One of my sisters spent a summer in Scotland in boarding school.............
My ancestors lived in Carrick (southern Ayrshire). There are several places where people of that surname lived but we don't know which of them might be our direct ancestors. I went there, and also to Edinburgh, Glasgow and up to the Orkney Islands.
A lot of the Protestant settlers of northern Ireland in the 1600s came from southwestern Scotland. By the 1700s a lot of them were fed up with the British government and went to the American colonies, where they tended to be very strong supporters of independence during the American Revolution.