As the first millennium dawned, there was no Scotland and no clear motivation for the disparate tribes in the northern third of Britain to unite.

A History of Scotland begins with the first stirrings of identity as the tribes of a place the Romans called Caledonia first banded together to confront the legions of the Empire. Although the Romans were victorious in the epic battle of Mons Graupius, they eventually withdrew to the South after they failed as Neil Oliver notes "to tame the elusive warriors of North Britain."

For three centuries the Romans kept these tribes at bay in their northern stronghold, until the Empire itself began to collapse. From this emerged a people with a new name, the Picts.The last British tribe to paint their bodies, Pictish society is now recognised by archaeologists as skilled and well-organised. But the Picts were not alone. The Last of the Free charts their sometime allegiances and wars with the Gaels in the West.

With the growing dominance of the Gaels came a new religion, Christianity, which slowly prised the Picts away from their pagan beliefs. Art flourished on both sides from the book of Kells, created by the monks of Iona, to intricate Pictish carvings. Yet as the native culture flourished, there were brutal challenges to be met including an invader from the sea, the Vikings, who threatened to conquer all of Britain. As the natives fought back, heroic warrior chiefs would come to the fore, but what was their relationship to the notion of Scotland?

And what of this nation of Scotland itself? As The Last of the Free highlights, there is a document which marks the arrival of a firmer sense of a Scotland.

This document, The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, a list of the 12 Kings of the House of Alpin, also charts a critical transition around the period 878 to 889 when all references to Pictland, which did not include the West and the Isles, disappear.

It is held in the Bibliotheque National in Paris, part of a parcel of documents believed to have been brought back to France from London by a courtier in the 17th Century. Within it is the first reference from Scottish sources to a land called Albaniam, the Gaelic for Scotland.

Says Neil Oliver: “This is a brand new name for the kingdom. In this single word, Scotland is created. This is Scotland’s birth certificate!”

The growth of Scottish patriotism is charted in this second episode, exploring how war with England saw the kingdom of Alba transformed by necessity into the newly emerging nation of Scotland.

The tale begins with the brutality of Scotland's Alexander II, who did not flinch from doing whatever he had to do to secure his kingship. Yet for all his brutality, as presenter Neil Oliver notes; "Alexander II had given the Scots a united kingdom with a border, a sense of who they were."

As tragedy hit his successors, within a decade all this was swept away. King Edward of England had the upper hand and he wanted to subsume Scotland, as he had done Wales. But the prospect of fighting Edward's wars tipped the Scots over the edge. They fought back with one man at the helm of a popular uprising, William Wallace.

In this episode, Robert the Bruce, aided by Scotland's bishops, harnesses the power of Scottish patriotism to win full-blown independence and freedom from external interference.

With Wallace dead and the Scottish king, John Balliol, broken and irrelevant in a foreign land, chess enthusiast Edward Longshanks believed this was "endgame" and Scotland was dead. After his cruelty in war, he played it softly, taking oaths of loyalty from the country's leading nobles. And then it was the turn of the bishops, but that was his first mistake. Unlike England's bishopry, these men had no subservience to a king but, instead, a direct line to the Pope.

While they literally paid lip service and kissed the English king's ring, these men were to be the driving force in the rebirth of Scotland's crown and independence. But first they needed a new Scottish king; someone worthy of the title, but not so worthy he could not contemplate something which looked dangerously like usurpation of the throne.

They chose Robert Bruce, a man who began by murdering his 'opposition' in a church. Despite being absolved by the Bishops, his campaign did not have a fortuitous start, with his brothers executed and his family imprisoned by the English.

After contemplating in a cave on the West Coast, probably not with a spider for company, the tide began to turn for Bruce. His enemy Longshanks died to be replaced by an ineffectual son. Then Bruce laid waste his enemies in Scotland. But he needed to become secure, to become legend... then there was Bannockburn.

It's a common perception that Scotland has always had a split identity, divided between Highland and Lowland, but is this true?

This episode, Language is Power looks at a split that had its origins in a feud between two families, the Macdonalds and the Stewarts.

As the 15th Century began, the Macdonalds were well placed. They had backed Bruce and the rewards had flowed; lands, wealth and power. As presenter Neil Oliver says, "Power over the islands, power over the sea." And with this power and stability came a flourishing of the arts with Finlaggan, the heart of the Lordship of the Isles, and Iona, its soul.

The teenage King of Scotland, James Stewart, had been captured by the English, and Alexander, Lord of the Isles, had little to fear. Although devalued and humiliated James was still worth a king's ransom, which the Scots eventually handed over when he was 30. And on his return, he was a man in a hurry to impress and to do it on a grand European scale.

