It is nearly two months since June's historic EU referendum and, over the course of the summer, what Brexit means has started to take shape.

The options for Scotland, too, are becoming clearer.

Three overarching questions will structure the UK's approach to Brexit: What kind of ongoing financial contribution will the United Kingdom have to make to the EU's institutions; to what extent (if at all) will UK legislation continue to be subject to the oversight of European law; and what sort of compromise will the UK have to accept in terms of border controls in order to access the European single market.

For access to the single market is never unconditional. Some sort of financial contribution, some acceptance of European law and some degree of free movement -- each of these will have to be negotiated.

Some politicians have started to talk about "hard" versus "soft" Brexit, but this is misleading. The truth is there is a spectrum of options, some retaining fuller integration with the EU than others. The softest form of Brexit would be that the UK simply exchanges its current EU membership for membership of the EEA-the European Economic Area.

This would bring not merely access to the single market, but would retain full membership of that market, with all the obligations to obey supranational European law that EU membership entails. Very little "control" would be "taken back". UK legislation would continue to be bound by the overriding verdicts of the European Court of Justice and we would be as fully signed up to the free movement of persons as we have been since the 1970s.

The hardest form of Brexit would be that, like the United States or Canada, we would have no formal relationship with the EU at all beyond any such trade agreements as we are able to negotiate. The ruptures this form of Brexit would entail are huge, not only to the economy but to our social and cultural life as well. An annual entry in the Eurovision song contest would be about the sum total of our European involvement.

The way forward, I would suggest, lies somewhere between these models. We should take our time to negotiate a bundle of bespoke but interconnected agreements with the EU tailored to our specific national interests. For sure, this cannot be done quickly -- it is more complex than taking a pre-existing model (such as EEA membership) off the shelf.

But the great advantage of pursuing this route is that we can ensure the deals we make with the EU fit the unique circumstances of the United Kingdom, Scotland included. Moreover, if there are distinct Scottish interests needing to be accommodated within the UK's Brexit package, this is the way of ensuring they are satisfied.

It is also by pursuing this route that the opportunities Brexit presents can be best exploited. Take agriculture. It has been decades since either Scotland or the UK have thought about what kind of farming and fishing policies best suit us. For nearly half a century we have simply applied the EU's common agriculture and common fisheries policies -- we have had no choice. But now we have the opportunity to think about, to design and to deliver a bespoke set of agriculture policies that work for us.

If "hard" versus "soft" Brexit is a false antithesis, so too is another myth that some politicians in Scotland are beginning to talk about: That Scotland will face a choice between remaining in the UK and remaining in the EU. There are several problems with this. First, Scotland is not and never has been a member state of the European Union: It is the UK that has been the member state. "Preserving Scotland's status" in the EU is therefore an impossibility because, formally, Scotland as such has no EU status to preserve.

Secondly, it needs to be remembered that on June 23 Scots did not vote for Scotland to remain in the EU: We voted for the United Kingdom to remain. Because the UK as a whole voted to leave, the whole of the UK will now leave and, as the Prime Minister has said on many occasions, "we are going to make a success of it". This means, at a minimum, that the United Kingdom is going to leave the EU together and is going to stay together thereafter.

Were any future independent Scotland to seek accession to the European Union it would be doing so on the same terms as any other applicant state: It would not be seeking to maintain the privileged terms of UK membership, with the British rebate, special British deal on VAT and British opt-outs from the euro and the Schengen free movement area. Thus, the choice between the United Kingdom we have and the European membership we have is one that can never be put.

Rather than myth-making, it would be much more constructive for Scotland's politicians to engage in the process of identifying precisely what interests we should be seeking to preserve and protect in the negotiations that will shortly commence with our European partners.

The Prime Minister has made it clear that she expects all the UK's devolved administrations to be fully involved in this process, and other EU member states have made it equally clear that it is with the UK itself -- and not with its component parts -- that they will negotiate.

If the Scottish Government truly wants what is best for Scotland, it has only one path: To work as closely as possible with the UK Government and not to use Brexit as an excuse for dusting off arguments about breaking Britain up.

Comment by Adam Tomkins, a Conservative MSP for Glasgow.