travelled all over the world with her work."

Estelle Quick 59, born in Kent, moved to Scotland in 1989, from Wiltshire. Before that she worked as an insurance broker in London and then as a project manager for a ­software company.

"We had a lovely thatched cottage but were only really ever there at weekends. I realised I was having to earn more and more money to sustain a lifestyle I wasn't sure I wanted."

Now, Quick has a small retail business on the Black Isle, where she raised her family of three. She didn't face local resentment on arrival in the north.

"But I didn't come up with ideas that I wanted to impose on anyone else, which is how some from the south behave. I genuinely feel that even now the Westminster Government has no real grasp of how different it is."

Jo Hunt, aged 49, comes from the village of Naseby in Northamptonshire, the site of the pivotal and penultimate Parliamentarian victory in the English Civil War in 1645. But he wanted to put down roots in Scotland and has done so quite literally, buying a 45-acre hill croft at Knockfarrel near Strathpeffer. He and his partner, Lorna, have established a food business and employ four full-time staff.

Hunt describes his politics as a mixture of green and red. However, he is clear: "I am definitely voting Yes. Basically, I think smaller countries make better decisions.

"I moved to Scotland as a refugee from Thatcher. My late father was a natural Tory, a moderate one. He had a manufacturing company employing 140 people which was destroyed by Thatcher's first recession. He went bankrupt and our house was repossessed. I was about 17 and the experience helped form my political views."

Hunt believes the access to decision-making and the influence of civil society has been transformed by the Scottish Parliament.

But he thinks too much of the independence debate has been about people being £500 better or worse off.

"It is not really about that. It is not about whether you like the SNP. It's not about nationalism. It is about the future direction of the society, its values and the independence of decision-making."

He says he was drawn to Scotland because its values were "obviously more communitarian, more equal".

"There has never been this emphasis on self. It is on society, whereas south of the Border it was the reverse. The class system still operates in England, hardly at all here."