In the summer of 1983 the Scottish Development Agency entered into a promotional exercise with Selfridges, the London department store. Over a substantial area of floor space a Scottish village was constructed, the shape of the papier mâché walls reprising Scottish rural vernacular architecture, the square containing a (by all appearances) genuine parish pump and trees, and the backdrops consisting of painted hills and castles. Attached to the walls at various places were enamelled signs, of the type common between the Wars, for products such as Wild Woodbine and Richmond Gem cigarettes, and leaning against the various trees and walls were milk churns, wagon wheels and a grocery boy's delivery bike of the kind generations born between the Wars can recall from their childhood. The names over the buildings included Flora MacDonald's China Gifts, The Balmoral Shop (crystal and glass), The Laird's Shop (knitwear), The Sweetie Shop, and The Gamekeeper's Inn. The interior of the latter was panelled in wood, had sheep and stags’ heads on the wall, stuffed grouse and salmon in glass cases, and an old copper kettle on top of the iron stove which nestled in a homely papier mâché hearth. The only potentially discordant note was the handful of vinyl records scattered on the rough-hewn table outside the inn, but the titles of the discs were entirely in keeping with the overall milieu: The Gathering of the Clans, Caledonian Heritage and The Crags of Tumbledown Mountain, the latter with the pipes and drums and regimental band of the Scots Guards celebrating the regiment's exploits in the Malvinas (more popularly known as the Falklands) War.

The central contradiction which the Selfridges Scottish village (needless to say, unconsciously) poses is as follows. A country, four-fifths of whose population live in cities and are oriented towards industrial production (in transition, of course, from traditional coal and steel-based heavy industry towards electronic industries), is constructed – not by poets and artists, but by the central government agency concerned with national economic regeneration – in exclusively rural Highland terms. That contradiction is a complex but illustrative issue of the historical construction of national identity and the reasons why such constructions were and are necessary.