An image of Jamie in a kilt on an episode of Doctor Who was the inspiration for Diana Gabaldon’s best selling Outlander books, she says.

The successful time-travelling Outlander novels, which have been translated to the screen in a television show that has been filming in Glasgow, have ignited many readers’ enthusiasm for Scottish history.

However the author of the novels, whose screen adaptation for the Starz network stars Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe in the lead roles of Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall, said it was the “powerful and compelling” vision on Doctor Who that compelled her to write the books, rather than Jacobite history.

Ms Gabaldon watched The War Games, a classic Doctor Who serial, on PBS, with the character Jamie McCrimmon, a young Scot from 1745, played by actor Frazer Hines.

The author talks about the conception of the novels in a new documentary for the Gaelic channel BBC Alba, Sar-sgeoil: Outlander, which airs this Thursday, September 29.

Ms Gabaldon, who was a professor of environmental science before she wrote Outlander, tells presenter Cathy MacDonald that before the Doctor Who show, she had no prior knowledge of Scotland or its history.

She said: “I didn’t know anything about Scotland but the image of the men in kilts stayed in my head.

“I then wanted to have a strong female character to create a sexual tension and I decided to have an English woman to create conflict.

“Then as I started writing the character of Claire Randall she just wouldn’t speak like an 18th century Englishwoman at all. She was speaking in a modern tone of voice and… I hit upon having her travel back in time.”
Ms MacDonald visits some of the Scottish locations which inspired the novels.

Of Culloden, Gabaldon says: “I’ve walked on a lot of battlefields. Most of them are not haunted. That one is.”

Caitriona Balfe was spotted filming scenes for the latest series of Outlander in Glasgow last week.

Onlookers watched as Caitriona, 36, and Tobias Menzies, 42, were filmed.