The story is set in the mythical Scotland of the past. The actors are young people from the streets of Glasgow, playing the kind of characters they might have been centuries ago - outlaw bands who live in a deserted countryside.

Dermid and Grannia fall in love, but they cannot be happy together, because she is already married, and so a sad tale full of fantasy and magic is unfolding against a background of a forgotten culture.

This culture has been destroyed, and the Scotland of today is still paying for this crime, as the film implies in its many allusions to the present.