Making for Home: A Tale of the Scottish Borders

As a child living in a bleak coastal village on the Solway Firth during World War 2, Alan Tait’s Dr Barnardo’s papier mache collection box, with its thatched roof and chimney, represented a different world, a bright and safe one, and inspired him to imagine the homes that might lie in his future, and to invent the rooms he might inhabit. From such simple beginnings grew a lifelong obsession with houses and collecting. In Making for Home, Alan Tait traces his journey from childhood imaginings to a tenement flat in Glasgow in the 1960s to the Moffat Valley, in the Scottish Borders, where he bought a remote farmhouse in the 1970s, since when he has overseen its restoration and renewal during four decades of continuing change. Making for Home is at once a memoir, a meditation on the nature of buildings and home and a history of this unique place, from earliest times, through the hunting of the Convenanters in the 1680s and the agricultural revolution, to the arrival of the Forestry Commission, which changed the landscape of the Valley forever, and beyond. The result is a lament, but not a dirge – for the valley will always move on and give shelter to men and animals.

Reviews of Making for Home: A Tale of the Scottish Borders

""Beautifully illustrated chronicle of the spirit of a special place."" Dundee Courier and Advertiser ""Will inspire and captivate anyone who dreams of reclaiming an old, ramshackle garden."" Amateur Gardening ""Like all good stories, this one ends happily. Lavishly illustrated, this book must give even the armchair gardener food for thought. It may well spur others on to try a similar project, or perhaps just dream about it."" Scots Magazine