WE Scots are often accused by our southern neighbours of whining

whenever we feel angry enough to point out unfair treatment of our

country by English officialdom.

Girner or no girner, having cooled down into a mild frenzy, I must

upbraid the British Tourist Authority (BTA) for its unpardonable

shortcomings when it comes to advertising to foreigners this

many-splintered chunk of the map of Britain, which begins above the Lake

District and comes to an end somewhere north of Edinburgh.

I do not know exactly what the credentials of the BTA are, but I

suspect that the organisation is charged with selling to foreign folk

the visitability of places in Scotland, England, and Wales. The Scottish

Tourist Board does the same for Scotland, I suspect, and area tourist

boards do likewise for individual regions.

To the point: to mark the start of the 1993 summer season the BTA

published a brochure entitled Literary Britain, a glossy affair with a

map and artworks on one side and text and pictures on the reverse side.

The map has 82 numbers on it, each of them introducing a place where

foreign visitors may retrace the footsteps of a famous literary

personage.

Scandalously, Scotland has only nine numbers, three of which are

marked on only because they have been visited by non-Scottish figures.

The Lake District, on the other hand, has eight numbers.

That would be effrontery enough for any Scot proud of his country's

literary talent. However, it gets worse. Hugh MacDiarmid's Langholm is

not marked. That will come as no surprise to aficionados of the poet,

who have become used to his being ignored even in Scotland, let alone in

the England he despised. But Burns's mausoleum in Dumfries is overlooked

by the map, as are his homes in and around Dumfries, to which Japanese,

American, and Russian tourists come in droves year in and year out. Neil

Gunn is not mentioned, nor are Sorley MacLean, Dunbar, Fergusson, and

many others.

Scott and Carlyle are there. So are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert

Louis Stevenson. Skye, however, is marked, and there is a nice picture

of Portree, only because Johnson and Boswell (admittedly a Scot) once

visited the island. The map has an inset for the Shetlands and Orkney,

but for no reason. There are no numbers, not for Brown nor Linklater.

Aberdeen is chalked up as visitable because Lord Byron went to grammar

school there. Okay, Byron had Scottish roots, but what about Lewis

Grassic Gibbon? Jura is annotated because Orwell wrote 1984 there. I was

expecting to see Daniel Defoe's name somewhere north of the Border, if

only because of his spying forays for the English, but his name is not

even in the southern part.

And who do we have south of the Border? Well, Wordsworth and Dickens,

of course, Chaucer, Tennyson. Jeffrey Archer is there; so too is John

Mortimer because he wrote Rumpole of the Bailey; there is Roald Dahl,

author of that classic, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Colin Dexter is there because of the popularity of Inspector Morse. I

looked in vain for John Buchan's name in the Borders, where there is a

shrine to his works, but no, there is a number against his name in the

deep south.

The BTA has considered it prudent to tell foreign visitors that Buchan

was holed up at Broadstairs near Dover in 1914. It does not matter that

the Galloway landscape inspired Buchan to write The Thirty-nine Steps.

The map gives us Gerald of Wales, but not Dunbar; John Le Carre and Dick

Francis, but not James Hogg or David Hume; Catherine Cookson but not

Allan Ramsay.

If all this is becoming a bit much to take, then let us have an

explanation. The Scottish Tourist Board politely declined to comment.

The BTA vigorously defended its publication, through its press officer,

Jane Mackay (eek, a Highlander).

She said the map was meant as a ''taster'', and explained that authors

whose works had been televised were there for foreign tourists. That

does not wash, however, when you shrug your shoulders at Gerald of

Wales, and wonder why the Dumfries home of J. M. Barrie is not

mentioned, although a garden in the town inspired him to write Peter

Pan.

A. J. Cronin's book was recently made into a remake of Dr Finlay on

television, yet we do not learn from the BTA that he was educated at St

Joseph's College in Dumfries; we do, nevertheless, learn that Henry

James lived in Rye.

There is a serious side to this. As many as 105,000 of the offending

brochures have been published in English, Spanish, Italian, German, and

Japanese.

Literary minded foreigners armed with the brochure will give Scotland

an unwarranted body swerve, because some individual at the BTA's London

HQ, inter alia, thought it inconceivable that Hugh MacDiarmid was known

in Japan and Russia (Hymn to Lenin, never heard of it?).

The BTA has sold Scotland short. I sincerely hope that it is able to

make amends in time for next year's tourist season.