FOR as long as I can remember, it has been a policy goal to boost tourism to Scotland. Tourism to Scotland has been going on for the last couple of centuries. It started when wealthy English people who had grown used to doing the Grand Tour of Europe found themselves caged in on their side of the Channel while Napoleon Bonaparte and his army waited at Boulogne to launch an invasion.

Of course it was the continent that had got cut off from England rather than England that had got cut off from the continent. However that may have been, an alternative was needed for holidaymakers. In Ireland they might still get their throats cut. Scotland had only recently been subdued, but it boasted an efficient judicial system that seemed able to keep the unruly population in sufficient order.

Experience of the country might still be a bit scary, for the natives had ways of their own that appeared to exclude outsiders. They were not keen to follow orders. They would mutter to each other in words and accents hard to understand. They would vanish into low, smoky howffs to get drunk. So they were also a bit slow in the mornings.

The travelogue of Dorothy Wordsworth, who in 1803 came on a tour with her brother, the poet William, is a hoot. After a long day they pitched up before the Drovers Inn at Inverarnan, only to be told it had no room. The rain was pelting down, and the next bed for the night lay 20 miles further on over a rough track to Inveraray. Food was off-putting: “a boiled sheep’s head, with the hair singed off”. Romantic it might all be, but it was filthy too.

We’ve come a long way in two centuries of pandering to tourists’ tastes, or trying to. During the 19th century Scotland went upmarket to attract travellers whose idea of a high old time was to shoot wild animals. During the 20th century Scotland went downmarket to compete in a mass market, which has brought us to our present dilemma.

We have reached the point where, for example, the good folk of Skye feel overrun, with every single bed sold every single night and the sights lost from view amid the crush of visitors thronging round them. Meanwhile in Edinburgh, people fear a flat on their stair may get put on Airbnb, so that all hell will be let loose by culture vultures in summer and stag parties in winter. Normal street life is banished by troupes of strolling players in the Royal Mile, amid coachloads of trippers from Barnsley or Milton Keynes with Royal Highlands or Bens and Glens posted on the front of their charabancs.

The National:

It is time, surely, to consider if mass tourism is such a good thing after all.

One trouble is our general worship of numbers. VisitScotland goes on and on about having so many hundreds of thousand visitors in one year, now and again maybe down from the year before, but hoping for more the following year, and of course aiming for another million in 2025. Here, as in other fields of national life, we too readily sacrifice quality to quantity. The more you want to bump up the numbers, the further downmarket you have to go.

VisitScotland once ran a fatuous campaign under the rubric of Autumn Gold. Perhaps this added up to a grudging admission that we do not usually have much of a summer, our present one being the first since 1976 – and, for my money, I hope the last for as long again. The Scottish climate, apart from being lousy in a general sort of way, is especially bad in August, when more rain falls than in the spring and early summer. Since, round the northern hemisphere, it is in the high season that the millions head abroad from their humdrum homes to their dreamland of sun, sand, surf and (if they are lucky) sex, there is no reason for them to come to Scotland, where all four commodities tend to be in shorter supply than on the Costa Brava or the Greek islands.

The National:

Some Italian friends of mine love this country just because it is so unlike Italy. They think a scene of roasting flesh stretched out under a merciless sun properly belongs in Dante’s Inferno. As they quickly tire of the Mediterranean midsummer’s glare, they want nothing so much as to get away to a loch where the mist hangs low, or a skein of cloud is drawn across the scree on a hill, or a poison-green bog beckons the unwary walker to squelch in up to his calves. What they seek in Scotland is something different, not something the same.

We should therefore be honest about what we offer. I suppose the idea behind Autumn Gold was to suggest to Americans that in Scotland they can discover a slightly exotic variation on their own season of the fall – when the vast forests of their country are a blaze of russet hues, which can last in the often balmy weather right up to Christmas.

Unfortunately, in Scotland gold just is not the dominant colour in the autumn or at any time of year. We have either evergreen trees which remain evergreen, or else deciduous trees from which the dead leaves drop off in a few days during the first storms of October, leaving them black and bare and skeletal. Tourists seduced by the PR catchphrase would only have been fooled once.

IF in an idle moment I leaf through the travel supplements, I discover a novel trend of the 21st century, a different temper of the times: not to join the hordes, but to pick out a place or activity away from it all where you can do your own thing. Whatever else might be said about Scotland, it would be hard to confuse it with any other place on Earth. So why indulge ourselves in the PR fantasy that, if only our sell is hard enough, our slogans slick enough, then indeed we can entice the touristic masses of the Costa Brava or the Greek islands?

I would just reply: wha’s like us? But if I was going to choose another tourist destination to emulate, it would not be the Costa Brava. Let me suggest Switzerland.

Switzerland is, of course, a richer country than Scotland with much higher mountains and a much more developed tourist industry. Yet there are similarities: the charming combinations of varied landscapes, the lovely lakes, the hidden valleys, the old towns, the people attached to their own way of life and impenetrable accents. Switzerland has some sun, a lot of rain too, but no sea or surf. Of sex, being good Calvinists, they do not speak. So how does it sell itself as a tourist destination? And how, unlike Scotland, does it make a huge success of that?

Switzerland achieves this not by going downmarket but by going upmarket. It has some of the world’s most exclusive resorts and luxurious mountain hotels. Its cities are wealthy and its countryside is fruitful. It is not interested in having hordes of tourists who slop about all day, get drunk at night, then fight one another or vomit in the streets. It actually discourages foreign coach tours by charging them outrageous tolls for the use of its motorways. Yet the contribution of tourism to the Swiss economy is enormous – far greater than what Scotland can boast. Switzerland limits quantity but more than makes up for it with quality.

The Swiss have things we do not have, yet we also have things they do not have, the ocean and the islands, the emptiness and freedom of the landscapes and the seascapes. The real difference is that they exploit their advantages to attract a wealthy clientele who will spend a lot of money. We throw our advantages away by preferring to attract plebeian tour operators, and the cheapskates they bring with them.