Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Corder, for Monday the 25th of September, which is a very special day because I'm here in the new Scottish galleries of the National, which is the National Gallery of Scotland right in the heart of Edinburgh.

And even better than that, I am with Dr Trisha Alliston, who is the co-director of the National Gallery Project.

Thank you. We're actually standing in a gallery that is new, completely new.

It's part of an excavation at the back of the National Gallery in the centre of Edinburgh, and it's one of our largest spaces. We've created a new suite of galleries for Scottish art, right in the heart of the city, using some spaces that existed before, which were built in the 1970s, and also excavating new space as well.

So we have a beautiful long run of galleries that can take you through, in a sense, the history of Scottish art, from around

1945, back in time to 1800, or should you come in the other way from 1800 up to 1945 and we're just looking here at the

what greets you if you start in at the beginning of this the monarch of the glens sir edwin

lands here if i'm not mistaken and people will recognize it from various bottles of whiskey and boxes of

shortbread and so on and we know that Monica the Glen encapsulates an idea of Scotland,

but for many people is very powerful.

And we know that because we took it around Scotland when we first acquired it.

It's a relatively new acquisition.

And we were astounded by the amount of warmth for this image.

And Monica the Glen, the city in a large gallery,

surrounded by other views of Scotland,

many of which were painted around the same time in the mid-19th century.

And there's a whole wall in a way that shows this sort of rather dramatic, magnificent, full-on view of Scotland, we could say, I suppose, really, pumped up view of Scotland and particularly of the Highlands.

But this gallery also tries to think about where the idea came from and how a lot of it was very much linked to the literature of the time,

and particularly Sir Walter Scott's writings. But it also starts the question the degree to which that image is real.

It's been a long journey about eight years or so since the project began.

Talk us through that and how it's worked for you.

Yes, well this in a sense is a project that's been decades in the making.

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