The Back O’ the Hill: Highland Yesterdays

This book is a blend of memories of a boyhood spent, just after the war, at Craigag, the earl of Morton’s Victorian shooting lodge near Glenfinnan, and a study of the history of that small once-Gaelic place. It is written from the point of view of some scholarship, and from the point of view of someone whose historical and ethnographic research work has been done mostly from Judique in Cape Breton. The author’s imaginative and stimulating blend of personal reminiscence and rigorous research demonstrates that Highland history can almost always be, and often best is, done from a local starting point. It exposes the first struggles from ruralism into industrialism on the fringes of Lochaber and Ardgour and what happened in a depopulated area of Gaelic Scotland for a century from 1840.