Scottish Hospitality

I saw a stranger yestreen;
I put the food in the eating place,
Drink in the drinking place,
Music in the listening place;
And, in the sacred name of the Triune,
He blessed myself and my house,
My cattle and my dear ones.
And the lark said in her song,
Often, often, often,
Goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise;
Often, often, often,
Goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise.
— Old Gaelic Rune recovered by Kenneth Macleod.

Among the ancient Scots it was deemed infamous in a man to have the door of his house shut, lest, as the bards express it, ‘the stranger should come and behold his contracted soul’.

The free and open hospitality survived much later in Scotland, and particularly in the Highlands, than in the
supposedly more highly civilized countries of Europe.

Robert Burns, who made a tour of the Highlands in 1787, leaves an enduring tribute to the virtue of hospitality in the race to which he was bound by blood and sentiment:

When death’s dark stream I’ll ferry over
A time that surely shall come
In heaven itself I’ll ask no more
Than just a Highland welcome.

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