At the National Museums Collection Centre, on the green edge of Edinburgh, curator Patrick Watt is showing me an extraordinary range of artefacts: some crockery Samuel Johnson used on his grand tour of the Hebrides; a flute which Robert Burns acquired on one of his journeys to the Highlands, and a portrait of Colonel David Stewart, who transformed King George IV's visit to Edinburgh into a lavish carnival of Highland regalia.

Wild & Majestic challenges some of our most cherished assumptions about Scottish heritage and culture

What do these curios have in common? They're relics of Scotland's romantic past, a story whose factual origins have become buried beneath a mountain of fictitious whimsy.

They all feature in a new exhibition called Wild & Majestic: Romantic Visions of Scotland, a show which challenges some of our most cherished assumptions about Scottish heritage and culture.

"There's been a longstanding idea here in Scotland that we know our history, that we know the symbols of Scottishness," says Watt. "Bagpipes, warrior culture, beautiful dramatic landscapes, Highland dress… We wanted to understand where this romantic view sits in relation to the reality of Scotland. Is this romantic view of Scotland real?"

Wild & Majestic focuses on the period between the Battle of Culloden in 1746 and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, an era in which Scotland experienced enormous social change. Cities like Glasgow became centres of vast wealth and awful poverty – yet Scotland's public image became increasingly bucolic and nostalgic. How did this mismatch come about?