While James built a palace, Alexander eyed the mainland and the scene was set for internecine rivalry between the two camps, which would continue for generations. But despite the bitterness and brutality, generations of Stewarts clung to their crown and the use of Gaelic at court receded. Scots became the dominant tongue.

This episode focuses on a tale of two widely contrasting visions of Britain – the vision of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her son James. Mary was the child, who had grown up among the French royal household, groomed to one day be its Queen, as well as Queen of Scotland, and perhaps through her bloodline, Queen of England, potentially at the helm of a vast Catholic empire.

But her husband, the Dauphin of France, died young and as Neil explains, "The glittering future that Mary had been brought up to believe in started to slip away..."

And so eventually this Catholic Queen, still tilting towards a bigger, grander prize, came to Scotland, a land which had been greatly touched by the advent of the new Protestant thinking.

Her unwise choice of husbands yielded a son and Protestant heir but also led to her abdication and then her flight into Elizabeth's custody. Aware of his mother's imprisonment down south, young James grew up a prisoner of another sort, within the confines of a castle with limited company including a tutor George Buchanan.

Buchanan tried to instil – often with the backing of physical violence – a new sense of kingship into his young charge; a kingship with a sense of the limits of royal authority. But the young James escaped from his shackles, and he too coveted the English throne.

As Neil Oliver says at the outset of the episode Project Britain: "The ambition of an unconquered nation and its royal family will be the driving force that unites two ancient enemies and sets them on the road to the Great Britain we know today..."

After Great Britain was founded, the Scots began to find themselves torn between their natural affinity to their ancient line of Stuart monarchs and their intense religious conviction. Should they follow King Charles I or King Jesus? When Charles I tried to impose his form of religion on the Scots, they were forced to choose.

This episode is about the forging and impact of two of the most remarkable documents in Scottish history which broke the power of the Stuart kings: the Covenants (of 1638 and 1643), written contracts with God in which the Scottish Covenanters sought not only to redefine their own place in Britain, but Britain itself. They were to start the British Civil Wars, unleash revolutionary turmoil which struck off the head of Charles I and ultimately led to Cromwell's conquest of Scotland, defeating the Stuarts. Yet, even in this darkest hour, the Covenanters' dream refused to die. When Charles II was restored they had high hopes for their Covenanted king, but Charles was having no truck with Covenants which gave the common man his place and placed limits on the Crown. His determination to take Scotland back to a time before the signing was the incendiary thrown into a cauldron of religious fervour in the West of Scotland.

The 'Merry Monarch' became Britain's greatest persecuting king, leading to rebellions, the infamous 'Killing Time' and the imprisonment of a curiously masked preacher on the grim Bass Rock. Britain's first "war on terror" was underway, with the Crown pitted against the Convenanters; a conflict which would lay the seeds for political and religious strife in Scotland for decades to come.

This episode covers the period in the wake of the 1688 revolution which brought William of Orange to power on the throne of England and Scotland, through to Culloden - the most iconic of all Scottish battles - in 1746. The Glorious Revolution of 1688/89 was triumphed as a win for Protestantism over Catholicism and liberty over the absolutist power of kings, but it was not accepted by all. The new thinking led to some mania of its own, such as the Darien project, a daring proposal to create a Scots trading colony in Panama - a mind-blowingly ambitious scheme, supported by vast swathes of the population, but which virtually bankrupted the country.

In the wake of the revolution and the Darien disaster, a financially bereft Scotland signed up to the 1707 Union of Parliaments, but its 'hearts and minds' were not remotely on board with the concept, especially as in its early days its effects seemed wholly negative. Taxes were hiked up and trade restrictions - contrary to the Articles of the agreement - disappointed even pro-Union Nobles, unhappy at the insensitive way Westminister was handling Scottish issues. Additionally, in Scotland the Glorious Revolution didn’t necessarily make good on its promises of libertarian modernity.

The clamour from some Scots for the rule of the past found an outlet in the Jacobite cause, and its crescendo and swansong was Culloden; the accepted story of these times, but A History of Scotland reveals the Stuarts in exile had 'evolved' and were making strides, with policies more liberal and forward thinking than the general rule of the land by William of Orange or his Hanoverian successors. It also goes on to reveal how close these new style 'would be' monarchs came on several occasions to coming back to power.

This episode looks at how the money made from transatlantic trade with Britain's empire transformed Scotland, catapulting it into one of the richest nations on earth. It's a story of national triumph, but also one which led others to fear that Scotland had lost its way.

