THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

For more than a century and a half the real story of Scotland’s connections to transatlantic slavery has been lost to history and shrouded in myth. As this foreword shows, this important book by leading scholars and historians sheds light on a previously untold area of Scotland’s history by uncovering the country’s connection to slavery in the Caribbean.

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Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection
Edited by Tom M Devine
Published by Edinburgh University Press

Foreword by Philip D. Morgan

Scotland’s connections to slavery can seem tenuous, almost nonexistent. After all, few vessels left Scottish ports for Africa to participate in the horrific slave trade. By the end of the eighteenth century, when England had a black population of about 15,000, perhaps fewer than one hundred black slaves resided in Scotland. Furthermore, Scots were in the vanguard of the abolitionist movement; and Scotland can pride itself as a pioneering abolitionist nation. A country that was about 10 per cent of the United Kingdom population contributed at times about a third of the petitions to Parliament advocating abolition of the slave trade. Iconic figures such as James Ramsay and William Dickson were in the forefront of the opposition to the slave trade. Moreover, in Duncan Rice’s view, scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment ‘perfected most of the eighteenth century’s rational arguments against slavery’. Scottish philosophers discussed slavery at greater length than their continental counterparts. Adam Smith’s famous The Wealth of Nations contains a condemnation of the slave trade and slavery not only as morally repugnant but as economically inefficient. Is it any surprise that many general histories of modern Scotland fail to mention slavery at all?

But the essays in this impressive collection make clear that, if Scots think their country has few or no connections to slavery, they are sorely mistaken. In effect, they are engaging in a form of collective amnesia, for in fact Scotland’s connections to slavery were extensive. Scots participated fully in slave trading from ports such as Liverpool, Bristol and London. At the height of the slave trade, a fifth of the ship captains and two-fifths of the surgeons manning slavers out of Liverpool, the world’s major slave-trading port at the time, were Scots. The image of Scots, dressed in tartan, playing golf by the slaving fort of Bance Island, Sierra Leone, points to the quotidian nature of Scottish involvement in that nefarious business. One Scottish slave trader thought so familiarly of slavery that he named his vessel after his daughter. This book shows that Scots owned and managed enslaved people in many New World slave societies – from Maryland to Trinidad, from St Croix to St Kitts. Scottish slave owners named many of their slaves and their plantations in ways to remind themselves of home. According to Edward Long, the historian of late eighteenth-century Jamaica, one-third of the whites on that island were Scots. Other societies such as Grenada and the other Windward Islands, as well as Demerara and Berbice, also experienced heavy Scottish influxes. In the early nineteenth century, Scots accounted for about a third of the planters on St Vincent. Scots fulfilled many roles within New World slave societies: from indentured servants to bookkeepers, from merchants to bankers, from attorneys to planters, from nurses to doctors. The scale of Scottish involvement in the slave economies and societies of the New World was therefore wide and deep. If Scotland can boast of its abolitionists, it should also take ownership of the many Scots who defended and profited from the institution. Even the slaves themselves took note of Scots: in one colony they tagged shellfish that clung to one another as clannish Scotchmen.

The economic links between Scotland and New World slave societies were impressive. Slave societies provided markets for Scottish textiles, herring and a range of manufactured goods. In turn, those societies supplied Scotland with tobacco, sugar, rum, coffee and cotton. Capital from the Chesapeake and the Caribbean made its way into Scottish industries and landownership. Indeed, as Sir Tom Devine suggests in Chapter 11, the small scale of the Scottish domestic market and the nation’s relative poverty probably accentuated the impact of the slave-based economies of the Atlantic. As he notes, there is evidence pointing to ‘an even greater per capita Scottish stake’ in British imperial slavery than for any of the other nations of the United Kingdom.

At the same time, this outsized Scottish involvement in the slavebased economies of the Atlantic must not be exaggerated. The Scots were not much of a presence in Barbados or some of the Leeward Islands. Between 1750 and 1834 only about 34,000 Scots travelled from Scotland to the West Indies, a small proportion of the Scottish population of just over 1.5 million in 1801. Furthermore, the Caribbean was a graveyard not just for slaves but for immigrant whites, many of whom died within a few years of arrival. A commercial handbook published in 1766 for ‘men of business’ in Glasgow recommended sending ‘two, three or more’ factors to the West Indies so ‘that on the death of one’, others could replace him. The famous volatility of the Antilles took its toll on Scots. The impact of slavery on the homeland was also limited in some respects. As Nicholas Draper emphasises in Chapter 8, only ‘between 5 and 10 per cent of British elites were close enough to the slave-economy to appear in the compensation records, as owners, mortgagees, legatees, trustees or executors’. The other 90 to 95 per cent had no discernible connections to slavery. Scotland, it is true, is over-represented among absentee slave-owning claimants, accounting for 15 per cent of them. Still, the point Draper makes about the general significance of slavery also applies to the Scots, namely that ‘slave wealth could be incidental in the sense that other sources of wealth appear to dwarf it in the composition of an individual’s overall net worth’.

More work therefore remains to be done precisely linking slavery to Scots at home and in the diaspora. The impact on Scotland – not just measured in investments but in everything from diet to country houses to material culture – will also need careful and precise calibration. But any claim that Scotland grew rich from slavery may not be easily sustained. The flow of profits from slaving and slave-related business, while notable, probably accounted for only a small proportion of domestic capital formation. The value added by the Caribbean sugar sector was approximately 2 per cent of British national income. As Devine notes below, ‘the origins of industrialism were far from being monocausal’. Rather, he adds, ‘the commitment of the landed elites to economic improvement, indigenous levels of literacy, the practical impact of improving Enlightenment thought, English markets within the Union, new technologies and the indigenous natural endowment of coal and ironstone resources, inter alia, were all part of the mix’. Slavery was important to Scotland’s development, as these essays abundantly and rightly demonstrate, but quite how profound the institution’s impact was awaits further investigation. Still, these splendid path-breaking essays point the way forward, by providing a sturdy foundation on which others can build.

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Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection edited by Tom M Devine is out now published by Edinburgh University Press priced £19.99.

Ever wondered how a book is illustrated? In this guest blog by the National Galleries of Scotland, we’re taken behind the scenes of the making of An Art Adventure, a specially commissioned colouring book by the talented Eilidh Muldoon who graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2013. So read on for an art adventure…

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An Art Adventure
By Eilidh Muldoon
Published by NGS Publishing

An Art Adventure blog by Sarah Worrall, former Publishing Project Manager at the National Galleries of Scotland

I spend a lot of time immersed in long texts, questioning everything – making sure a book will become a complete and whole object; in tandem with all the labour that goes into the words from both author and publisher, will it be a nice product that people want to pick up and hopefully run off with…?

In keeping with this latter aim, I had the great pleasure of working with the illustrator Eilidh Muldoon on the latest National Galleries of Scotland Publishing venture, a children’s colouring book. It was a complete change for me – a book with very few words, and I was working with an artist, not an author. Eilidh had already worked with the Education Department at the Galleries, so they put us in touch and we began to discuss the possibility of a colouring book that takes people on a journey around the National Galleries of Scotland.

The book went through only a few drafts, with much valued input from several parties within and outside the Galleries. Meg Faragher, Families & Communities Learning Coordinator, held a tester day with some early proofs of the book, where it became apparent that all ages enjoyed colouring in and it became an activity that was happily shared between generations. I’d had initial doubts that a four year old would have the patience to colour in such (beautiful) detail. This doubt was quickly shot to pieces by several dedicated and focused four year olds.

Similar to Mindfulness colouring in, the book has a subtle narrative and aims to engage ‘readers’ with Edinburgh, buildings and works of art. Each time the book went for a revision, the pages came back to be met with genuine delight. I wanted the book to have a tactile sketchbook feel: something not too precious that can be carted about Edinburgh and enjoyed. My own four year old happily tested the dummy book’s robustness with a variety of pens resulting in no punctures and the binding holding strong.

I’m only used to working with InDesign and Microsoft Word files, so in the sometimes anxious pre-to-press moment I asked Eilidh, ‘if we need to change something within the illustrations at the last moment – do you have to redraw the whole page, or can you correct it magically?’  Cue a wise look from Eilidh: ‘Err, I can change it. By magic.’

 

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An Art Adventure: Around the National Galleries of Scotland is out now published by NGS Publishing priced £7.95. This article was originally published on the National Galleries of Scotland blog.

We’re also doing an exciting giveaway with NGS Publishing where you can win a copy of An Art Adventure and Charles Rennie Mackintosh In France. Find out the deadlines and how to apply in this article about the competition.

Towards the end of his life, Charles Rennie Mackintosh gave up his principal career as an architect and moved to the south of France where he devoted himself to painting in watercolour. This introductory excerpt contextualises these paintings in relation to Mackintosh’s wider career whilst the accompanying spreads showcase some key work from this lesser-known period of Mackintosh’s life.

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Charles Rennie Mackintosh In France: Landscape Watercolours
By Pamela Robertson and Philip Long
Published by NGS Publishing

Today Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) is celebrated worldwide as one of the most creative and individual architect-designers of the 1890s and early 1900s. His achievements are promoted in international exhibitions and publications, and his works fetch world-record prices at auction. Such acclaim was not achieved in Mackintosh’s lifetime, and he spent the final four years of his life in quiet seclusion in the south of France, with his wife, Margaret Macdonald (1864–1933). There, he devoted himself to painting, producing a series of some forty watercolours depicting mountain landscapes, farm buildings, hill towns, ports and flowers. The watercolours are both highly sophisticated compositions and also important documents. In the absence of other evidence, they provide a valuable visual diary of the couple’s final years together, and resonant testimony to Mackintosh’s mastery of the watercolour medium. […]

When Mackintosh moved abroad in 1923, he began a period in his life and working practice which, in comparison with all the phases of his earlier career, can be characterised by its isolation. In France he produced a body of work that was required to satisfy nothing more than his critical temperament and a wish that his efforts might culminate in an exhibition. This is in marked contrast to the years for which he remains best known, the decade or so around 1900, when his work and his professional reputation were shaped in a more public way: through his relationship with clients, his critical reception, and his contact with progressive artists across Europe.

For Mackintosh, however, this vital period was short, and from around 1910 the story of his career is traditionally seen as one of decline. Fourteen years separate the completion of his final major building project (the second phase of the Glasgow School of Art, finished in 1909) and his departure for France. A range of circumstances contributed to Mackintosh’s difficulties during this time, not least changing fashions in architecture and the paralysing effects of the First World War. Although Mackintosh remained active as a designer and painter, the succession of unrealised architectural projects exacerbates a perception that his late watercolours are remote and detached in style from his earlier work. There was virtually no public awareness of the paintings he produced in France until their inclusion in the Mackintosh Memorial Exhibition held in 1933, a fact that contributes to a romantic interpretation of Mackintosh’s later circumstances. The paintings themselves, however, are made with a conviction and have a coherence which emphasises their importance to Mackintosh as a new phase in his work and, for him, the circumstances of their making must have been liberating.

