Unlike, perhaps, any race that ever lived, the Scots — or certainly those of a certain vintage — learnt their history from a souvenir tea-towel.

You may very well recall the device in question. It was always on offer in the gift shops and keepsake caves we encountered on childhood holidays to Mull or Millport, depicting a tableau vivant in which frock-coated, full-bearded gents went about devising the inventions that were to commend them to history. Here, for instance, John Logie Baird perfected his haunted fishtank as Alexander Graham Bell tinkered with house-to-house communication. Over there, Charles Macintosh was fashioning the raincoat and, later, Alexander Fleming accidentally synthesised penicillin.

This tea-towel was a history O-level in 75% Terylene. By stealth, sneakily as we cleaned the crockery, it inculcated in us the idea that the Scots invented everything — with the possible exception of Morris dancing, which the English were welcome to.

There’s an argument that, more than most, Scots could be considered cuckoos in the historical nest, serially insisting upon responsibility for the world as we know it, or at least the good bits. It’s a force of habit engendered by saloon-bar anecdotalism, by populist myth and legend and, most of all, by the obscuring mists of time.

It may be, of course, that were you to purchase kitchen requisites in, say, Holland, they’d be emblazoned with the achievements of Hans Lippershey, inventor of the telescope, or Willem Einthoven, creator of the electrocardiogram. But one rather doubts it. Half-true historical hubris seems an essentially Scottish invention.

We were reacquainted with the phenomenon last week with the news that Catherine Brown, the food writer, had uncovered yet another instance of Caledonian hostage-taking. Haggis, it would seem, was not the creation of gingery Highlanders who were keen to do something snacky with all their leftover sheep stomachs. Rather, the recipe appeared first in a cookbook entitled The English Hus-Wife, in 1615. This came 132 years before a Scot ever mentioned the dish, and 171 years prior to Robert Burns’s poetic PR job.

Thus we were reminded of the reverse side of the tea towel; of the fact that, for every Scottish claim of ownership and provenance, there seems to be a counter-claim. Our history and the totems and icons around which it is hinged are perennial subjects of debate and controversy, of border warfare. What seem to be givens are attacked first by correction then by revisionism. The kilt, to take the most commonly bruited example, was originally Irish and Danish and then a sort of kitsch fancy-dress popularised by Sir Walter Scott; Hogmanay is a French word; whisky has its roots, should you care to investigate them, in Italy and China. By now, the alternative histories of tartan (invented by the central European Hallstatt tribe), bagpipes (known to the Hittites) and Bonnie Prince Charlie (light-loafered drunk from Bologna) are as well known as the official varieties.

“They are very important, they are symbols of being Scottish and we are very proud of that,” argues Sandra White, SNP member for Glasgow. “It’s what people associate with Scotland. The tartan and bagpipes might not have originated from Scotland, but they are Celtic. I don’t mind stealing other people’s good ideas.”

The English, however, might have a contrary slant on the lineage of the lightbulb. Now, the lightbulb feels as though it might be a Scottish invention. It’s ingenious, mechanical and late-Victorian. It has the appropriate light-engineering feel that evokes a bearded bloke in a garden shed with a soldering iron. And, indeed, Wikipedia tells us that “in 1835 James Bowman Lindsay demonstrated a constant electric light at a public meeting in Dundee, Scotland. He stated he could ‘read a book at a distance of one and a half feet’.” A more authoritative source, however, tells us: “The first electric light was made in 1800 by Humphry Davy, an English scientist. When he connected wires to his battery and a piece of carbon, the carbon glowed, producing light.”

Michael Fry, the author and historian who has challenged the Scottish triumphalist impulse, believes this need to appropriate other countries’ inventions has something to do with our small country syndrome and our need to assert a separate identity.

“Certain kinds of Scots need to cling on to these things because Scotland is not an independent country and in charge of its own fate,” he says. “Over the centuries, Scots have found other ways to preserve their identity. The Scottish financial system was in part inspired by a desire to be different from the English. Scottish banknotes are another example.”

“The impetus in defining Scottish values is to be not-English,” he adds. “Whatever the English might choose in the future, Scots will choose precisely the opposite. This has its uses in keeping Scottish nationhood going. It is not the symbol that is important but its meaning. If the English took over tartan then the Scots would wear flowery shirts, and if the English would take over whisky, Scots would take on Bacardi. If it was found that these things were not Scottish we would just invent new symbols.”

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