It helped reverse the centuries old view that the Highlands and Islands represented all that was brutish and uncivilised in Scotland, but the story of the Royal Celtic Society may be unknown to many.

It held its first meting in an Edinburgh pub in 1820, having been founded by Sir Walter Scott and other gentlemen with an interest in the Highlands. It was one of several organisations to emerge from the early 19th century romantic movement, and today one of only two survivors along with the Highland Society of London.

Since the middle ages profound animosity had characterised Lowland-Highland relations. With the crushing of the Jacobite cause an act of parliament was passed in 1747 which declared "no man or boy, within that part of Great Britain called Scotland . . . . will wear or put on the clothes commonly called Highland Clothes..". ."

Yet within a short time tartan, paintings of clan chiefs and landscapes of mountain and glen, were to be recognised internationally as the symbols of Scotland. The Royal Celtic Society's influence in that was significant, not least its role in George IV's historic visit to Edinburgh in 1822.

This week the society donated its 200-year-old archive to the National Library of Scotland, containing important documents about this period.

Dr Ulrike Hogg, the library's Curator of Gaelic, Music and Early Modern Collections, said “We're extremely grateful to the Society for the donation of this archive. It sheds an important light on the support and encouragement of Highland culture and traditions at such an early stage, and we are delighted that the National Library will be able to preserve these papers and make them available to the wider public.”

The society's first meeting was in Oman's Tavern, situated very close to where Register House now stands in Edinburgh, just off Princes Street.

But many see the process which transformed the image of the Highlands and Scotland as beginning earlier, with James Macpherson's publication in 1765 'The Works of Ossian Son of Fingal', which purported to be a translation of the words of the legendary Gaelic bard but was a highly successful hoax.

According to Highland historian Professor Jim Hunter : "Macpherson became an international sensation. Napoleon Bonaparte was a Macpherson fan. Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, read Macpherson every day. Scotland, courtesy of Macpherson, had been put on the world's literary map and had got there in a Highland guise.

"In the 19th century this continued with the still greater international success enjoyed by Walter Scott. Unlike Macpherson, who looked to remote antiquity for his material, Scott - in novels like Waverley - dealt with the Highlands as they'd been, or supposedly been, in the era of Bonnie Prince Charlie."

With all the tartan trappings of the royal visit in 1822, the process was unstoppable.The idea of the kilt as Scotland's national dress, was given royal affirmation.

According to a spokesman "The Royal Celtic Society continues to promote and support the language, music, literature and culture of Scotland."