Some poetry, pipers and politics for the people

Supporters of a Scottish parliament crossed the land in a bus, winning hearts and minds on the way

It was midnight, at the top of Drumochter Pass. We stopped the minibus and climbed out into the darkness, scented with invisible heather and bog myrtle, to look up at the sky. It was uncannily clear, the Milky Way lying like a silver fleece across the northwest. As we stared, a brilliant meteor flashed out of the constellations and slid towards the Pole.

We sensed a good omen. As the bus set off again, its occupants began to recite and sing. One repeated Alexander Montgomerie's old poem: "The royal palace of the highest Heaven/ The stately furnace of the starry round ... " Deep in the small hours, I half-woke to hear the novelist William McIlvanney softly rendering Sinatra ballads. Chancellor Seafield signed away the Scottish parliament in 1707 with the famous words "Here's ane end to ane auld sang". But old songs never end.

The "Bus Party" was making an overnight run from Inverness to our next date at Biggar in the early morning. Then it would be Lesmahagow, Peebles, Galashiels. We were campaigning through the last 100 hours before the Referendum, trying to use every moment left to meet people. But this was no conventional "yes-yes" effort, nothing to do with political parties. We were a travelling conversation and ceilidh, haring round the land to listen and learn as well as to speak and entertain.

The idea came from Germany. Back in the 1960s, at a time of suffocating conformity in West German politics, the novelist Gunter Grass, decided to stir up trouble. The opposition Social Democrats had the right ideas, he felt - reconciliation with eastern Europe, a bolder public life - but were too timid to voice them. So he hired a bus, stuffed his friends into it and set out round the small towns and villages. There he would throw parties, make heretical speeches and encourage local people to open up their private hopes and fears.

But his "Bus Party" was not just a new, ribald style of politicking. It was a two-way process. The band of big-city intellectuals on board were also discovering their own country, a Germany they only knew about from reading novels. They listened to the fantasies and nightmares of people with little education - people they would normally have avoided with a snigger. They argued with local politicians, and with one another. They preached, but also they learned.

Could something like this be done in Scotland? Some of us thought it could and should. The chance to revive a Scottish parliament after three centuries was - or ought to be - a choice calling for the most profound reflections on responsibility and liberty, history and the future. But as early as last year, the menace of dire, routine Scottish campaigning began to emerge. The same old faces were preparing to squabble about the same old petty conundrums; the people would watch with gloomy scepticism as the politicians rattled on about the tartan tax, the West Lothian Question, local government sleaze and the business rate. Passion would be monopolised by the inanities of the Braveheart tendency. There was a danger that the Scots would be so alienated by this debate that they would not bother to vote, or return such a lukewarm, indecisive verdict that - as in 1979 - devolution would be stillborn.

So the Bus Party was dreamed up. The journey of Gunter Grass had not swung an election; neither would we. But by word of mouth and the media, the rumour of a different way of doing politics - maverick, enjoyable, coaxing people to speak their hearts rather than obey slogans - had filtered into German awareness. Perhaps we could achieve something like that.

We soon found our Grass. William McIlvanney is the best-known novelist in Scotland; every small-town bookshop stocks a row of his works. His tall, spare figure, the lean face with the Clark Gable moustache, is recognised everywhere. Better yet, he has orator's magic: that west of Scotland eloquence that thaws a wary audience into laughter and then seizes their hearts as the wit turns serious. With him came the critic Joyce Macmillan, the teacher Margaret Mackintosh, the young piper Fin Moore, the minister Willie Storrar, who organised the whole journey, the radical lawyer Alan Miller. Billy Kay, promoter of popular song and oral history, was there, and the historian Isobel Lindsay. Poets - Douglas Dunn, Robert Crawford, Matthew Fitt - came and went; we were joined by folk singers such as Sheena Wellington, Rod Paterson and Mairi Campbell, whose baby daughter slept on our laps as the bus toiled across the Border hills.

We seemed always to be crossing rivers: Forth and Tay, Don and Dee, Deveron and Spey, Ythan and Ugie, Gala Water and Tweed. Amateurs at campaigning, stress and lack of sleep pitched us into peaks and troughs of feeling. But emotion was close to the surface in the audiences too. An old man in the Town house at Inverness said: "Never again will this chance come. Your fathers and grandfathers look down at you", and I heard a hiss of indrawn breath all around me. "Let politics look after itself - this is a moral and a spiritual decision", and the sober citizenry broke into applause. At Galashiels, the night before the poll, Mairi Campbell sang "Auld Lang Syne" to the touching melody which was Burns's first choice for it. It was a reminder that old times were ending and a new time opening, and - I swear it - I saw tears on solid, red-cheeked Borders faces.

But there was fun too. There was the Arbroath schoolboy who said; " I want the parliament to help wee-bitty Third World companies to compete wi' multinationals. And mair flags!" There was the couple from the Home Counties visiting Forres: "Good luck to you. But mind you don't get a rotten government like we've had in England for the last 20 years!" There was the chippie in Stonehaven which pressed on us the local delicacy, deep-fried Mars bar in batter (a killer, but tasty). There was the man in St Machar's cathedral at Aberdeen who shouted: "Comparing Scots to sheep is an insult to sheep. Sheep don't have the vote, and if they did they wouldn't vote for mutton pie!"

And there were topics which never came up. Where were the scab-picking orgies, so dear to intellectuals, about Scottish identity? The pupils at Mintlaw Academy in the heart of Buchan knew just who they were, and only wanted their "Doric" speech - now taught in the school - to be better respected. "Why should some shopkeeper force me to use a language that's no mine?" a boy asked me. Willie McIlvanney commented: "Scottishness is like an old insurance policy you can't lay your hand on when you need it." But the people we met on this journey knew exactly where to find it. It follows that the other thing we didn't encounter was anglophobia. A girl from Biggar High School told me: "I don't feel put down because I'm Scottish. The English and the Scots put each other down in a perfectly normal way." At Forres we met English families from the RAF base at Kinloss who were happily preparing to vote "yes".

But there are places a parliament cannot reach. We went to the desolate housing scheme at Middlefield, in Aberdeen. "Powerlessness to the people!" said a social worker. "I see families come here and disintegrate month by month." Local authorities foster this dependency culture by refusing to trust self-help community groups with money. It was a microcosm of the worst aspect of Scotland - an archipelago of undemocracies, run by power cliques who want as few people as possible to participate in running their own lives.

At midnight on Wednesday, we returned to our starting-place: the Calton Hill in Edinburgh, where the empty parliament building waits. The Vigil veterans, who had squatted at the gate for just 1,979 days to demand a Scottish parliament, greeted us with whisky. Speeches, embraces, a last tune from Fin Moore's pipes as passing cars hooted greetings.

We agreed that we had learned much and shared much. Then William McIlvanney recited the ancient lament for King Alexander III, one of this small country's many lost leaders: "Succour Scotland and remede/That stayed is in perplexitie". And quietly, without trumpets, Referendum Day began.