AS a writer about history, I sometimes have to confront issues that have surfaced out of the past to cause controversy in the present day.

One such is the plan to transport the Stone of Destiny from Edinburgh Castle to Westminster Abbey so that King Charles III can sit on it when he is crowned on May 6. At his coronation, King Charles will sit in King Edward’s Chair, built on the orders of Edward I of England, the Hammer of the Scots, to house the Stone of Destiny that he had stolen from Scone.

The traditional coronation stone on which generations of Kings of Scots had sat when being crowned, the Stone of Destiny, or Stone of Scone, was brought back to Scotland in 1996 in a publicity stunt by the then Scottish secretary Michael Forsyth.

There have been several suggestions in recent days that Scotland should not hand it back even temporarily, notably by National columnist and former MP Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, but the fact is that the Royal Warrant which permitted the stone’s return to Edinburgh specifically states – and has the force of law – that it must always be sent to London for coronation ceremonies for as long as they continue. Who knows how many more there will be…

The task of getting the stone to London and back safely again will be carried out by the police and the army on behalf of the Commissioners for the Safeguarding of the Regalia, a committee of the great and the good which was first established after the Honours of Scotland, our Crown Jewels, were re-discovered by Sir Walter Scott in 1818.

The current Commissioners include the Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland, better known as First

Minister Nicola Sturgeon, and Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain KC. Being lawyers, those two will not want to break the legally-binding Royal Warrant so any thought of withholding the stone has already perished.

Now I’m not going to get into the arguments about whether King Charles should be perching the royal bahookey over the stone, the symbolism of which is obvious. I am quite relaxed about the whole thing because after many years of on-and-off research about the whole issue, I have reached the conclusion that the Stone of Destiny that will be sent to Westminster is not the original coronation stone of the Scots, brought with them when they came from Ireland to establish the kingdom of Dalriada.

Some accounts maintain that it was the altar stone brought by St Columba to Iona, others that it was only moved to Scone after Kenneth MacAlpin united the Scots and Picts under his rule around the year 843. We know for certain that it was looked after by priests and monks, latterly of the Augustinian order, until the late 13th century.

The evidence that the stone in Edinburgh Castle is the same stone stolen by Edward Longshanks is pretty overwhelming. Edward I really did attempt to smash Scotland’s identity after his overwhelming victory at the Battle of Dunbar in 1296, just as he had done after his savage crushing of a Welsh uprising, and he sent his cavalry to Scone where they found the Stone of Destiny. It was taken south along with this country’s most famous relic, the Black Rood of St Margaret which allegedly contained a piece of Jesus Christ’s cross, and the then Scottish regalia.

The Rood has long since been lost, probably destroyed at the time of the English Reformation, though one author claims that it is in Durham Cathedral, and parts of the regalia such as the crown were returned and then rebuilt and added to in the 16th century, but the Stone of Destiny was permanently on public display in Westminster Abbey from around 1300 onwards. Every English monarch from Edward II to Elizabeth I was crowned on it, and from the Union of the Crowns in 1603, every monarch of the United Kingdom since then has also sat in King Edward’s Chair with the stone in its special compartment.

You can ask why the Church of England allowed stolen property to be stored in its Abbey for centuries. You could also argue that the stone should not be sent back to Westminster because the English aren’t very good at looking after it – a piece of it was deliberately chopped off in the 18th century and both Irish nationalists and suffragettes managed to damage it before it was famously repatriated in 1950 by a group of four young Scottish nationalists, the stone sustaining damage during their raid on the Abbey.

Rumours that it was replaced with a fake before it was handed back at Arbroath Abbey can be discounted as the late great Ian Hamilton himself said the returned stone was the same one he and his friends had removed.

Yet was it the original Stone of Destiny? I don’t think so.

The stone was examined by experts at Edinburgh Castle and found to weigh 336lbs or 152kgs, and as they reported in the Scottish Journal of Geology in 1998, the stone “resembles that of Lower Devonian sandstones from the Perth area”. In particular, the texture, mineral assemblage and colour are similar to those of sandstones from the Scone Formation in the vicinity of Quarry Mill, near Scone Palace itself.

All the early testimonies about the stone say it was black and possibly meteoric in nature, and shaped like a chair. Alex Salmond, who many people may not know is an avid student of Scottish history, thinks the stone is a fake, and so do I – the monks at Scone knew Longshanks was on the rampage and could easily have fashioned a similar stone before they were raided. I just do not believe that those monks would have allowed Scotland’s greatest treasure to be stolen in such cavalier fashion.

Tellingly, though Edward III said he would give it back, Robert the Bruce and his son David II did not press too hard for its return, and the latter was crowned at Scone in 1331 – was the real Stone of Destiny taken out of hiding for the occasion?

Next week, I’ll tell the story of truly scandalous English behaviour against Scotland that involves several Scottish local authorities and, tangentially, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.