He is the only Glasgow captain to have led his team into a European Cup knockout tie; was part of the last Scotland team to win a championship and will consequently forever be a Five Nations champion; is the only Millennial Scot to have played on two British & Irish Lions tours; was one of the few professionals to have returned to the club at which he started his career after his full-time playing days were over; and is the only one ex-pro to have served on the Scottish Rugby board. So how come Gordon Bulloch would rather take to the hills than head to his old stomping grounds at Scotstoun or Murrayfield?

There is no lack of goodwill towards his successors on the field or even in the boardroom in the explanation and the first clue as to why is the setting of the family home in which he and Jen are bringing up little Evie, a lovely rural retreat on the outskirts of Killearn at the foot of a hill, Dumgoyne, that he has run up and down well over 300 times in the past five years. At 41 Bulloch would simply rather remain active than revel in the performances of others or memories of glory days.

“I played for the fun. I loved playing, I loved competing, but then I’ve walked away now and I don’t want anything to do with it,” said the 75 times capped hooker.

“I never stayed in the clubhouse, I’d be gone within 20 minutes, which I think some people thought wasn’t quite right, but I think they’d rather have me playing.

“It’s probably why now I’ve turned to hill running and things like that, because I still get that competitive element even though I’m never going to win a race. I’ll be middle to the back of the field, but it’s still that feeling of competing.

“A lot of the time it’s just against yourself. The nice thing is you don’t have that feeling that if I don’t turn up I’m letting folk down… if you don’t run who gives a damn.”

In saying so there is tacit admission that growing up in a part of the world that is blighted by childhood obesity and heart disease, he was among the lucky ones as a product of the fee-paying Hutcheson’s Grammar School.

“I’d rather be doing something than watching something,” he continues.

“I think it was maybe my upbringing. I watch Glasgow if they’re on TV, but then my dad goes to watch them all the time.

“I was encouraged to do every different sport under the sun though. I can sail, I can ski, I can ride horses, so rugby wasn’t the be all and end all at school level. I found out I was good at it and enjoyed it, but I had other stuff.”

He knows, however, that relatively few of his generation received such opportunities, in turn restricting the environment in which sportspeople are developed in Scotland, his time on the SRU board having helped expand his understanding of the impediments to progress.

“It’s difficult because there are politics in that as well, the whole school thing, so it’s not an easy fix,” Bulloch observes.

“I remember Graham Lowe (a New Zealander who was SRU director of rugby) would pull his hair out about it. He just couldn’t believe the barriers that were in place when trying to get the best guys playing against each other and trying to create a competitive environment.”

Bulloch could not have witnessed the consequences of that more closely, noting that his younger brother Alan, a fine centre who followed him into the Scotland team, was limited not by any lack of ability, but as a consequence of a playing environment at school level that was too easy.

“Alan never really learned to pass the ball,” Bulloch noted.

“He scored 60 tries one year and he didn’t have to learn to tackle at school because the game was over as a competitive element within 10 minutes.”

Set against the background of having to find ways of addressing those aforementioned political problems, the short-term solution is, he believes, relatively straightforward.

“We need to take the best 150 players at age 15, 16, 17 and play them against each other week-in, week-out so that they learn they’re not brilliant because they can tuck the ball under their arm and run and we still haven’t learned,” he said.

If not then the likelihood is that Scottish rugby will continue to produce relatively few players capable of competing at elite level, while leaning heavily, at both club and international level, on imported talent.

That dates back to Bulloch’s time, too, his greatest success having been achieved as part of a team that included the Leslie brothers and their fellow Kiwi Glenn Metcalfe, not to mention Budge Pountney, a flanker who qualified to play for Scotland because his granny was born in the Channel Islands, Dave Hilton, who infamously should not have won any of his 42 caps because his Scottish connection was a great granny rather than a granny and Paul Burnell, who was Scottish qualified because his otherwise wholly English family was briefly in Edinburgh when he was born.

The influence of one of those imports underlines the point.

“You knew John Leslie brought something extra because he did something that others didn’t really do at a Glasgow level which was talk and organise,” Bulloch recalled.

“Other people talked and made a lot of noise but didn’t really organise. He would be organising all the backs round him and even forwards at set plays, telling us we want this, we want that. So suddenly you had some sort of structure around things and someone pushing and pulling.

“Leadership on the field is massive and if you don’t have that through people talking, communicating, organising others then you can have the best players in the world but if they don’t know what each other are doing then you’re really struggling.

“I learned that you can’t just shout and rave. People just turn off. You need to be saying the right things in the right ways. What one person will react to doesn’t work for another either. If you scream and shout at Gordon Simpson he’ll be up for it, but if you did that to Simon Taylor he’d just turn off and turn his headphones up or something like that.”

As an individual match that 36-22 ranks alongside the 21-6 victory win over South Africa in 2002, Scotland’s first for 20 years against one of the Southern Hemisphere big three and being among Bulloch’s career highlights, but as a relative newcomer on the international scene while he admits he did not realise at the time quite how significant it was.

“It was a surreal type thing in Paris that day. No Scotland team had done that. We’d watched Jim Telfer score his try in 1969 and then we’d watched the ‘Toony flip’ for years, so you thought that wining in Paris was something that happened by a whisker, it wasn’t something you could just rip up the script and start scoring at will which started happening.

“We hammered South Africa without scoring lots of tries in 2002, but from 2000 onwards I don’t think I played in a Scotland side which was free-scoring, so ’99 was special. It was so early in my career that I maybe didn’t appreciate it as much as maybe Gary (Armstrong), or Gregor (Townsend), or Taity (Alan Tait), people who’d maybe been through a bit of hardship before that. I was only about 18 months into it. They knew it was their last chance.”

By contrast it was one of an array of highly varied opportunities to come Bulloch’s way over the decade which followed.

As with his response whenever he was invited to try a new activity at school, his life was enhanced by the way he seized them, including that slightly surprising nomination to become a non-executive director of the SRU from 2008 to 2012.

Now chairman of family firm Highland Metals, which was set up by his father-in-law in the seventies, that time in the boardroom served him as well as many of his on-field experiences during what was a testing time with both Scotland and the Lions.

“It probably came too early for me because as a player in the professional era you don’t have enough wider experience or anything to reference it against,” he admitted.

“I hadn’t really been in business for any length of time and even at that I was really picking up things at that stage, so it probably gave more to me than I gave to the job because I just didn’t have the experience. It opened my eyes to what was actually going on, how much politics there was.”

Few who watched him perform for Glasgow, for Scotland, for the Lions and, perhaps most particularly, latterly for West of Scotland, will begrudge him that.

However, as Scotland head for Paris, looking for a first win there since 1999 under a coach who may have finally helped the national team turn a corner in spite of having been told he is now surplus requirements, some may meanwhile wonder whether the sport might have done better to hold onto Bulloch’s rugby knowhow once he had learned how to roll with the blows in the boardroom, just as he previously did on the field of play.