I am trying to tell Andy Scott, without sounding like a horse’s arse, what his two big Kelpies by the side of the M9 mean to me.

I’m telling him this because of an atrocious article about them written several years ago by the art critic of a London broadsheet. He’d dismissed them for being too accessible and for not possessing a sufficient degree of complexity. What he really seemed to be saying was that if too many of the plebs appreciate a piece of art then it must be aesthetically worthless.

“That article was snobbery: pure and simple,” says Mr Scott. “I had no way to respond without seeming petty. It was written to maintain a degree of superiority. I wondered if the writer had just seen pictures of them online and decided from his cosy wee office in London that they didn’t conform to his view of what public art should look like. It was metropolitan elitism.”

Had the critic paused to pursue some intellectual inquiry? Why were there two of them; why were they located here; why were they posed the way they were; why were they that type of horse? “He’s probably thinking: ‘If the taxi driver can appreciate it then it must be shite,’ says Mr Scott.

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I tell him that if I’m driving to Edinburgh, I always now take the M9 route past Falkirk because of those Kelpies and how they lift your spirits and that, no matter how frenetic your day has been, these big metal beasts bring tranquillity.

The Kelpies were unveiled ten years ago, although by the time he’d come to make them he was already gaining international recognition as an important public artist. It was these 98-foot steel twins - where the Forth and Clyde Canal begins - that brought him to wider public attention.

Not long after their completion he moved to the US; first to Philadelphia, then latterly to Los Angeles. “We exhibited the small-scale Kelpies in New York in 2014 and staged an exhibition in the city. It went really well and that experience made me consider working in the US. There was also a bit of mid-life ‘if we don’t try it now we never will’. I’d........

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