HOW the wheel turns. As a child, dragged in the summer holidays from castles and keeps to lighthouses, cathedrals and museums, I yearned to loll under the apple tree. The louder the siren call of the Costa del Sol and Provence for our neighbours and friends, however, the more emphatic was my father – a fluent French speaker – about staying close to base and polyfilling the gaps in his family’s historical education.

It needed more than grouting, as I now realise. In recent weeks, for background to a book I’m writing about Mary Queen of Scots – don’t yawn! – I’ve been visiting some of the locations of her troubled years here. Despite a lifelong interest in history, doubtless in part due to early brainwashing, I have been shamed to discover how much of the past there is, within easy reach, that I’ve never bothered to seek out or explore.

When it comes to ill-fated Mary, Historic Environment Scotland offers a guide to most of the key points in her tale, as found in old buildings and sites. It’s a clever idea, pandering to an international fascination with her that never fades. Of all our prominent figures, not even Charles Edward Stuart has the abiding allure of this deeply tragic royal. Hence the number of visitors from Japan and America in Linlithgow Palace, where she was born, or the Germans photographing forbidding Hermitage Castle in the Borders, where she paid a fleeting visit to the wounded Earl of Bothwell, a trip that cost her dear.

Yet what is immediately obvious is how few locals there are clambering up Dumbarton Rock, where she stayed for months as a child, before being whisked to safety in France, or on the woodland paths around the site of the Battle of Carberry Hill, where her fate was effectively sealed.

Arguably the most important location, Dundrennan Abbey in Dumfries & Galloway, had no other visitors whatsoever while I was there at the weekend. It hardly appears to be on anyone’s radar, even though in terms of Mary it is hugely symbolic, being the very last place she slept before leaving for England. When her boat reached Cumbria, from the tiny nearby port, she was to spend the rest of her life in captivity. There is far more to Dundrennan, however, than the memory of Mary’s passing. A tranquil haven, in lush countryside close to the sea, this 12th-century Cistercian abbey survived the wars of independence, though not the tumult of the Reformation. Above all, it is architecturally fascinating, showing the arrival of the gothic style in Scotland.

The enchanting narrow and winding roads around here, and for that matter all across this un-sung region, were almost car free. You’re more likely to encounter a milk tanker than a motorcycle. Put a grandfather clock in our back seat, and we could have been on The Antiques Roadshow, tootling through bucolic pastoral scenery, one foot firmly planted in yesteryear.

The richness of history that lies all around us is staggering. Yet, either because of over-familiarity, complacency or lack of knowledge, it is half-forgotten or ignored. Even our glitziest period celebrity cannot draw crowds much beyond the central belt. Scotland’s bygone affairs, you might say, do not have the magnetic pull of British history – ie, English – in whose shadow they have lain for as long as time has been measured.

Population density and accessibility in part explain why English monuments and castles are crawling with tourists, whereas the wind whistles emptily through many of ours. Stonehenge, just off a convenient main road, attracts millions, whereas to visit the far eerier Callanish Stones on the isle of Lewis requires determination and planning. Nor could the ferry cope with a sudden surge in traffic.

But there’s more to it than that. Until fairly recently, our history was seen by those who shaped the curriculum, and the political agenda, as a branch of a bigger tree. Despite the profoundly influential impact of our royal dynasties across all these isles, and our complex, sophisticated political system, even today most of us are still probably better versed in Tudor kings and queens than in the equally colourful Stuarts.

While we live in more enlightened times now, connecting with our past is as much our own responsibility as that of the educational or cultural establishment. Who cares whether British history gets more attention than Scottish, Welsh or Irish? The abundance of clues left by our forebears is a priceless record, a heritage written plain and loud as a redtop headline. We don’t need permission, or a professional go-between, to discover it for ourselves.

School teachers are well aware that facts and dates rarely stick without something to bring them alive. Visit Scotland, and the past rises to meet you at every turn. Some of it lies beneath our feet, the bones of early civilisation, or the work of long-gone farmers, still visible as if on an x-ray. Castles, forts, mines and harbours are all within easy reach of most of us. As scaremongers like to say of rats, you’re never more than a few feet from a fragment of history anywhere in this land.

Indeed, there’s so much of it you can understand why some people feel oppressed, fearing that to pay our national saga too much attention will hold us back. For me, though, the wealth of evidence is invigorating. Following in the footsteps of a figure such as Mary Queen of Scots is to feel an almost tangible connection. Rather than highlighting how far distant were the times in which she lived, it has the opposite effect. Listening to crows cawing on the rooftop of Linlithgow Palace, or the kittiwakes nesting on the ruins of Dunbar Castle; looking out across Arthur’s Seat from Craigmillar Castle, or to the English coast from the beach near Dundrennan, is actually to sense that those who shaped our country were in most important respects not much different from us.

As I’m belatedly learning, jaunts to castles and battle sites are a three-dimensional holiday, offering a perspective that reaches deep into the archives. Rather than encouraging nostalgia or sentiment, it is instead a bracing reminder of the urgent need to live in the here and now. There’s nothing like a ruin to show you how quickly time catches us all.