When John McPhee returned to the island of his ancestors—Colonsay, twenty-five miles west of the Scottish mainland—a hundred and thirty-eight people were living there. About eighty of these, crofters and farmers, had familial histories of unbroken residence on the island for two or three hundred years; the rest, including the English laird who owned Colonsay, were "incomers." Donald McNeill, the crofter of the title, was working out his existence in this last domain of the feudal system; the laird, the fourth Baron Strathcona, lived in Bath, appeared on Colonsay mainly in the summer, and accepted with nonchalance the fact that he was the least popular man on the island he owned. While comparing crofter and laird, McPhee gives readers a deep and rich portrait of the terrain, the history, the legends, and the people of this fragment of the Hebrides.

An essential collection of criticism on the leading nature writers of today.

List of members in each vol.

Contains an historical account of the parish of Strachur and Stralachlan along with the glen of Glenbranter and the village of St. Catherine's.

Willie Gavin, Crofter Man is a portrait of a crofting life in the bare and sometimes bitter landscape of Scotland’s North-east lowlands. It is the closely reconstructed life of one man in particular, and beyond that, the wider story of a croft and its people, assembled from the family’s folk memories. Willie Gavin’s real identity has been blurred, but this is essentially a true story and is illustrated with a fascinating selection of period photographs. Through the eyes of Willie Gavin we experience the hardships and wretched lifestyle endured by crofters throughout Scotland. But with deep understanding David Kerr Cameron reveals too their love for the land, the fragile bonds of friendship forged by crafting families, the weddings and the festivals they enjoyed, and the children who were raised in that life without luxury. The traditional crofting way of life began to break down in the early-twentieth century, but David Kerr Cameron has captured and recorded for future generations a culture and a landscape that have now gone forever. Willie Gavin, Crofter Man is the second part of Cameron’s trilogy of rural life; the other books are The Ballad and the Plough (about life on the farmtouns) and The Cornkister Days (which focuses on agricultural practices).

This is an extraordinary collection of tales from one of the very greatest Gaelic storytellers, Angus MacLellan, and translated by one of Scotland’s finest Celtic Scholars, John Lorne Campbell. The stories in the book include every type of tale found on South Uist, from Fingalian heroes and ghost stories to international folktales and humorous and historical local anecdotes. These tales of ancient kings, thrilling escapes, jealous stepmothers and magic spells are fascinating not only for their narrative power, but also their links with myths and legends from Ireland, Scandinavia, France and Greece. The Hebrideaen island of South Uist was one of the last places in Western Europe where the ancient art of Storytelling was still honoured and practised, and the style of these translations is at once original and hypnotic, reflecting the oral tradition at their source.

This case study focuses on Geall, a community in the Scottish Outer Hebrides. With an understanding gained from an intimate, long-term relationship with Scotland, things Scottish, and the people of the community the author describes Geall as a human community and places it in the wider cultural, historical, economic, and sociopolitical contexts of maintaining relationships to Scotland, England and Europe. This is the first book to look at a Scottish Highland Community and the first ethnography to utilize the semiotic theory of culture, which views history as an act of cultural creation. The book emphasizes the way symbols are used to interpret elements of the culture such as economy, power, mental illness, and religion, by exploring the significant symbols associated with the state, the mechanisms for integrating community and state, and how people define leaders and social role.