It documents Scotland's international moneymen, who weren't averse to 'playing the markets' for their own ends in the 18th Century. In the wake of Culloden, many Scots felt humiliated by the rebellion: many former Jacobites were forced to flee to the New World to redeem themselves, and many others viewed it as their best option too. A few Jacobites made their fortune, and they didn't always care about the cost to others. Having been 'victims' as they saw it, many of these Scots then became slave owners, often among the most merciless. (This episode features the story of slave Joseph Knight, brought to Scotland from Jamaica.) Others became very adept money-makers who weren't exactly scrupulous about how they did it. In this shiny modern world, a new God - money - had replaced the old conflicts over dynasty and religion. It was also the dawn of a new era; when Scotland shaped the modern world by exporting its most valuable commodities; its people and new ideas of liberty and equality that helped start a revolution.

Among the stories to be featured are the restrictive trade practices of the Glasgow tobacco merchants, who went all out to target smaller farmers with less commercial clout. They tied local Virginian farmers into direct trade deals, stopping them getting a fair price in the open market. The Tobacco Lords effectively bought low and sold high, and at the other end they enjoyed a monopoly in Europe and could sell their produce at high prices. In some instances, American farmers were lured into tempting credit deals, which also tied them to buyers who could then virtually set whatever price they wanted. This greedy money-making at any cost wasn't filtering down many advantages to the ordinary people of Scotland, who mostly remained poor. Ironically, it was the poverty that Benjamin Franklin saw at first hand in Scotland that convinced him that some sort of American-British Union was not the way forward, while at the same time the best intellectual efforts of the Scottish Enlightenment had provided America with a blueprint for liberty, and some noteworthy individuals to help put it into practice.

Among them was a humble Paisley minister Dr John Witherspoon, who, fearing it had lost its moral compass, left Scotland in 1768 to take up an appointment as Principal of the renowned Princeton College, in New Jersey. He became the leading Churchman of his time advocating independence; so much so that the British specifically targeted his base, Princeton and the college, destroying just about everything in their path.

Further galvanised against the British by this action, Witherspoon worked tirelessly for five years to make for repairs to the college and on a special Congress set up by the revolutionary forces. His dedication to this cause was acknowledged by being amongst those present to witness the signing of the American Declaration of Independence.

This episode chronicles the conflict between those who owned Scotland and those who lived in it. It's the story of how Sir Walter Scott's romantic tartan image of Scotland was born out of his fear that dangerous revolutionaries in industrial towns would sweep away everything distinctively Scottish.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Scotland and Britain were changing fast. The new mills had transformed its swelling industrial towns, the economy expanded, the Highlands were being cleared for sheep, Scots had proven loyal Britons in defeating Napoleon and the French Revolution, and Scottish history had been consigned to the cabinet of curiosities. Yet, in other ways by 1815, nothing had changed since the Union of 1707: political power still lay in the hands of wealthy landowners, a tiny electorate and Scottish MPs legendary for their corruption. Something would have to give… and it did.

The boom years of the French wars had taken Scotland's industry to a high, but now the bust of a post-war recession brought it low. There was a groundswell of industrial unrest and demands for democracy and British liberties filled the air. It seemed that the industrial monster had been unleashed - a potential powder keg for a British revolution which would blow away the landowners’ grip over Scotland and the rule of kings...

One man was determined to prevent the terrifying prospect of reform and preserve his agreeable version of Scotland's past. His answer was to create a new popular image for the Scots which reconciled the country's national identity with patriotic attachment to the British monarchy. Walter Scott painted a story of doomed, brooding Jacobites, a romantic Scotland of loyal Highlanders, tartan and lairds. It was a global success, but was it a triumph of style over substance? Was it enough to prevent his beloved Scotland being swept away?

This episode tells Scotland's story in a period of unprecedented social, political and economic upheaval from the Great War to today. Within the space of a generation Scotland went from pre-war industrial powerhouse to post war marginalisation.

The Great War wasn't just devastating due to the number of casualties. Following it was a slump which devastated Scotland's industrial heartlands, taking Scottish wages down well below the English average, and unemployment rocketed. Scots voted with their feet. With the advent of the 1920s came the greatest exodus of people from Scotland the country had ever known. Between 1921-34, it is estimated that around half a million Scots emigrated. It looked like Scotland was dying. The rumblings about home rule, even independence, began in earnest...

After World War II a new collective vision of Britain emerged of new towns, nationalised industries and the welfare state. The planners of the Scottish Office in the 1950s and ’60s set out to solve Scotland's economic problems with a grand plan to re-engineer the nation for a brighter future... and then came Mrs Thatcher; and in her wake, devolution.