AT Scotland’s glitzy newspaper press awards last month (as glitzy as a gathering of journalists can ever expect to be) Jackie Bird was on stage to imbue the occasion with a measure of elegance and wit.

Later the same evening a newspaper colleague says that she seemed to be “well clued-up” on the newspaper scene “for a television celeb”. I tell him that she had worked at Glasgow’s Evening Times and the Scottish Sun for a decade before her broadcasting career had started. She knows our trade.

I’d last seen her in dozens of photographs pasted on to the walls of BBC Scotland’s Pacific Quay headquarters in Glasgow in 2019. She had just announced her departure from the BBC and her colleagues all wanted to show their appreciation and no little affection by festooning these austere walls with her image.

“I loved my time at the BBC, but it was time to move on,” she says. “I was grateful to leave on my own terms and while I still had several ideas and passions to pursue. It’s not that the daily cycle of news was becoming tiring, simply that I felt I’d done all that I possibly could from every possible perspective and that there were still new possibilities for me waiting to be explored.”

Bird had been the anchor on the BBC’s flagship Reporting Scotland for 30 years before she opted to step away. She’d taken a nation through all of the landmark news events in that period: the Lockerbie bombing in 1988; the Dunblane school shootings in 1996; the devolution referendum in 1997 and the Scottish independence referendum in 2014. She acknowledges her privileged role in the life of the nation: “The only way I can describe it is that it was like having a ringside seat in Scottish life.”

We’re meeting just south of Glasgow. She arrives, as usual, looking much fresher than a near 40-year career in newspapers, radio and television might otherwise suggest. I find myself – haggard and unkempt in comparison – tempted to ask her for health advice rather than her views on new challenges and old landmarks.

We’re here, primarily, to talk about her new (unpaid) role as president of the National Trust for Scotland, announced the previous week. But first we fall to talking about the challenges facing young recruits in journalism and, in particular, the pressures on young women imposed by the 24/7 churn of social media.

We discuss the extent to which women in the media appear to be subject to much greater abuse on social platforms than men, and much more malevolently. She points out that, even after half a lifetime at the heart of Scotland’s media circus, she is still learning lessons and that one of them has been in how her younger female colleagues survive and thrive in a treacherous landscape.

“For years, I would tell younger female colleagues simply not to engage on social media,” she says, “and, in particular, to renounce Twitter. But it’s not really as simple as that. No matter how talented these young journalists are, they are becoming increasingly judged by their social media footprint and how many followers they have and thus how many ‘clicks’ their articles solicit.

“It’s easy for someone like me, who’s enjoyed a high media profile before the social media age, to disengage from it all, but much less so for the new generation of younger female journalists whose chances of getting ahead are intrinsically connected to their social media activity.”

She still recalls the vitriolic words of a male former fashion editor of The Herald who chose to write about the gown she wore while presenting BBC Scotland’s annual Hogmanay show. “Do I still harbour a resentment about that after all these years? You bet I do,” she says.

Already there has been some social media perma-rage about her National Trust for Scotland appointment. This seems to be rooted in a report she compiled at the height of the 2014 independence referendum campaign which was later shown to have contained a factual inaccuracy. It seemed to me then that this was little more than an error made under pressure during rolling, 24-hour coverage of the most demanding news event of this century in Scotland.

“I find it astonishing that some people think we ever have time to insert our own prejudices into news reports,” she says. “These are fast-moving stories, often prepared just minutes prior to broadcast. All you’re concerned with is delivering it cleanly and efficiently.”

It’s a little unfortunate that her appointment immediately follows the three-year tenure in the post of Neil Oliver. In recent years, the archaeologist and television presenter whose programmes about Scottish history are among the most popular on UK television has chosen to become a de facto spokesman for the pro-Union side of the independence debate and the UK right in general. Does this make Bird’s work in the NTS role more difficult?

“I don’t think so,” she says. “I thought – and I still think – that Neil Oliver is a terrific programme-maker and that he opened windows on Scottish history and our understanding of it of which many Scots were ignorant. Nor has he ever claimed to be a trained historian. You need entry points to history and Neil’s programmes provided them in abundance. He simply makes great television about the subject and he’s already been in touch offering advice about the role.”

She admits to having been genuinely taken aback at the offer to become president of the NTS. “I’d been doing some podcasts for the trust which I genuinely loved doing. My first thought when told that the Chairman wanted to speak to me was that they wanted to drop the podcasts, and so I was prepared for bad news. I was stunned when they asked me to be president, but absolutely delighted.

“I never had the opportunity of studying at university, but if I’d had then history would have been my subject. I’m obsessed with history and Scottish history and will never tire of researching it and discovering new aspects of Scotland’s story and how it shapes us today."

She returns to the concept of entry points to Scotland’s history. “If you don’t have these entry points below academia and intense study then you can stand accused of elitism and creating barriers for all but the anointed. If I can help assist in that process then I’ll be immensely satisfied.”

Her own go-to Scottish location, the one that beckons her to keep returning is the Glenfinnan Monument, because of its positioning at the head of Loch Shiel.

“It immediately invites you to put yourself there with Bonnie Prince Charlie and to consider what lay ahead of them. You know it ends in tragedy but it gives me a sense of time and place perhaps more than any other. It’s cinematic and I could never tire of visiting that place.

“I’ve just come from making a programme about Mary Queen of Scots and all I could think of was that she’s Marilyn Monroe: bad choices; bad men, surrounded by people who were ambitious for themselves and often at her expense. Is she still iconic? Yes. Are they still making movies about her? Yes. Is there a new play opening in Hampstead next month about her? Yes!”

“It’s a good time in my life to do this,” she says, “Sir Ian Wood once told me that the key to a good age was never to stop learning. And to keep on asking the daft question – and I’m a master at the daft question – because it’s often an effective way to learn.”

She’s also captivated by heritage body’s desire to include more in its portfolio that speaks of Scotland’s industrial heritage. “I was a freelance industrial correspondent for network and worked for Radio Clyde in the 80s. So, coal-mining, the steel industry; the shipyards. It was music to my ears to hear that.

“The trade unions and all their politics and their emotions. These are real politics affecting real people. And the places they lived in and worked in are worth preserving for those generations who have been reared at a time when these places no longer exist. We need to remember them and educate people about that heritage just as much as about our old castles and old wars.”