You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. This week, ahead of schedule, the second episode of Rosemary Hills series on Romantic History. looking at how history was transformed in the romantic period.

I'm Rosemary Hill. If you tuned in last week, you will have heard me talking to Tom Stammers

about a huge row at Salisbury Cathedral in 1789 and how it transformed attitudes to the past,

how it introduced a whole new idea about conservation.

Today we're bringing Scotland into the picture, and to do that, I'm joined by Professor Colin

Kidd of the University of St Andrews. He's a regular contributor to the LRB. Hello, Colin.

Hello, Rosemey. Very glad to be with you.

Well, thinking about romantic history and what it did to reinforce the

union is quite a curious moment, I think, because romantic history made the Scots more pro-English,

not least by making the English think that they were really Scottish. And the craze for all

things Highland reached its absolute apogee in the middle of the

19th century. It began with Walter Scott, who we're going to talk about later, but I thought

I'd like to just begin, if you like, right at the end at that climax in the middle of the

19th century when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1848 bought the Balmoral Estate in Aberdeenshire.

And what they bought was a real medieval castle, but in a way that was very typical of history in the romantic period.

Although it was old, it didn't really make them feel right about what they, it didn't give them the right feeling for what

they wanted for their Highland home. And so over a period of time, with the help of the

architect William Smith, they demolished all the historic parts and built the Balmoral that we

know today, something more Gothic. And it's an interesting moment in all sorts of ways, I think,

because one of the ways they funded this huge project

was through the sale of the Brighton Pavilion,

which had been George VIII's Palace at Brighton,

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