It’s too soon to be talking about a “post-referendum” spirit in Scottish culture. Novelist Ian Rankin recently described the ballot as too “toxic” to figure in fiction for the time being at least. But as the toxicity slowly fades, it has become clear that there is something new in the air or, maybe more accurately, a return of something old. Scottish traditional music has tended to wobble between triumphalism and tragic despair, between Bannockburn and Flodden, in other words. The most marked sign of Scotland’s cultural cringe was an over-representation of murder ballads, Clearance songs, defeatisms of one sort or another, all of it tricked up with heather, plaids and stags to reinforce an image of the Highlands created not so much by Walter Scott as Sc