Mackintosh’s French paintings are not made with the radical approach to art and design that characterises his more startling early work. In turning full-time to painting, it is fascinating to think that Mackintosh might have developed as fresh an artistic language as he had in his designs from the 1890s onwards, which as a young man had surprised his contemporaries and brought him attention from across Europe. The fact that his late paintings were not overtly avant-garde should not be interpreted as a consequence of a failing imagination. Rather, his French watercolours can be seen as a natural, fully orchestrated development of the sketches of buildings and landscapes he first made while a student, a development which is traced through the introductory works in this exhibition and more fully in the preceding essay. Here, it is important to emphasise that from the outset of his career Mackintosh produced sketches of buildings and landscapes and in some of the most interesting of these explored the interweaving of the man-made and the natural, as he would in his French works thirty-five years later. In tune with Arts and Crafts ideals and those of Fra Newbery, the director of the Glasgow School of Art who fostered Mackintosh’s talent, Mackintosh always viewed himself as an artist, and artistic values constantly underpinned his work as an architect and designer. His sketches played a crucial part in the development of his architectural vocabulary; they can be described as the germ from which his innovative designs grew. Painting itself remained important for him throughout his career and if his late works are considered in a broader artistic context, we find that not only are they in tune with British painting of the time, but they also show Mackintosh’s wider knowledge of recent developments in European art.

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Charles Rennie Mackintosh in France, by Pamela Robertson and Philip Long, is published by the National Galleries of Scotland and priced £16.95. All images in this article are from the book.

We’re also doing an exciting giveaway with NGS Publishing where you can win a copy of An Art Adventure and Charles Rennie Mackintosh In France. Find out the deadlines and how to apply in this article about the competition.

This book exposes the stories of Scots who were guilty of dastardly deeds after leaving Scotland for America. These emigrants were rogues, con artists, charlatans and reprobates of the worst order. In some cases they literally got away with murder. Lundy explores their crimes in detail as this excerpt, on the centrality of a Scot – James Thomson Callender – to the controversial US presidential election campaign of 1800, shows.

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Between Daylight and Hell: Scots Who Left a Stain on American History
By Iain Lundy
Published by Whittles Publishing

The US election campaign of 1800 between President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson was to go down as the most malicious and poisonous in American history. These two luminaries who had helped the U.S. shake off her colonial shackles engaged in vitriolic personal attacks, dirty tricks and mud-slinging that would make the most hardened modern-day spin doctor blush. Far from behaving like statesmen, they traded insults like street urchins. It was a disrespectful and slanderous campaign and it brought nothing but shame on the new nation but naturally, the two protagonists let others do the dirty work.

Enter the Scot James Thomson Callender. Callender had left his native land under a cloud and carved out a career in America as a salacious journalist. His writing was undoubtedly powerful and eye-catching, although it was filled with personal invective, and he had developed a reputation as a muck-raking guttersnipe.

Under a variety of pen-names, Callender had been responsible for almost all the shocking anti-Adams propaganda. Every lie, every libel, every last hurtful insult that dripped from Callender’s quill was approved and financed by the great Thomas Jefferson – the man known as the Apostle of Democracy.

The election campaign was Callender’s most spectacular offensive. He enjoyed expressing his anger in print; he had been doing it all his life, and it was his way of earning a living. John Adams was only one victim of his pen; he also had the temerity to write disparagingly about the father of the nation, George Washington, another founding father Alexander Hamilton, and then without compunction, he turned the tables and directed his venom with devastating effect at his old friend Jefferson.

The Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair may have shocked the nation during the 1990s, but the scandal-mongering of James Callender uncovered the first two major sex scandals in United States history. Whatever criticisms can be levelled at Callender’s behaviour and the tenor of his writing, he achieved something no journalist has managed to do since – he single-handedly determined the outcome of a U.S. election and thereby altered the course of American history.

Callender’s reputation as a polemicist had caught the attention of Thomas Jefferson. The two men had met in Philadelphia and, with an election looming, Jefferson decided he wanted the Republican-minded journalist as his attack dog to maul Federalist rival John Adams. He cautiously provided financial support but tried to keep a discrete distance.

In return for Jefferson’s patronage, Callender promised the future president ‘a tornado as no government ever got before, for there is in American history a specie of ignorance, absurdity and imbecility unknown to the annals of any other nation’. It was a dark warning of what lay ahead. Callender aimed to destroy the sitting president of the United States; little did Adams realise the character assassination he was about to endure. Callender was in the mood to repay Jefferson’s investment – and then some.

In early 1800 the ‘tornado’ that Callender had promised Jefferson arrived with the publication of his most famous pamphlet The Prospect Before Us. It was political dynamite; it savaged John Adams in a way no American politician had ever been attacked before or, arguably, since. Jefferson was sent a copy for his approval and remarked, ‘Such papers inform the thinking part of the nation’. The document contained 20 separate passages that were found to be libellous. A copy was sent to Adams when he and his family were at home in Massachusetts. What they read horrified them; they knew the election campaign had degenerated but not to this level.

Callender wrote that Adams, who had led the country since the 1797 election, was ‘mentally deranged’. If he was re-elected he would, said Callender ‘crown himself king’ of the United States and he was already grooming his son, John Quincy Adams, as his successor to the throne. Other examples of Callender’s venomous penmanship included:

He is not only a repulsive pedant, a gross hypocrite and an unprecedented oppressor but, in private life, one of the most egregious fools on the continent.

Future historians will enquire by what species of madness America submitted to accept, as her president, a person without abilities, and without virtues; a being alike incapable of attracting either tenderness, or esteem.

John Adams is a blind, bald, crippled, toothless man…who secretly wants to start a war with France while he is not busy importing mistresses from Europe.

Callender was charged with and found guilty of sedition, jailed for nine months and fined $200. However, Jefferson triumphed in the election, and his first act was to pardon and release Callender, although he could not have guessed at the turn of events that lay ahead. Callender’s demands for money or a government post, both refused by the new president, turned him against Jefferson.

Then on 1 September 1802 Callender’s paper, the Richmond Recorder, carried a ‘literary weapon of mass destruction against the President’. The newspaper report read: ‘It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. …’ It added, ‘By this wench Sally, our president has several children…THE AFRICAN VENUS is said to officiate, as housekeeper, at Monticello’.

Yet again Callender had succeeded in finding his target by way of a scurrilous rumour. Jefferson had become the third serving U.S. president to be defamed in print by the Scot.

Finally it all backfired on Callender. Jefferson refused to dignify the allegation with a response, Virginia society closed ranks, and even Callender’s Federalist newspaper allies distanced themselves from him. Callender was jailed again in 1803 and ten days after he was released from jail, he was seen in a state of extreme intoxication in the streets of Richmond and the following day his body was recovered from the James River. Whether a drunken accident or suicide, it was a suitably melancholy end to a joyless life, and to a relatively short but bitter and tempestuous chapter in American political history.

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Between Daylight and Hell: Scots Who Left a Stain on American History by Iain Lundy is out now published by Whittles Publishing priced £18.99

Celebrated Edinburgh-based author Alexander McCall Smith takes us through an urban landscape of ‘ fragile beauty, of secretive corners and sudden vistas’ as he connects Edinburgh’s colourful architectural heritage with being a unique and inspiring city steeped in literature.

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 A Work of Beauty: Alexander McCall Smith’s Edinburgh
By Alexander McCall Smith
Published by Historic Environment Scotland

City of Literature

Is there something in the Edinburgh water that explains why the city has produced so many writers? BBC Scotland, in a playful mood, broadcast a discussion on this subject some years ago – on the First of April. It is hard to imagine anybody falling for such an absurdity, but the setting of a city – if not its water – probably does help literary creativeness. Edinburgh is a city of fragile beauty, of secretive corners and sudden vistas – such a city will always attract writers and provide them with inspiration.

In the nineteenth century Scotland held the attention of the romantic imagination in all branches of the arts, including music: Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor are examples of Scotland’s influence on composers, even if their actual experience of Scotland was slight. Painters, too, were drawn to the magnificence of the Scottish landscape, and indeed often exaggerated it in their romantic enthusiasm: Highland mountains often seem loftier in nineteenth century paintings, waterfalls whiter, mists thicker, and even stags more at bay. Reality may be impressive, but sometimes it is not quite as impressive as we would like it to be.

In literature, the greatest romantic of them all, Walter Scott, put Edinburgh at the heart of European literature, while at the same time effectively inventing an idea of Scotland that proved not only popular but also persistent. The literary critic Stuart Kelly has described that invention in his book Scottland: if it had not been for Scott, he suggests, we would never have all the familiar accompaniments of stage Scottishness: the ubiquitous tartans, the shortbread tins with Highland cattle, or even the songs of Harry Lauder and Kenneth McKellar. The point is well made, but even if Scott’s vision of his country inspired a raft of romantic contrivances, his literary achievement is still outstanding. Scott is generally credited with the invention of the historical novel. And it was no bad thing for Scotland, surely, that this small nation on the edge of Europe should have produced a writer whose fame was unequalled in his day. It was quite fitting then, that the city should have created for him a monument on such a scale. Most writers would be more than satisfied with a modest plaque on the side of their former home: Scott was given an astonishing spiky edifice, complete with winding stone staircases up which literary pilgrims may climb their way to the top. It certainly makes its point: altogether there are over 80 statuettes on its exterior representing characters from Scott’s novels or figures from Scottish history. To the modern eye it is, admittedly, odd to the point of being eccentric, but it is a landmark without which one of the best known views of Edinburgh – looking west along Princes Street – would appear very different.

The story of Edinburgh’s association with literature does not begin with Scott, or even with Burns. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Scottish court was enlivened by a number of poets, or makars as they are known in Scots, whose works laid the foundations of a national literature. William Dunbar, a poet, and David Lyndsay, a playwright, both found time outside their courtly duties at Holyrood to satirise the state of Scottish society. Lyndsay was the author of A Satire of the Three Estates, which is widely regarded as the first great Scottish play. That tradition of poking fun at human foibles is still strong in Scottish writing, and is probably the reason why Molière translates so well into Scots; more than one modern Scottish writer has produced Scots language versions of the French dramatist’s works, with one of these, Liz Lochhead’s Tartuffe, proving lastingly popular with the public.

