We've had men in kilts with "Freedom" lipsticked on their bare chests.

We've had Saltires fluttering over ancient battlefields. And lots of whisky and green rolling hills.

International reporting of Scotland's independence debate - until now - has rarely strayed too far from hackneyed shortbread tin images of this country.

Russian media, for example, routinely refer to all Scots as "Highlanders". German outlets have a weakness for romantic nationalists nursing a malt and talking about fishing. And everybody, just everybody, talks of Braveheart.

So - I must admit - I was a bit relieved to see Luis Moreno Fernández in El Diario, a Spanish online paper, dust off a different stereotype for a change: that of the canny Scot whose head rules his heart.

This veteran Spanish commentator is struck by just how "dispassionate" we are about independence.

"Up till now the debate in Scotland has displayed a deliberation characteristic of the homeland of Adam Smith, David Hume and thinkers of the schools of Democratic Intellect and Common Sense," he wrote this month. "The independence campaign has been dominated by argumentative rationality, in the scrutiny of different points of view supported by contrastable facts and empirical evidence."

Scots, says Moreno, are carefully and practically weighing up the pros and cons of independence. We, the Madrid academic and journalist might have said, are more David Balfour and less Alan Breck; more Whig and less Jacobite; more pragmatic and less romantic.

His article is headlined "Rational Scotland, emotional Catalunya." So there may another stereotype at play here: that of the passionate Catalan nationalist whose heart rules his head.

The Catalan independence movement, Moreno says, revolves around issues of national identity. Scotland's - he says, citing surveys - does not. The latest polls suggest Catalans are nearly twice as likely to vote for "independence" - whatever they mean by that - than Scots.

Yet both nations, Catalunya and Scots, have strong sense of their identities. Some polls, cited by Moreno in El Diario, suggest more Scots feel exclusively Scottish than Catalans feel solely Catalan.

Is Moreno right that Scots are "rational" and Catalans "emotional"? Me? I am not so sure. I'm not convinced we are a nation of logical David Humes. Nor do I think Catalans are a bunch of hotheads.

But is our national conversation more sober, more polite than Spain's? Well, it might just be. What do you think?