Hello and welcome to Stories of Scotland, a podcast dedicated to the heritage of this wonderful country.

I'm Annie, your hag-eye hunting archivist. And I'm Jenny, your wild haglet on the run.

And in this episode, we're looking into the weird and wonderful history of the haggis.

Yes, haggis is the national dish of Scotland.

And it tastes like a perfect balance of meaty miscellany and oats deep in a cloak of black pepper seasoning.

It's rich and fatty, stuffed deep in its strange grey balloon-like skin.

Nowadays, there are a great variety of different types of haggis and vegan and vegetarian haggis

are increasingly popular, which are the varieties I prefer because I don't have a strong enough

stomach for the real haggis.

Well, Annie, luckily for you, the haggis brings its own stomach.

That's the whole point.

It's literally, it comes wrapped in a handy stomach. It's a

stomach. Yeah. That's right. Everyone get your grimaces on. It's going to be a long episode. The haggis of a rare Scottish animal.

In fact, probably the rarest of all, even more so than the Scottish wildcat or nessie.

What about the unicorn, Jenny?

Don't be ridiculous, Annie.

There haven't been unicorns since they put them all on the passports.

And isn't there only one Loch Ness monster?

No, no, no, no.

Nessie is actually, like, so you know all the little bumps of a Nessi?

They're all individual monsters and they just go and rota shift and each one is its hump kind

of thing.

...