Just about every street of any note in the Old Town has its literary associations. The area around the University is particularly rich in this regard, even if the University’s attitude to its architectural heritage has at times been disappointing. The redevelopment of George Square and some of the surrounding streets changed irrevocably an area of great character that could have been conserved and sympathetically modernised. As building after building was replaced, it has become increasingly difficult to find the sites in which men and women of note lived. Plaques that say something like On this site stood the house in which… are depressing reminders of how our connections with our cultural past may be lost, overnight, and so very easily. Cities have to change, of course, but change need not obliterate character and particularity. How dull life will be when we find ourselves all living in cities that look the same as each other – bland, utilitarian boxes of concrete and glass that could be anywhere, and are in fact nowhere.

Edinburgh’s close association with literature continues. It was the first UNESCO city of literature, a title given to a handful of cities that have particularly strong literary connections. It also has its own makar – an official poet – in the same vein as the poets that once received the patronage of the Scottish royal court centuries ago. In one view, poets should never be official, as ‘official poetry’ can often be strained and meretricious. Scotland’s official makars, both local and national, have been anything but that, and in Ron Butlin, who occupied the post in Edinburgh, we found a poet who captures the moods and ways of Edinburgh beautifully.

In fiction, the contemporary city has been portrayed with verve and wit by writers who have set their face against the conventional vision of Edinburgh and have concentrated instead on those at the receiving end of society. Irvine Welsh presides over that school of Edinburgh writing, and does so with considerable skill and humour. Welsh’s Edinburgh – or Leith – exists, of course, and is part of the fabric of the city’s life, as is the dark underbelly that Ian Rankin describes in his Rebus novels. The contrast between worlds – the world of wellset middle class Edinburgh and the world of deprivation and desperation – is stark, but undoubtedly adds to the richness of the city’s literary portrayal. It is not necessarily a comfortable literature: there is resentment and irony and pawky irreverence. There is light and dark along with a great deal that is opaque. Which suggests that the Edinburgh literary imagination exactly mirrors the city it sets out to portray – a city of complexity and subtlety, revealed at one moment, concealed the next.

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A Work of Beauty: Alexander McCall Smith’s Edinburgh by Alexander McCall Smith is out now published by Historic Environment Scotland priced £14.99. If you enjoyed this article you might also like this Books from Scotland Q&A with Alexander McCall Smith about his 2016 novel My Italian Bulldozer.

Scotland’s Landscapes tells the enduring story of the interaction between man and environment. Stunning new imagery from the National Collection of Aerial Photography comes together in this landmark book to build up a picture of a dramatic terrain forged by thousands of years of incredible change. Read on to discover how Scotland’s unique 12,000km coastline shaped the lives of Viking raiders when they arrived at Ardnamurchan around the tenth century AD.

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Scotland’s Landscapes: The National Collection of Aerial Photography
By James Crawford
Published by Historic Environment Scotland

Coastlines

Sometime around the tenth century AD, on the Ardnamurchan peninsula in the western Highlands, a group of Vikings dragged a boat inland from a sheltered beach. This was no ordinary coastal landing, however. As they reached a low mound above the shore, they began to dig a hole in the earth about 5 metres long and 1.5 metres wide. After manoeuvring the boat into this channel, they then lowered the body of a dead warrior carefully down into its wooden hull. Once in position, they arranged a host of possessions around the body. A shield was placed over the chest, while a spear, axe and an iron sword – with a beautifully decorated silver pommel and a bone hilt – were laid alongside. They also added a bronze drinking horn, flints for making fire, a metal pan, pottery from the Hebrides, a bronze ring-pin from Ireland, and a whetstone from Norway. Finally, the boat was filled almost completely with rocks. This burial ritual was reserved only for Vikings of the highest status: for chieftains, or great, ocean-going adventurers. The boat itself was a symbol of a life connected intimately to the sea. It is surely no coincidence that this final resting place looks out past the island of Eigg and the rocky peaks of Rum to where the sun sets on the open water.

The Ardnamurchan Viking remained lost for over 1,000 years, until the grave was chanced upon in 2011 by a team of archaeologists working on the peninsula. Believing at first that the burial mound was debris deposited by farmers during field clearances, closer inspection revealed hundreds of metal rivets – many attached to rotten slivers of wood – laid out in the distinctive outline of the pointed prow and stern of a Viking boat. Fragments of an arm bone and several teeth were all that were left of the warrior. But, along with the possessions and the wooden remains, archaeologists believe that laboratory testing may reveal where this person came from, and even the origin of the trees felled to build their vessel. This discovery, thought to be the first complete Viking ship burial found on the British mainland, would be remarkable enough on its own. But it is in fact just one of a number of monuments to the dead left in this bay going back almost 6,000 years. On a hillock just above the Norse burial site there is a stone cairn built around 4000 BC, with an internal chamber where human remains were placed. Over time the way people were buried in this cairn changed, from cremations to tight bundles of bones, and then, a thousand or more years after it was first constructed, a single, complete body was laid to rest along with pieces of pottery. This last burial saw the cairn sealed for good. Yet about 1800 BC, and just 10 metres away, a new tomb was built.

Again, a single body was placed inside, this time with a jet bead necklace – a sign of far-flung trading connections – before the entrance to the grave was blocked off. There was clearly something special about this place, something that, over an extraordinarily long period of time, brought different people and cultures to the same spot to commemorate their dead.

For millennia the coast has been a gateway for the people of Scotland – landing ground for hunter-gatherers; beachhead for Viking raiders; staging point to strike out to abundant fishing grounds; borderland to the open highway of the sea. With so many lives half-lived on the water, it seems no surprise that communities would view the coastline as a symbolic location for ritual and remembrance. Perhaps these monument-graves were placed deliberately on the ‘edge’, in a landscape part-earth, part-sea; a landscape that defined the traditions and myths of the people who lived there – and also of those who were just passing through.

Of course, not all remains are designed to be lasting memorials, and there is more to this one Ardnamurchan bay than just ancient tombs. Immediately to the west of the beach, on a rocky promontory overlooking the inlet, there is evidence of a fort dating back to about 200 BC, with traces of burning and slag that hint at a centre for Iron Age metalworking. A thousand years before the Vikings arrived to perform their burial ritual, it is clear that there was a strategic need to watch the seas and mark ownership of the surrounding land. And it does not end there. Close to the fort, on a crescent of hillside, there are the rocky footings left behind by a nineteenth century farming community. The people of this township had worked the land of the bay up until 1853 – and then their houses were abandoned and demolished to make way for a sheep pasture.

This is just one tiny fragment of Scotland’s near 12,000km of coastline, a sliver of land on a Highland peninsula now seen as remote to our modern eyes. Yet its long, varied history demonstrates the cultural richness of our coastal landscape, and the enduring importance of the sea. Take almost any beach, bay, dune or cliff-side, and you will find the layered traces of man’s presence across time, from ancient harbours, promontory castles and medieval saltpans to stone ‘fish-traps’ and smugglers’ caves. The shoreline has represented security, survival, opportunity and adventure over many thousands of years. Yet a day does not go by without the inexorable shift of this physical border. From the coming and going of the tides, to rising sea levels and the never-ending process of erosion, the histories and memories contained within this landscape are at once enduringly vibrant and dangerously fragile.

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Scotland’s Landscapes: The National Collection of Ariel Photography by James Crawford is out now published by Historic Environment Scotland priced £14.99.

Extolling the many merits of the literary podcast, David Robinson reveals his favourites for you to discover and enjoy. Think you’re too busy in the run-up to Christmas to get downloading? Think again. This, David argues, is in fact a great time to immerse yourself in the world of audio available at just a click of a button. So ‘lie back and listen’…

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I don’t know how you are about new technology, but me, I’m a late adapter. So late, in fact, that I still don’t want a smartphone and have only now, about eight years after everyone else, discovered podcasts.

Why did nobody ever tell me about them?  Why did no-one ever shake me by the lapels and insist that I listen the New Yorker’s Fiction podcast? That I really ought to download John Lanchester’s exquisite exposition of the Brexit bungle – still the best I’ve heard – on the London Review of Books? That on no account should I miss the podcast of  Melvyn Bragg and his assorted professors on Radio 4’s  In Our Time distilling several lifetimes of learning into a 40-minute scintillating discussion of Orwell’s Animal Farm?

You think these are rhetorical questions? They’re not. I read books all the time, discuss them, go to book festivals. Professionally and personally, books and talking about books frame my life. So why have literary podcasts passed me by? Do they pass most people by too? Do people talk about them, recommend them to friends the way they do books? If so, why did that never happen to me?

I only wish it had. An iPod loaded with podcasts, somebody should have told me, is like having your own book festival, the only difference being that it’s one for which you can get all the tickets you want and they’re all free. But because nobody ever did tell me that, I’ve become that person instead. The kind who, eyes evangelically bright, will insist that you try trawling through the backlists of Backlisted, Literary Friction, Longform, Slate’s Audio Book Club, The Book Show from RTE, or Guardian Books. Whose recommendations will be simplicity itself:  type Andrew O’Hagan, Ali Smith or Amos Oz into your iPod, lie back and listen.

So let me do you a favour. It’s nearly Christmas, and I bet there are still a whole load of chores you’ve still got to do. If it isn’t the seasonal shopping and queuing, it’ll be the usual cleaning and the ironing and walking the dog.  This is all what we podguys call “dead time”. So: out with the iPod, in with the earbuds, click on (say) the New Yorker Fiction site and all of a sudden you’re listening to Margaret Atwood read a short story by Mavis Gallant and explain the roots of her fandom. Or Roger Angell, still writing immaculately at 96, reading John Updike’s late story “Playing With Dynamite” and remembering editing him. Or Allan Gurganus reading Grace Paley’s “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age” and explaining just how much her mentoring meant to him. Or ….  But you get the drift.

You’re probably wondering where the Scots are in all of this, and so am I. Yes, of course, you’ll find Damian Barr hosting The Literary Salon in London, and over the last five years a handful of fellow-Scots such as Maggie O’Farrell, Kirsty Wark, and Janice Galloway have joined him. And which literary podcast host can possibly compare to Jim Naughtie, who has been at the helm of Bookclub since 1998? The programme started off with Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, and there have been well over 200 since – all downloadable –  with guests including Elmore Leonard, JK Rowling, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, and Muriel Spark (talking about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: check it out). When BBC Scotland complain that the audience for a dedicated radio book programme just isn’t there, perhaps Naughtie could enlighten them: even on a late Sunday afternoon, Bookclub still manages to pull over more than a million listeners.

The BBC is, of course, a cultural powerhouse like nothing else in the language. Across its radio network alone, it offers no fewer than 513 podcast series, covering everything from pop to philosophy. And although Bookclub and Open Book on Radio 4 and the Arts & Ideas strand on Radio 3 might seem to be a small proportion of that, books and authors figure prominently in other programmes. In the last couple of months, for example, both Jackie Kay and Ali Smith have appeared on Desert Island Discs. I’ve read scores of print interviews with both of them (and written a few myself) but I’ve never come across ones that mirrored Jackie and Ali’s openness and generosity of spirit as clearly as their interviews with Kirsty Young – proof, if it be needed, that she is at least as  good as anyone who has sat in the interviewer’s chair in the programme’s history. (Talking of which, because there are so many programmes in the Desert Island Discs podcast archive, if you started listening to 24/7 on 1 January, it would mid-May 2017 before you needed to find something else).

