I remember being a schoolchild and finding history a subject that never really captured my interest. Many lessons consisted of memorising lists of dates from the Hundred Years' War or the Wars of the Roses. It therefore came as something of a surprise to me that later in life, when I decided to study subjects in order to gain university entrance qualifications, I chose history as one of them.

I was even more surprised to discover that, for these qualifications, I could focus almost entirely on Scottish history. It was a genuine light-bulb moment. I found myself becoming deeply interested in the heritage of Scotland and the story of the Scots.

So it was perhaps inevitable that when I began writing poetry in earnest, I once again found myself returning to Scotland's history. I set myself the challenge of identifying twenty-five historical events that I might portray in verse. After much research and deliberation, I selected my twenty-five. Once they were written and revised, however, I felt compelled to add two more in order to bring the sequence up to the present day. In that way, my twenty-five became twenty-seven.

I offer them to you in the hope that you may find them of interest and worthy of discussion.

Feel free to make any changes to this.