Being Scottish, you accept happiness, goodwill and bonhomie in small doses, so long as there is a respectable distance between them. Too much conviviality and benevolence makes us suspicious and edgy. Paranoia is just around the corner.

I began to experience such feelings about the slew of accolades that Scotland was gathering from august international bodies. Hardly a year went by, it seemed, without Scotland being voted the most beautiful country in the world or the best place to visit. Some of its islands, including Lewis and Harris, were pronounced among the world’s top five, while my own city of Glasgow regularly earned plaudits for the quality of its nightlife and the friendliness of its citizens. Even Edinburgh, a city where the phrase “happy hour” in pubs was a warning and not an invitation, picked up baubles for quality of life and all-round satisfaction. I know of one chap from the east who collects empty cigarette packets that carry those assorted depictions of impending death and disease. He greets each new morbid illustration with the same delight as finding the fiendishly rare Roberto Donadoni sticker in the 1990 Panini footballers collection.

But when you are asked to visit Dundee and Aberdeen on assignment because yet another travel guide has included each in its latest Index of Joy you begin to think: “Haud oan a minute.” It’s not that I disdain these two great north-east cities; it’s just that being douce, dour and a wee bit austere is a big part of their attraction for me.

In these places, you can ask for directions, safe in the knowledge that you will be extended the courtesy of a few rudimentary bearings and nothing more. In Glasgow, the seeker will often be taken by the arm and led to the exact location while being given a brief history of the neighbourhood. I know this because I have done it myself. We are so eager to please and to be liked that we spend hours fantasising about some startled American or English person returning home and telling all and sundry about just how welcoming and friendly Glaswegians are. I think it masks a degree of insecurity and it’s too late for me to change now. Last week, it was something of a relief to discover that Finland had been awarded top prize in something called the 2018 World Happiness report. Indeed, the top four places were all occupied by Nordic countries, with Finland followed by Norway, Denmark and Iceland. The annual report is published by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which stated that these nations were highly rated for level of income, life expectancy, social support, freedom, trust and generosity.

It seems, too, that I may not be the only Scot who has become slightly weary of all these global awards. Several distressing developments at some of Scotland’s most totemic and anointed spaces in recent weeks have made me wonder if the tartan junta that runs civic Scotland has also decided that Scotland’s beauty and appeal is beginning to get out of hand.

In January, plans to build a housing estate next to Culloden Moor, site of one of the most important battlefields in the nation’s history, were given the go-ahead. This land is a sacred war grave. Yet the Scottish government’s planning reporter had given consent to the development, which would lie just half a mile from the main battlefield. Now there is to be a second hearing on the plans submitted by the developer after it emerged that local councillors had voted through the plans “by mistake”. Aye, right. A couple of hundred miles down the road from Culloden, another of Scotland’s grandest stretches of wilderness is also about to be violated. Another housing estate, this one comprising 375 homes, is to be built at Loch Lomond and the Trossachs national park. The justification for this piece of despoliation deploys a familiar phraseology that includes “housebuilding boom” and “regeneration of the area”.

Quite why one of the most beautiful spaces in Europe needs to be “regenerated” is left unexplained. That only a quarter of these homes are deemed “affordable” tells you all you need to know. Scotland, like the rest of the UK, has a serious shortage of affordable homes and this won’t address it. Instead, the Scottish government, along with the national park authority, has chosen to make one of the nation’s most naturally beautiful spaces liable to exploitation by the property-speculator class.

In Edinburgh, councillors and planners are obviously sick of being regarded as the UK’s best-looking city. The splendour of the city centre, a Unesco world heritage site, is a distant memory. It seems to have been vying for the title of Europe’s poshest building site for much of the past decade. In that time, a sum of money eclipsing the economies of small nation states has been spent on a toy tram system that manages to miss out most of the city.

Its unique built heritage near Princes Street is in the process of being disfigured by a nasty-looking hotel development that looks like it was designed by Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men. Meanwhile, in Glasgow, the councillors seem determined to turn large parts of the city into student theme parks, with outsized metal dormitories overshadowing much of its unique Georgian and Victorian heritage. This, too, is accompanied by the usual wretched lexicon of “progress”.

Welcome to Scotland, still pimping its natural treasures into the 21st century.

• Kevin McKenna is an Observer columnist