Apart from the BBC, Scotland doesn’t do as well as it ought to on the literary podcast front.  The Herald attempted a few before giving up, the Scotsman never really did – both papers being too small and under-resourced to try properly – and Scottish Book Trust’s series of fortnightly alternating  interviews and book group discussions, which started in October 2012 lasted for two and a half years before being abandoned.

When I think about it, perhaps this points to one of the reasons nobody has ever talked to me about podcasts. Maybe this very uncertainty about how something provided for nothing can ever make enough money to survive undermines our faith in podcasts’ viability, so instead of including them in cultural discussions they start to look like add-on, easily discarded extras. The contrast with audiobooks – where we all understand how publishers make money from their product – couldn’t be stronger. Over almost exactly the same period that Scottish Book Trust experimented with its own podcast series, national sales of audiobooks more than doubled.

Hats off, then, to two Scottish organisations that are out to prove me wrong. For the last seven years, the Scottish Poetry Library has been steadily building up an impressive (and well produced) pile of podcast interviews with and readings by some of the finest poets around. Again, because I have interviewed some of them of them, I can compare and contrast, and I must reluctantly concede that the SPL’s interviewers have often done a better job.  There are nearly 240 to choose from, and as I have only just started listening to them on my daily dogwalk,  I can’t yet give you a definitive report on which is the best. But if you try the ones with JO Morgan, Ian Bell, Niall Campbell, and Andrew Greig talking about Norman MacCaig, you’ll at least want to start off on your own poetry podcast pathway.

As I attend practically every Edinburgh book festival event it is humanly possible for one person to do, I have been in the audience at quite a few of the events from this year’s programme to have been given a podcast afterlife and can recommend the ones with Chris Packham, Kevin Barry, Edna O’Brien, Michel Faber. On my next dogwalks, I’ll start listening to the ones I missed out on at Charlotte Square in August, then do the same working backwards through the years. Then it’s back to the New Yorker Fiction, for another of Deborah Treisman’s elegant interviews, another classic short story, another discussion. By then it will probably be Christmas again. In the meanwhile, season’s greetings!

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David Robinson is a freelance journalist and editor and from 2000-2015 he was books editor of The Scotsman.

Against the terrifying backdrop of bombs, the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq – NYOI – began in the most trying and tragic circumstances. In Upbeat the Orchestra’s compelling story is told by its musical director Paul MacAlindin. Listen to the NYOI, a beacon of hope and achievement, play Beethoven’s iconic Eighth Symphony below.

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Upbeat: The Story of the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq
By Paul MacAlindin
Published by Sandstone Press

The story of the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq is here told by its musical director from its inception to its eventual end. The NYOI came through the most difficult and dangerous of times to produce fine music not only in Iraq but also in Britain, Germany and France. A beacon of hope and achievement the young musicians and their tutors made bridges across their own ethnic divisions, made great music in the most trying and tragic of circumstances, and became their country’s best ambassadors in 5000 years.

Author Paul MacAlindin discovered from an early age that he loved being an artist leading artists. As a musician, dancer and all-round performer, he found his voice through conducting, a passionate journey that has led him to work with orchestras and ensembles all over the world, from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra to the Armenian Philharmonic to the Düsseldorf Symphoniker.

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Upbeat: The Story of the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq by Paul MacAlindin is out now published by Sandstone Press priced £19.99. You can read more about the book, the NYOI, and it’s unusual genesis in this article here.

We’re delighted to launch an exclusive giveaway in collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland where you can win two brilliant books!

An Art Adventure around the National Galleries of Scotland colouring and drawing book takes us on a journey through Edinburgh, visiting each of the three National Galleries of Scotland. Intricately illustrated and decorative, there are drawings to complete, colour and embellish, and paintings and sculptures from the National collection to be discovered! Enjoyable for all ages.

Eilidh Muldoon (Muldoodles) is an Edinburgh-based illustrator and designer. Eilidh Muldoon is the illustrator of the children’s book, Never Bite a Tiger on the Nose by Lynne Rickards. Much of her work is inspired by the iconic buildings in the city.

Known worldwide for his architecture and interior designs, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) was also an extremely gifted painter.  Towards the end of his life he gave up his principal career as an architect and moved to the south of France where he devoted himself to painting in watercolour. Meticulously executed and brilliantly coloured, these landscape watercolours are conceived with a sense of design and an eye for pattern in nature, which owes much to his brilliance as an architect and designer.

This book charts Mackintosh’s time in France and explores his career as a landscape painter, placing his work in the context of the modern movement. The forty-four paintings Mackintosh is known to have completed while in France are illustrated, and are supported by documentary photographs of the places he painted as well as extracts from his letters written to his wife and friends. This is the first publication to discuss in depth this period of Mackintosh’s work.

Check out the Books from Scotland Twitter here for details of how to apply; the giveaway will run until noon on the 13 December and the winner will be notified via a Twitter Direct Message that day.

The forthcoming December Issue of Books from Scotland will go behind the scenes of making An Art Adventure and there will also be an extract from Charles Rennie Mackintosh in France.

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An Art Adventure: Around the National Galleries of Scotland by Eilidh Muldoon and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in France by a leading Mackintosh expert are out now published by NGS Publishing.

If you’re an art lover you also might like to know that the National Galleries of Scotland are hosting a major Joan Eardley exhibition from December 3rd. Why not check out this article on Books from Scotland about Joan Eardley’s life and work?

In this guest post from Scottish Book Trust, in celebration of Book Week Scotland 2016 (21-27 November) and the theme of Discovery, we explore some great books by Scottish authors that are definitely worth seeking out.

1. All the Little Animals by Walker Hamilton

First published in 1968 and recently republished by Freight Books, All the Little Animals is the story of Bobby, a 31-year-old man with the emotional development of a ten- year-old boy, the result of a childhood car accident that killed his father. After the death of his mother, he runs away from a privileged but abusive life with his stepfather in London to Cornwall, where fate draws him to Mister Summers, a strange little old man who has inexplicably dedicated his life to burying roadkill. Bobby finds his true calling and the pair embarks on an idyllic but all-too-brief life together before the past catches up with shattering consequences.

2. The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau by Graeme Macrae Burnet

The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau is the debut novel from Man Booker shortlisted Macrae Burnet, written before His Bloody Project.  Manfred Baumann is a loner. Socially awkward and perpetually ill at ease, he spends his evenings quietly drinking and surreptitiously observing Adele Bedeau, the sullen but alluring waitress at a drab bistro in the unremarkable small French town of Saint-Louis. But one day, she simply vanishes into thin air. When Georges Gorski, a detective haunted by his failure to solve one of his first murder cases, is called in to investigate the girl’s disappearance, Manfred’s repressed world is shaken to its core and he is forced to confront the dark secrets of his past.

3. Chronicles of the Canongate by Sir Walter Scott

A collection of short stories published between 1827 and 1828.

Set within a framing narrative told by Chrystal Croftangry, these three stories are set in the years following the Jacobite defeat and all feature characters who are leaving Scotland to seek their fortunes elsewhere. In ‘The Highland Widow’ and ‘The Two Drovers’, two young men find themselves torn between traditional Scottish loyalties and the opportunities offered by England. And ‘The Surgeon’s Daughter’ follows three young Scots to India during the first phase years of the British Empire.

4. Espedair Street by Iain Banks

A little-known novel exploring rock pop excess in the seventies and eighties by the hugely popular writer of fiction. Daniel used to be a famous, not to say infamous, rock star. At 31 he has been both a brilliant failure and a dull success. He’s made a lot of mistakes that paid off and a lot of smart moves he’ll regret forever. Contemplating his life, he realizes he has only two problems: the past and the future.

5. Skye: the Island and its Legends by Otta F Swire

Otta F Swire was the author of three books on Hebridean Folk Tales, all highly acclaimed as sources of folklore. Her most famous fan is Neil Gaiman, who cites her as a big influence, and who got the title of his novella, The Truth Is A Cave In The Black Mountains, from Swire’s account of a cave in the Cuillin mountains. Skye: the Island and its Legends, is a fabulous treasury of legend and wonder; tales of monsters who dwell in lakes, of small people who trap humans in earthen mounds where time stands still; of dark, shape- shifting spirits whose cloak of human form is betrayed by the sand and shells which fall from their hair. In the absence of a written tradition, for generations of Skianachs, these tales, handed down orally, contained the very warp and weft of Hebridean history.

6. The Raiders by SR Crockett

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Galloway-based SR Crockett was a very successful writer. His popularity has necessarily declined over the years, but his best-known book, The Raiders, was republished in 2002 by Canongate Classics and is well worth seeking out. Caught up in the strife between smugglers on the Solway Coast and the gypsies of Galloway, young Patrick Heron is flung into a society of social outcasts, outlaws and downright murderers. But this world of moonlit confusion and bloody horror offers a kind of freedom, too, as Patrick travels far beyond the conventions of his day to enter a world made anew by fear and desolation and courage and energy. Crockett’s raciest narrative is full of the wild Galloway landscape which he knew so well and loved so much, informed at every turn of the plot by his delight in local history and old folk tales of the region.

7. A Den of Foxes by Stuart Hood

Described by freelance critic Stuart Kelly as “work of supreme ingenuity”, A Den of Foxes was written by a former controller of BBC television and investigates what happens when Peter Sinclair, a writer and academic, receives an invitation to take part in a “war game”. The invitation comes from a man who writes from a part of Northern Italy Sinclair himself knows well – a part where he saw killing behind enemy lines during World War II. Sinclair decides to join the game.

8. The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps by Michel Faber

A little-known novella from the author of the highly acclaimed The Crimson Petal and the White, The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps follows the story of Siân, troubled by dark dreams and seeking distraction, joins an archaeological dig at Whitby. The abbey’s one hundred and ninety-nine steps link the twenty-first century with the ruins of the past and Siân is swept into a mystery involving a long-hidden murder, a fragile manuscript in a bottle and a cast of most peculiar characters. Equal parts historical thriller, romance and ghost story, this is an ingenious literary page-turner and is completely unforgettable.

9. The Comforters by Muriel Spark

In Muriel Spark’s fantastic first novel, the only things that aren’t ambiguous are her matchless originality and glittering wit. Caroline Rose is plagued by the tapping of typewriter keys and the strange, detached narration of her every thought and action. She has an unusual problem – she realises she is in a novel. Her fellow characters are also possibly deluded: Laurence, her former lover, finds diamonds in a loaf of bread – could his elderly grandmother really be a smuggler? And Baron Stock, her bookseller friend, believes he is on the trail of England’s leading Satanist.

