Wood was born in Maidstone[1] in Kent, England, before her parents moved to South Africa, where her father was a brewery manager and landscape painter, and was brought up over there.

If challenged as to her Scottish birthright, she would reply, "One does not have to be a horse to be born in a stable", echoing the old proverb that is sometimes misattributed to the Duke of Wellington, albeit for a different purpose.

On Bannockburn Day in 1932, Wood led a group of nationalists into Stirling Castle, then an Army barracks as well as being open to tourists; to tear down the Union Flag and replace it with Scotland's lion rampant.

[2] Eric Linklater wrote that she flushed the Union Jack down the toilet, and she sued him for libel, eventually settling out of court for a farthing damages.

Wood hung an effigy of the Secretary of State for Scotland in Glasgow in 1950 and displayed a Home Rule banner at that year's Highland Games.

[7] In 1960, Wood spoke at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, to try to mobilise them behind the re-convening of the Scottish Parliament, which she asserted had not been properly dissolved in 1707, merely adjourned.