Carolina Nairne and her contemporary Robert Burns were influenced by the Jacobite heritage in their establishment of a distinct Scottish identity, through what they both called national song.

Nairne tends to focus on an earlier romanticised version of the Scottish way of life, tinged with sadness for what is gone forever, whereas Burns displays an optimism about a better future to come.

[4] Following the failure of the Jacobite rising of 1745 the Oliphant family[2] – along with the Robertsons and the Nairnes – was accused of high treason, exiled to France, and their estates seized.

The government eventually allowed the family's kinsmen to buy back part of the Gask estate, and the couple returned to Scotland two years before Carolina's birth.

The upbringing of Carolina and her siblings reflected their father's Jacobite allegiance, and their everyday lives were filled with reminders that he considered the Stewarts to be the rightful heirs to the throne.

[8] A governess was employed to ensure that the girls had a 'full education including music and art',[2] and that they did not speak in a broad Scots dialect, as their father considered it unladylike.

[8] General tuition was provided by a local minister – the children's prayer books had the Hanoverian sovereign's names obscured by those of the Stewarts – and music and dance teachers were also engaged.

[4] Delicate as a child, Carolina gradually developed into a genteel young woman, much admired by fashionable families;[9] she was well educated, able to paint and an accomplished musician familiar with traditional songs.

Although the two never met, together they forged a national song for Scotland, that in the words of Dianne Dugaw, Professor of English and Folklore at the University of Oregon, "lies somewhere between folk-song and art-song."

Purdie was gathering together "a collection of the national airs, with words suited for refined circles" to which Nairne contributed a significant number of original songs, all without attribution to her.

In "The Laird o' Cockpen", for instance, Nairne echoes the Jacobite distaste for the Whiggish displays and manners of the nouveau riche in post-Union Scotland, as does the evocative "Caller Herrin'".

– at the age of 75, adding a note in the manuscript that perhaps reveals much of her attitude to life: "The thirst of the dying wretch in the desert is nothing to the pining for voices which have ceased forever!"