10. Caged by Theresa Breslin

Carnegie Medal winner Theresa Breslin explores the dangerous world of cage-fighting in this dark and powerful novel. Escaping from a troubled home and struggling to survive on the streets, the abandoned tunnels of the London Underground are a perfect sanctuary for Kai. Along with other teenagers running from their pasts, he finds somewhere to belong in this strange community of outcasts. But Kai is now facing a very different kind of fight. Every night, led by the enigmatic Spartacus, the runaways must become cage fighters, each fight broadcast to the outside world via YouTube. With gambling profits from these videos racking up, Kai and his friends hope to be able to start a new life. Yet treachery and danger are never far behind, and a new arrival threatens the order that Spartacus has worked so carefully to maintain. And then there is the looming finale, the last battle between Kai and his nemesis Leo: the Kill Fight…

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There are hundreds of free book events running right across the country during Book Week Scotland (21 – 27 November). Events include ‘Design by the Book: A Scottish Publishing Showcase’ and literary afternoon tea with historical novelist Sara Sheridan both at Edinburgh Castle. Check out www.bookweekscotland.com for details of these events and more.

 

 

The author of a book about the new Scottish superhero on the block Slugboy – AKA eleven-year-old Murdo McLeod – reveals his top 10 superheroes. You can also sing along with the Slugboy theme tune!

10. Thor

The only character in my top ten that makes it onto the list purely on the strength of his movies. Chris Hemsworth is brilliant and hilarious as the Norse God of Thunder, stealing scene after scene in the Avengers films.
Thor: [walking into a pet shop] I need a horse!
Pet Store Clerk: We don’t have horses. Just dogs, cats, birds…
Thor: Then give me one of those large enough to ride.

9. The Incredible Hulk

The strongest one there is. This guy once held up an entire mountain to keep his buddies from being squashed. Nuff said.

8. The Fantastic Four

Love the unique family dynamic of the FF. Plus the Human Torch and Thing help to keep things light-hearted, even when the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

7. The Avengers

Earth’s mightiest heroes, the Avengers are at their best when tackling ridiculous out-of-this-world threats that no single superhero could overcome.

6. Magneto

Superheroes would be nothing without supervillains, and they don’t come any better or more compelling than the master of magnetism. He isn’t out to rule the world. He’s not interested in power or money. All he wants to do is protect his kind – mutants – from persecution. Sure, he almost always goes about it the wrong way, but I like that he has noble intentions behind his diabolical actions.

5. Slugboy

11-year-old Murdo McLeod isn’t your typical superhero. He’s small and scrawny and he’s absolutely hopeless. But he’s eternally optimistic, he never gives up… and his heart’s in the right place, bless him. Did I mention that he also appears in my fabulously funny new novel, Slugboy Saves the World? Available now in all good bookshops and online!

4. Captain America

In a world where a lot of superheroes are dark and edgy, Cap’s old-fashioned values are actually very refreshing. He believes in honesty and justice and he always tries to do the right thing. Simply put, he’s a really nice guy trying to do some good in the world. A terrific role model for young people everywhere.

3. Spider-Man

One of the few superheroes whose civilian identity is as much fun as his costumed alter ego. As Peter Parker, he’s an unpopular geek, contending with money problems, girl problems, school bullies, homework, exams and hiding his secret identity. As Spider-Man he has awesome powers, one of the coolest and most iconic costumes of all time… and he’s really funny! He also boasts some of the best villains of all time, including Doctor Octopus, Venom, Electro, Rhino, Mysterio and the Green Goblin.

2. The Uncanny X-Men

By far my favourite superhero team. No other team comes close. I could’ve quite easily filled this top ten with individual members of the X-Men, like Cyclops, Phoenix, Beast and Shadowcat, but it’s when these characters are combined that they really shine. The mutants have tackled lots of big issues over the decades and have featured in some of the greatest and most celebrated superhero stories of the last fifty years, including The Dark Phoenix Saga, Days of Future Past and God Loves, Man Kills.
To see the X-Men at their best, I highly recommend checking out Astonishing X-Men, by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday. Hilarious and heart-breaking, featuring widescreen action, pitch perfect dialogue, spot-on characterisation and beautiful artwork. It’s absolutely brilliant – everything a superhero comic should be!
So who could possibly beat the X-Men to the top spot?

1. Wolverine

Simply put – the best there is at what he does. Over the years he’s been a secret agent, a soldier and a samurai. He’s gone from being a hot-tempered loner to a devoted team member. He even joined the Avengers and became head teacher of the X-Men’s school! Through it all, he’s remained true to his character: a tough-talking, hard-as-nails brawler who doesn’t take any rubbish from anyone – and the greatest superhero of all time.

And last but certainly not least you can sing along with Slugboy to his theme tune!

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Slugboy Saves The World by Mark A Smith won the Kelpies Prize 2015 and is out now (PB, £6.99) published by Kelpies.

In this thought-provoking excerpt Tattersall, a leading medical authority on diabetes, traces the evolution of the disease – named ‘the pissing evil’ in the 16OOs by the Royal Physician to King Charles I – in the twentieth century.

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Extract from The Pissing Evil: A Comprehensive History of Diabetes Mellitus
By Robert Tattersall
Published by Swan & Horne

Given the thirty-year history of false dawns since 1889, it is not surprising that the reports about insulin from Toronto were greeted with scepticism, especially in Europe. It is said that Naunyn wrote to Minkowski telling him not to believe a word of it as it was another case of American bluff! However the imprimatur of the North American scientific community was given at a meeting of the Association of American Physicians on 3 May 1922, when Macleod presented the clinical results. No physician present seemed to doubt them and Rollin Woodyatt moved that the association give a standing vote of appreciation to Macleod and his associates. Joslin could not remember such an action in the twenty years he had been involved with the society. Insulin was first supplied to American physicians in August 1922 and their experiences were published in a special edition of Allen’s Journal of Metabolic Research; this did not come out until 1923. The journal contained ten papers and was 438 pages long.

It is a truism that a picture is worth a thousand words. The most impressive papers at that time were those by Rawle Geyelin and Kansas professor of medicine, Ralph Major; both were illustrated with before and after photographs of the children they had treated. The main aim was to fatten up these extremely emaciated children, so they were deliberately given two or three times more carbohydrate than they received previously.

One case in Geyelin’s paper was a 15-year-old girl who had developed symptomatic diabetes in 1918 and was treated with the standard regimen including occasional fasting days. In July 1921 she was admitted to hospital because she still had glycosuria on as little as 20 g of carbohydrate daily. She was eventually discharged with her carbohydrate and fat allowances halved. Unsurprisingly, she deteriorated over the next year and was so weak she could not go to school. In July 1922 she was admitted again, this time for acidosis, with a blood sugar of 428 mg/dL (23.8 mmol/L) and weighing just 46.75 lb (21 kg). She was discharged on an exceptionally restricted diet – 6 g of carbohydrate, 25 g of protein and 30 g of fat per day – on which she still had continuous glycosuria. In September 1922, on three control days before insulin was started she excreted 44 g of sugar per day, weighed 48 lb, and had generalised oedema. Over the next six months, while on insulin, she grew by 3.2 cm, her weight increased from 48 to 57 lb, and her daily carbohydrate was increased from 10 to 55 gm.

Another case described a 10-year-old boy with diabetes for four and a half years who, when admitted for insulin in November 1922, was so weak he could not lift his head from the pillow without help. Emaciation was extreme and he weighed only 27 lb (14.6 kg). Over the next three months he grew by 2 cm and his weight increased to 48 lb. On a diet of 80 g of carbohydrate a day he took 35 units of insulin per day. What is interesting from the chart in the paper is that the lowest blood sugar of 240 mg/dL (13.3 mmol/L) was recorded before he started insulin.

The most famous before-and-after pictures are those of a patient of Major – Billy Leroy. In the first picture, the three-year-old Billy had had diabetes for two years and weighed only 6.8 kg. In the second picture, taken after three months, his weight had increased to 13.6 kg and he was aglycosuric on a daily regimen of 55 g of carbohydrate and 25 units of insulin. These pictures were not representative of all patients who survived the Allen starvation regimen because, as Chris Feudtner pointed out, hardly any young patients starved to the degree of those shown in the dramatic pictures; they had lost 30% or more of their body weight, but 10% was more typical.

Joslin’s first patient to be treated with insulin (also reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association in June 1923) was Miss Mudge, aged 42, who had had diabetes for five years during which time her weight had fallen from 72 kg to 33 kg. She could not be kept sugar free on any diet and had only been out of her house once in nine months before beginning insulin in August 1922. Her weight increased by 9 kg and she had a normal blood sugar before and after breakfast on 10 units of insulin and 25 g carbohydrate. Twenty five years later, Joslin remembered that:

Colonel Palmer, a most brilliant young officer in the Canadian army whose career was shattered by diabetes just before the First World War, came back for insulin. When he saw the children, his first reaction was: ‘Now they make a noise’. Formerly they sat with protruding bellies, silent for hours, resignedly consuming their washed 3% vegetables. Yet today of those feeble creatures there is many a one alive, breathing and standing on his own feet. Von Noorden shuddered and turned aside at the sight of one of them a quarter of a century ago.

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The Pissing Evil by Robert Tattersall (HB, £40) is published by Swan & Horn in November 2016

The Saltire Society’s annual literary awards shines light on Scotland’s wealth of literary talent and is a highlight of the cultural calendar. Here our columnist – and this year’s chair of the judges – delves into the 2016 Non Fiction Shortlist which includes five brilliant books by Amy Liptrot, James Crawford, John Moore, Richard Holloway, and John Kay.

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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about literary prizes, because in the next couple of weeks, I’m judging one.  As I write, we have still to pick the five category winners for the Saltire Literary Awards – best fiction, non-fiction, poetry, first book and history – and then the overall winner, but we’ve already chosen the shortlists.

At this stage, I could easily imagine any one of at least half a dozen books winning the overall prize. And it’s this part of the judging process – when everything is still up for grabs, when just one of the judges’ passionate advocacy could still sway the room, when doubts about front-runners have still to be articulated and certainties have still to be frayed by debate – that I like the best.

On 24 November, the overall winner of the Saltire Best Book of the Year will be announced, and the news will filter out across the media in headlines that will seem to spell certainty, resolution, and objective fact. But right now, the shortlisted books are all in play, every one of them, each with their own supporters ready to point out their originality, style, impact, narrative flair, depth of research, breadth of imagination and singularity of purpose, or any number of other qualities. All of the books are on the table – literally so: at our last meeting, they were piled up on the table around which the eight judges sat, a visual reminder of the sheer range of Scotland’s literary imagination.

