In Beyond Burns on Radio 4 this week, Alistair Heather led a stravaig aboot (a wander around) Scotland, from Dundee to Orkney, on which he was guided by the work of local poets of place, writing in the Scots language. I can’t claim to have understood every one of the poems on first hearing — even though I grew up in Northern Ireland, where, as Seamus Heaney reminded us in “A Birl for Burns”, the Scots influence was in our ears from early on. But it was certainly worth putting the programme on rewind and, as Heather puts it, “takin’ time to understand folk on their ain terms”. At the end, he brings in Kathleen Jamie, who recently passed on the baton of Makar, Scotland’s national poet, to Peter Mackay. Can the Scots language, he asks her, “sing the song of place for an entire country”?