I remember that, as a schoolchild, history never truly captured my interest. Many lessons seemed to consist largely of memorising lists of dates from the Hundred Years' War or the Wars of the Roses. It therefore came as something of a surprise that, later in life, when I decided to study subjects in order to gain university entrance qualifications, I chose history as one of them. I was even more surprised to discover that, for these qualifications, I could focus almost entirely on Scottish history. It was a genuine light-bulb moment. I found myself becoming deeply interested in Scotland's heritage and the story of the Scots. It was perhaps inevitable that when I began writing poetry in earnest, I returned once again to Scotland's past. I set myself the challenge of identifying twenty-five historical events that I might portray in verse. After much research and deliberation, I selected my twenty-five. Once they were written and revised, however, I felt compelled to add two more in order to bring the sequence up to the present day. In that way, my twenty-five became twenty-seven. I offer them in the hope that you may find them interesting and worthy of discussion.