Every time a literary prize is announced, the chair of the judges invariably says how the abundance of quality writing made picking the winner such a difficult decision. I’ll probably end up saying the same thing myself: just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean that it isn’t also true. Meanwhile in the audience, many people will be inwardly muttering, ‘Yes, yes, of course. Now can we please get on with the main event? Can’t you just tell us who’s won?’  This time, as a judge, I almost want to change that around, to say: ‘Never mind who’s won. Just look at what we had to choose from.’

I don’t have the space to do that for all five categories, so let’s just look at one. I’ll pick non-fiction, and rather than subverting the judging process by looking at how the books in the category measure up against a general standard (style, originality etc), I’ll confine myself to looking at which of them was best at a particular one: filling the yawning chasms of my own ignorance.

There are five on the non-fiction shortlist: The Outrun by Amy Liptrot, Glasgow: Mapping the City by John Moore, Other People’s Money by John Kay, Richard Holloway’s A Little History of Religion, and Fallen Glory by James Crawford. Or, to put it another way, an acclaimed memoir about overcoming addiction on Orkney, a scholarly study showing how Glasgow grew, an economist’s critique of how the financial sector dangerously distorts our economy, a crisply written guide to the world’s religions and a history of the world’s greatest lost buildings.

In terms of books that did the most to fill in gaps in my own ignorance, I’ll keep them in that order too, ending up with James Crawford’s Fallen Glory as the book from which I learnt the most. Perhaps the things I learnt from the other books were more significant – the clarity of Holloway’s exposition of how doctrines of the afterlife and resurrection made their first appearance will stick in my mind,  as will Kay’s takedown of a financial sector grown too big for its boots, whose profitability is overstated and which, after all, only directs 3 per cent of its total lending to firms producing goods and providing services.

But Crawford’s book – a 566-page history of the world’s greatest lost buildings – is, for me, a triple ignorance-buster. First of all, it tells me the kind of things that, in hindsight, I’m embarrassed that I didn’t already know – like precisely where the Tower of Babel was built and what’s there now, which is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, where the first lottery in Britain was drawn, or which 17^th century siege (with, according to contemporary reports, a besieging army so large it occupied 30 square miles) made its victor the richest man on earth. *

Crawford realises that just as important as depicting fallen glories is showing what they reveal about human nature – both the grandiose dreams of their creators and the fantasies about the past sometimes unleashed by wishful archaeologists.  Agamemnon’s tomb at Mycenae, for example, was visited by Himmler, Goering and Goebbels, lured by archaeology that – wrongly – seemed to hint that those fighting armies from the Age of Heroes were proto-Nazis. At Knossos on Crete, meanwhile, Arthur Evans was busy trying to prove the opposite – that the ancient Minoans had been civilised, sporting pacifists rather than bloody savages.  The most recent evidence, Crawford points out, suggests that the archaeologists got it the wrong way round: the Mycenaeans were farmers and traders, while the Minoans certainly sacrificed humans and may well have been cannibals too.

But it’s the third, deepest level of Crawford’s ignorance-busting that impresses me the most. The first level is, after all just the pub quiz question: you either know the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city or you don’t.  But Crawford has the knack of introducing new facts about stories you might have thought you already knew – facts which, although they might not radically alter the historical record, widen and deepen it immeasurably.

Take 9/11, for example, and look at it through the eyes of two architects. The first is Minoso Yamasaki, Japanese-American architect of the World Trade Centre. When it was finished in 1973, he went out on the roof of what was then the world’s tallest building with two of his colleagues. They celebrated with champagne, looking down on the planes landing and taking off from Newark airport ten miles to the west.

A year earlier, at St Louis, Minnesota, nearly a thousand miles further west again, in what Crawford calls the creation of “the first great American ruin”, the first three of the 33 tower blocks Yamasaki built in the 1950s were blown up (the rest followed in the next three years) after they became a byword for public housing policy failure.  The destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe flats is one of the more spectacular moments in Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi. It was, said architecture critic Charles Jencks, the moment modern architecture died.

Our second architect was four years old at the time the Pruitt-Igoe flats were blown up. Later, for his post-graduate degree, he studied in Germany, where his 162-page thesis took issue with the way in which western modernism – buildings like the Pruitt-Igoe flats or smaller-scale examples of Yamasaki’s ‘New Formalism’ – often overrode local architectural traditions. The architect was Mohammad Atta, and the city whose architecture, according to the thesis he spent five years putting together, was being swamped by western modernism was the one I’ve already mentioned twice without naming. You know, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. I didn’t know either, because for some reason they never mention it in all the news reports.  Aleppo.

* Tower of Babel? That would be the Temple of Etemenanki in Babylon, south of Baghdad on a site levelled – and ruined – by coalition forces in the 2003 war. The first recorded lottery drawn in Britain was at the West Door of (Old) St Paul’s in London in 1569, and the 1687 siege of Golconda fortress in Hyderabad, centre of the world’s diamond trade gave Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb control of the south of India and made him vastly richer than he already was.

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David Robinson is a freelance journalist and editor and from 2000-2015 he was books editor of The Scotsman. This year David is convener of the Saltire Society’s Literary Awards panel; find out more about the awards here. The winner of the Scottish Non Fiction Book of the Year will be announced at the awards ceremony on 24 November 2016.

Following on from the success of The Novel Cure, the Story Cure authors turn their attention to children and further their convincing case: that reading the right stories at the right time can help you see things differently and even be therapeutic. At Books from Scotland HQ reading is the best type of medicine that we can imagine…

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Extract from The Story Cure
By Ella Berthoud & Susan Elderkin
Published by Canongate Books

Introduction

Between ‘Once upon a time’ and ‘happily ever after’ is a land we’ve all been to. Strange and marvellous things happen there.

Sometimes they’re things we don’t normally get to do – like riding on the back of a dragon, or finding the golden ticket to the chocolate factory. Often they’re things we want to do but are too scared or sensible – like running away from home. And sometimes they’re things we wouldn’t want to happen to us at all, but we’re very curious to know what it’d be like if they did – like being orphaned, or stranded on a desert island, or raised by a badger, or tragically turned into a rock. By the time we come back, brushing the dust off our hats, a new, worldly look in our eye, we alone know what we’ve seen, experienced, endured. And we’ve discovered something else, too: that whatever is going on in our actual lives, and whatever we’re feeling about it, someone else has felt that way too. We’re not alone, after all.

When we suggested, with our first book The Novel Cure, that reading the right novel at the right time in your life can help you see things differently – and even be therapeutic – the idea was surprising and new. That children’s books can do the same for children won’t surprise anyone at all. Parents, godparents, grandparents and kindly uncles – not to mention librarians, English teachers and booksellers (who are, of course, bibliotherapists in disguise) – have long been aware that the best way to help a child through a challenging moment is to give them a story about it, whether they’re being bullied at school, have fallen in love for the first time, or the tooth-fairy failed to show up. The best children’s books have a way of confronting big issues and big emotions with fearless delight, their instinct to thrill but also, ultimately, to reassure.* No rampaging toddler ever feels quite so out of his depth after Where the Wild Things Are. No pre-teen girl so alone with her questions after Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

In this book, you’ll find the very best children’s books to give to (or read with) the kids in your life – whether they’re three or thirteen, love books or avoid them, can’t sit still, want more toys, have nits or nightmares, or are desperate for more independence. For many of us, a favourite book from childhood is among our most treasured possessions – not just any copy, but the actual copy we owned, defaced with wax-crayon scribbles and with the pop-up bits torn off. For Susan, it’s a copy of Go, Dog. Go! by PD Eastman, with its endless litany of dogs, big and little, spotted and plain, driving in open-topped cars, or sleeping in the biggest bed you ever saw, then leaping out in a blaze of colour and light when it’s time to wake up. Each time it was read – or, rather, pored over, because this book is all about the detail in the pictures – there was the chance of sharing a new, hidden joke with the author: the one dog that has his eyes open in the middle of the night, or is still snoozing at daybreak. For Ella it’s her copy of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs – the first in a series of twenty-four Tarzan adventures which she gulped down, one after the other, their yellowed pages teeming with the screeches and calls of the jungle. And, in the margins – sometimes running over onto the text – her own colourful attempts at sinuous snakes and bright-winged parrots and leaping monkeys. Potent time capsules, they seem to contain not just who we were, but who we dreamed we would one day be.

Which books our own children hang on to from their childhoods is anyone’s guess – but they’ll surely be of the physical, tangible kind. Tablets are brilliant for beaming up a book in an instant; but engaging the senses of touch and smell, as well as sight, makes it so much easier to get lost in a book.

That’s when we get transported. That’s when we go to the land.

So, if you’re sitting comfortably, let’s begin.

* There are notable exceptions, of course: fairytales in their darkest forms, Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children and Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter . . . all of which help to keep psychiatrists in business.

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The Story Cure: An A-Z of Books to Keep Kids Happy, Healthy and Wise by Ella Berthoud & Susan Elderkin is out now (HB, £17.99) published by Canongate Books

Following the journey of Waclaw Kossakowski, a young Warsaw University student, this timely book is published in the month of Remembrance. Written by Waclaw’s granddaughter Irene, the excerpt shows how Waclaw’s life changed forever on 1 September 1939 when Hitler’s army brutally invaded Poland.

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Extract from A Homeland Denied: In the Footsteps of a Polish POW
By Irene Kossakowski
Published by Whittles Publishing

The wooden cattle trucks rattled laboriously along at an uneven pace, their cold metal wheels clattering noisily on the iron railway tracks, jolting their occupants.

The bitter Arctic wind easily found its way through the poorly fitted slats of wood, chilling the fifty men inside each truck. Crammed like sardines shoulder to shoulder, they were unable even to move their arms from their sides, and the suffocating smell of unwashed bodies combined with the overpowering stench of urine and vomit was nauseating.

Pressed tightly into a far corner of the truck was a young Polish soldier, fresh from Warsaw University. Without any warning, Germany had invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and Vadek Kossakowski had volunteered immediately on hearing the news. But the Poles were hopelessly outnumbered as the Germans advanced with over one million troops on several fronts – and when Soviet forces unexpectedly invaded from the east just two weeks later, Warsaw had to admit defeat. However, the Polish government never officially surrendered, and its exiled leaders fled to London while its people continued to fight with the Underground, the Polish resistance movement.

Under a Soviet agreement with Hitler which remained in force until June 1941 – and which had included a secret protocol to partition conquered territories – Poland was now split between Germany and Russia. The Soviets took the eastern half, and almost two million Polish citizens were sent to labour camps in Siberia. Here they would be forced to build runways in readiness for the military airbases Stalin planned to construct there.

Vadek remembered only too well the brutality of the Russian prison on the outskirts of Kozielsk village, one hundred and fifty miles from the capital of Moscow and ninety from the city of Smolensk. With the other cadets from the army training school who had been arrested that grim day of 19 September, he had endured several months of interrogation and harsh treatment in the detention centre on the Polish border with Latvia, before being taken to Kozielsk (in Russia).

Once the centre had been the important Orthodox monastery Optina Pustyn, comprising a chapel and several outbuildings connected by long corridors centred around a large and tranquil quadrangle – but now it served as a military prison. With views across the pine forests and gentle rolling hills not far from the river, its peaceful, rather quaint, setting belied its now forbidding interior.

He had been desperately scared, wondering if he could endure another beating, unable to prevent himself from shaking whenever he heard those heavy boots echoing on the hard stone floor as they came slowly and menacingly nearer to his bare but filthy cell. At each dreaded footfall along that long narrow corridor, he had frozen, as if moving would in some way bring that which he feared closer toward him. Hardly even daring to breathe, he felt that every fibre of his being was stretched taut with fearful trepidation as they reached his door; almost collapsing with relief when they passed. If they passed; sometimes they did not.

Every day there were incessant interrogations, and roll calls at all hours of the day and night. His name, his identity, was taken from him, and from that day forth he answered to a cold, impersonal number. He wasn’t brave, or did not think so. No-one he knew of had been prepared for war, and events had escalated so quickly there was no option but to fight. Kill or be killed. There was no other choice – but the only thing he had had brandished before was a pen, for he was a mathematician not a soldier. Though not particularly religious, but brought up in the Catholic faith as most Poles were, he now found himself uttering a prayer more frequently than he had ever done before. Death was always at the forefront of his mind, and he did not want to die. The terrible uncertainty consumed him everyday, and he felt he was trapped in a terrifying nightmare with no possibility of waking up.

And his family, what of them? He had so desperately wanted to get a message to them, but there had been no warning of the approaching Red Army. And no time. No time to do anything, for it had all happened so quickly. How could he have sent it anyhow – who would have taken it? There was no-one. Now it was too late. No-one knew where he was or where he was going.

But he did. He was on his way to Siberia. He had not known what to expect and had been terrified that he would be shot like so many others. Every day he had been asked to give up his Polish citizenship, to deny his heritage. But he had not. He would not.

Then one cold grey dawn he had heard his number called, followed by a loud hammering on the door before it was pushed open and a surly guard brusquely ordered him out of his cell …

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A Homeland Denied: In the Footsteps of a Polish POW by Irene Kossakowski is published in November 2016 by Whittles Publishing (PB, £16.99)

Joan Eardley’s work centered on two very different themes: strikingly candid paintings of children in the Townhead area of Glasgow; and paintings of the fishing village of Catterline with its leaden skies and wild sea. This excerpt showcases many of Eardley’s most loved paintings and highlights her enduring legacy ahead of her major retrospective exhibition in Scotland.

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Extracts from Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place
By Patrick Elliott with Anne Galastro
Published by NGS Publishing

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In anticipation of Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place, we spoke to the authors about the book and Eardly’s much-loved oeuvre.

Q&A with Patrick Elliott, author and curator of the exhibition

What do you feel makes this book unique?

As well as including Joan Eardley’s well-known works, the book draws on a largely unknown and, in many cases, previously unpublished range of sketches and photographs – people will be fascinated to see them all brought together in this way. The book also includes a number of works from private collections. But the unique features of this book also take you into a much deeper understanding of Joan Eardley. This is the first time that her artistic development through photography, sketching and painting has been catalogued chronologically and so specifically in relation to time and place. Her movements have always been notoriously difficult to pin down and other books tend to jump around chronologically. But we have researched all of the material in a painstaking way, enabling us to piece together accurately where she was and when.

Are there any aspects of the book that you feel particularly thrilled about?

It’s fascinating to be able to see, on the specially prepared maps, Eardley’s exact location as she worked. Also, unlike other studies, this book concentrates on the very heart of her work, focusing on her two favourite artistic locations: Townhead in Glasgow and Catterline, near Stonehaven. Many have documented the differences between the city and rural locations in her work but this book draws important and much more interesting parallels – in both of these places, people were living on the edge. In Glasgow, people were wrestling with poverty while in Catterline, the number of fishermen had dropped from 100 to twenty. The warmth in Joan Eardley’s paintings imbues the focus on people living in bad situations with an uplifting quality that chimes with people just as much today as when Eardley was painting.

Why do you think that Joan Eardley is so popular?

Well, she’s certainly very popular – she is a huge draw and her popularity even outshines artists such as Picasso here in Scotland. Her images of childhood in the tenements of Glasgow and of the wild seas and huge skies of the North East are very appealing. But I think it is the warmth and humanity that pervades her work that seals her reputation. Her career was struck tragically short – she died at the age of forty-two, before her well-deserved status as a major British artist could be fully recognised and acknowledged so, in a sense, she is Scotland’s wonderful ‘secret’. But I hope that this book will help to continue to make her work appreciated more widely beyond our borders.

 

Q&A with Anne Galastro, co-author

Why has it been difficult in the past to piece together Eardley’s movements?

Eardley was not a character who sought publicity. She was interested above all in pursuing her painting, and tended to consider giving interviews about her work a waste of her precious artistic time, so there are not many direct accounts of where she was and when. She hardly ever dated her paintings or drawings, almost never dated her letters, and enjoyed moving about discreetly from one place to another, so it has been difficult to track her movements with any accuracy. 

What made it possible to find out the chronology of her work at this point?

In 2009, the archive material deposited with the National Library of Scotland by the family of Lady Audrey Walker became available to the public. This provided a very thorough account of Eardley’s time in Catterline; the letters from Eardley to Walker begin in 1954 and continue up to Eardley’s death in 1963. By a process of piecing together snippets of information in these letters with other letters she wrote to her family, with the contemporary reviews of her works in exhibitions, and by referring in as much detail as possible to the legal records of her house purchases in Catterline, we have been able to form a more accurate timeline of her movements. This allows us to appreciate more fully how her work evolved over the course of her brief career.

In what ways is the book enhanced by having maps and a chronology of Eardley’s work?

All her work is imbued with such a strong sense of place (hence the title of this book!) that having maps of the areas where the paintings were created adds to the viewer’s perception of what she was trying to achieve. Obviously the Townhead paintings depict a world that no longer exists; her portraits of the children there show their fragility in this decaying environment, but also their spirit and tenacity. Seeing the old photographs and having a map of this now-destroyed part of Glasgow explains to us what a close-knit community it was. In Catterline, it is still possible to identify the precise spots where she set up her easel, so here, having the map reinforces our understanding of Eardley as an artist who looked intently at the landscape. We can retrace her steps and see almost the same views she saw, and observe just how carefully she recorded every detail.

How would you define Eardley’s place in Scottish art history?

Joan Eardley is remarkable first and foremost as a very successful artist in her own time who spent her entire career working in Scotland. As we point out in the book, unlike her near-contemporaries such as Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, Eardley chose to remain in Scotland, finding her inspiration in the specific environments of Townhead and Catterline – two places that allowed her to work unimpeded by material concerns and uninhibited by current fashions. Despite, or perhaps because of, her solitary working practice, Eardley was a great innovator, with a strongly individual approach to her art. She was always looking forward, thinking about what she might try out next in her work.

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Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place, by Patrick Elliott with Anne Galastro,  can be pre ordered now and will be published in late November 2016 by NGS Publishing priced £19.95. This book will accompany the major exhibition Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place which will be held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art from 3 December 2016 to 21 May 2017.

Described by James Robertson as ‘a great tale’, this charming story – first published in 1980 and now in its fifth edition – introduces Gavin who meets Clare, Michael, and Mot whilst on holiday in the wild and remote Scottish countryside. Together their summer of adventure turns darker as the children come face to face with a devious criminal gang.

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Extract from Light on Dumyat
By Rennie McOwan
Published by Rowan Tree Publishing

Chapter 2: The Mysterious Light

Gavin reached over the seat and put his hand in his rucksack pocket. He produced the compass.

Aunt Elspeth laughed: “I see you are prepared. Can you use it?”

Gavin nodded. He had practised using a compass and map in a park at home.

“Well, that’s good because the hills are new to you, so your compass is essential,” said Aunt Elspeth. “Anyway, it’s early to bed tonight. Tomorrow you can explore as much as you like. You do know you should never go hillwalking without a hot drink and food, don’t you? It’s just in case the temperature suddenly drops or you get into difficulty.”

The car stopped in front of a large stone house. Gavin eyed it with interest. It had three storeys and a high roof. At one end was a round tower and there were real battlements. A pebble-covered drive ran right around the house, with large flower beds in front. The woods surrounded it on all sides. They looked deep and peaceful. Gavin listened in delight. There was no sound, but a soft whispering from the trees and the deep crooning of wood pigeons in the distance.

Aunt Elspeth led the way to his room. It was small, with thick walls papered in bright colours. His bed was against one wall.

“These are the Ochils,” said Aunt Elspeth, pointing out of the window.

Gavin peered out. Beyond the trees and dwarfing the house lay a range of hills. They were like a huge, frozen green wave, he thought.

He studied their steep flanks, seamed with little cliffs and covered with clumps of gorse and boulders. Half hidden by a cluster of tall pine trees, he could make out a rocky pointed peak at the end of the range.

“What’s that?” he asked Aunt Elspeth.
She came over to the window.
“Oh, that’s Dumyat,” she said. “Long ago there was atribe of Picts called the Maeatae. They built a fort on top of that hill. It overlooks the Forth valley and then north-wards to the Grampian mountains.

“A Pictish fort is called a ‘dun’,” she continued, “so that’s how the hill got its name. The dun of the Maeatae. Since then, the name has become slurred into Dumyat – pronounced dum-eye-at.”

Aunt Elspeth laughed. “Some of your cousins didn’t. When they came to stay here, they couldn’t sleep. They thought the hills were going to fall on them!”

Gavin chuckled. Yet he could understand their feelings. The hills did appear to lean over the house. They “frowned”, he thought.

“You’ll meet Uncle Fergus in the morning,” said Aunt Elspeth. “Now, get to sleep. I’ll call you early and show you over the house. You’ll have plenty of time to explore.”

Gavin lay in his narrow bed and gazed at the hills. Now that it was dark they were just a blue-black mass against the sky. A few stars twinkled palely. Dark night clouds drifted slowly across the sky.

It was then that his adventure began. Halfway up the hill – the peak Aunt Elspeth had called Dumyat – he suddenly saw a light. It winked for a moment and then disappeared.

Gavin lay still. It must have been a shooting star. Or his imagination. Then the light appeared again. It flashed twice .

Gavin jumped out of bed. He opened the window quietly and leaned out. All was still. From a farm, a dog barked twice. The pines sighed softly. From the woods came the hoot of a tawny owl.

Gavin studied the hills again. They remained black and silent. Then the light flashed again. He saw it clearly.

But who would have a light up there? No one lived there. Aunt Elspeth had said so. Could it be poachers? Or smugglers? Anyhow, no one burned a light late at night in those lonely hills without good reason.

It was a funny sort of light, thought Gavin as he drifted off to sleep. It was almost as if someone had opened the door of a lighted room and then shut it again… quickly!

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Light On Dumyat by Rennie McOwan is out now (PB, £7.99) published by Rowan Tree Publishing

Leading architectural historian Watters looks at the history of a troubled and celebrated structure that emerged out of an innovative phase of post-war Catholic churchbuilding. The story of Cardross Seminary began in 1946 and since then, as Watters and the accompanying photography shows, it has undergone many phases from birth, to death, and now innovative renewal.

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Extract from St Peter’s, Cardross: Birth, Death and Renewal
By Diane M Watters
Published by Historic Environment Scotland

The story of Cardross Seminary begins in 1946, when St Peter’s College in Bearsden was destroyed by fire, and the college moved elsewhere: first, in 1946, to Darleith House, and then additionally, in 1948, to Kilmahew House, Cardross. It was not until 1953 that the concept of a new and massive extension to Kilmahew House, to be designed by the architects Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, was formally endorsed; and building work did not start until 1961. The new seminary that was eventually opened in November 1966, although not completed until 1968, was a large and strikingly Modern design, but was at the same time not without its traditional, even anachronistic, aspects.

Located on a limited, level area set in steeply sloping woodland, the new seminary buildings were grouped in a courtyard or precinct-like manner on three sides of Kilmahew House. This Scotch Baronial mansion was originally built in 1865–8 to the designs of John Burnet the elder, for John William Burns, son of the founder of the trans-Atlantic Cunard Line. Kilmahew was a compact, tower-like design in the tradition established by J Gillespie Graham at Brodick (1844) and Ayton (1851), with a massive arched porch similar to Burnet’s Arden House (1867). During the 1959–66 work, this mansion was thoroughly refurbished. Gillespie, Kidd & Coia’s new buildings included the main five-storey accommodation block, with bedrooms on the upper floors and the communal spaces of refectory and chapel below; a projecting two-storey wing at one end of the chapel contained a sanctuary and crypt beneath. To the west of the main block, a common-room and classroom block dramatically jutted out over the woodland, while on the north side of Kilmahew House was placed a small, self-contained group of convent buildings. Architecturally, the Gillespie, Kidd & Coia buildings, grouped into varied external forms and internal spaces, and faced mainly in rough harling and concrete, belonged to the late phase of the Modern Movement – a period, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, when the simple, crusading faiths of the Modern pioneers were challenged by calls for more complex solutions.

The extended Cardross Seminary only functioned as intended for a few years. It closed in 1980, within fourteen years of its opening, and began its long decline into decay and, ultimately, ruin: the abandoned complex had only one period of active occupation, as a drug rehabilitation centre from 1983 to 1987. In 1995, Kilmahew House was gutted by fire and demolished, leaving the Gillespie, Kidd & Coia additions standing on their own. Over the 30 years since its closure there ensued a long succession of plans for re-use or repair of the derelict complex, and from the mid 1990s, an equally protracted battle by preservationists to save and restore it. The decaying ruin of the former seminary itself sat patiently awaiting its fate throughout.

In 2015, a part-restoration scheme for its re-use as a cultural centre, developed by new owners, the public arts-charity NVA, began work on site. The staging of the art event Hinterland, in March 2016, officially opened the former seminary buildings to the general public. The restoration scheme is due for completion in spring 2019.

St Peter’s, Cardoss explores and documents both the St Peter’s College (also known as Cardross Seminary) project itself, and the wider architectural and religious movements of which it formed an important symbolic part. It illustrates, in microcosm, the varied character of both Scottish Modern architecture and postwar Scottish Catholicism. And it highlights the conflicting factors within the idea of a Modern religious architecture: the meaning of a religious building, and its ability to communicate with those who worship in it, depend largely on the power, not of newness, but of tradition. The book also traces the way in which religious and architectural change led to the dramatic downfall of the seminary buildings. The extended St Peter’s proved to be an anachronism – a built embodiment of ideals which, even as construction proceeded, were turned upside down by the radical Catholic church reforms of the momentous Second Vatican Council (October 1962–December 1965). Its viability was then further undermined by the mounting economic and social difficulties of the Church in the following years, and, last but not least, by the prolonged troubles of its performance and maintenance.

This book, then, records the story of the slow decline of the abandoned seminary, including the demolition of the main building that was its focus; but from the late 1980s, the complex’s fate and reputation was also affected by the beginning of the re-evaluation of Modern architecture as a potential subject of heritage. The seminary ruin then entered into a new life as a heritage artefact, and became increasingly divorced from its own religious and architectural history. The misfortunes of the college highlight today’s conservation quandary, of how to re-use, or even just to maintain, the more spectacular creations of Modern architecture. This preservation-orientated narrative then finally shifts to examine the story behind its transformation into a permanent art installation. Perhaps a secure long-term future is at last in prospect for St Peter’s.

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St Peter’s, Cardross: Birth, Death and Renewal by Diane M Watters is published by Historic Environment Scotland on November 30 (HB, £30). You might also enjoy this additional extract from the book on Books from Scotland here.

Did you know that Islay, in the Southern Hebrides, boasts eight active distilleries, countless single malts, and even its own whisky classification? This photographic excerpt invites you to witness how the water of life is at the heart of this unique island.

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Photographs from Whisky Island
By Fiona Rintoul & Konrad Borkowski
Published by Freight Books

 

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Whisky Island by Fiona Rintoul and Konrad Borkowski is out now (HB, £20) published by Freight Books

Alan Warner has called Fallow his ‘book of the year’. A tense relationship between two brothers bound by a terrible crime lies at the heart of this debut thriller. The brothers hit the road but will their nomadic lifestyle lead to enlightenment and escape or will their violent past catch up with them?

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Extract from Fallow
By Daniel Shand
Published by Sandstone Press

I waited in the trees for Mikey to get the job done. He was a fast worker. I counted as I watched the two heads’ shadows move between the lower windows of the house and I didn’t get far. I watched the heads move apart and then towards each other. It was hard to tell which was which but once they fell to the ground and only one returned a minute or so later I knew it must be Mikey.

He flashed the lights three times when it was all over and I crept across the road and around the back. I knocked on the door and Mikey answered.

‘Well?’ I asked.

He wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘Like you said.’

‘It’s self-preservation, Mikey. You’ll thank me one day.’

I needn’t have worried about the dog. It was locked up in a run outside. Mikey followed me into the garden to check it out. When the beast saw us approach it lowered itself onto the breezeblocks and cringed. The floor of the run was dotted in dried turds.

‘We’ll need to get this seen to as well,’ I said.

Mikey put his fingers through the wire and the dog ran its heavy pink tongue all over them. ‘Hello,’ he said.

‘No one else inside?’

He shook his head.

We left the dog where it was and went into the house to assess the damage. My brother had done a grand job. You went in through the kitchen, came to a hall with a living room joined onto it. A Ramsay ladder led to the upper floor, which I assumed was a bedroom. The man was on the floor of the living room. He’d been watching a porno film, the dirty old bastard. I couldn’t help but laugh. The girls were still moaning and slavering, and here he was. Lying on the floor.

We carried the man out through the back garden and over the fence into the waste of nature beyond. The land was wilder there than up in the meadow. You could sense the mountains in the distance but it was so dark you couldn’t make them out.

I got Mikey to run back to the house to fetch a shovel, leaving me alone with the man. I propped him up against a hump of earth.

‘You thought you could get the better of me?’ I said. ‘You won’t be making that mistake again, will you?’

I was chuckling and moving around him. I felt as though I took up the whole of the night. My mouth was the entire black sky.

I knelt down so we were face to face. ‘This is what happens. Are you pleased with yourself? Are you? You just couldn’t just let a couple of lads camp in peace, could you, you posh fuck?’ I might have shouted that last part because when I was finished my throat was scratched.

Mikey came back with a pair of spades little bigger than trowels. Even in the dark I could tell his eyes were pink. He handed me a trowel.

‘What do you call this?’

‘It’s all he had.’

‘You’re joking? These country folk, they’ve got all the fucken tools going.’

‘They’re all I could see.’

It took us quite some time to create a suitable hole. The earth was soft enough, it was just a matter of volume. We got him settled in the end but we were filthy when we made it back to the house. I sat in the kitchen and rolled myself a fag while Mikey heaved the sack of dog food out into the back garden. It was a nice place. The kitchen was done out all old fashioned, with one of them big ovens that’s always switched on. I lit my fag and had a nose in the fridge. He was well stocked. Plenty meat, plenty beers.

I went through to have a look in the living room, tipping my ash on the carpet as I went. The porno film was drawing to a conclusion and I pulled the telly out at the plug, all that nonsense being of no interest to me. I heard Mikey close the back door and he came into the living room to join me. We took an armchair each. There was a tumbler of whisky on the carpet by my armchair that I dropped my singed filter into.

I looked around and said, ‘How about this?’

Mikey was playing with his bottom lip. He nodded when I spoke.

‘Aw,’ I laughed. ‘Come on now! You can’t be serious.’

He shrugged, staring into the cream carpet.

‘This I cannot believe. Mikey Buchanan, suddenly developing a conscience.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

He said it in such a way that it made my blood kick in. ‘You know fine well what that’s supposed to mean.’

That shut him up right enough.

‘Listen,’ I went on. ‘All right, agreed. Maybe, perhaps, this is some good fortune we’ve come into through less than ideal circumstances. I’ll give you that, Michael. But come on mate. We’d be mad to pass it up. That’d be looking a gift horse right square in its gifty gob.’

‘I suppose.’

‘He supposes does he? Well very good. This is an opportunity. This is an opportunity to keep our heads down in relative comfort. Keep our heads down until it’s all over back home. Until those hacks fuck off back to Glasgow or wherever.’

‘I suppose.’

‘I don’t think I need to remind you of the reason why those fucken hacks are there in the first place, do I? I don’t need to remind you whose fault it is we’re even out here?’

Mikey gave me a look then. A look like he was going to say something to me. And I was ready. I had pure energy in my wrists, in my neck. I was waiting for him to say his piece. I wanted him to say his piece more than anything else.

But he didn’t. He nodded and agreed with me, which was for the best.

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Fallow by Daniel Shand is published by Sandstone Press on 17 November (PB, £8.99)