Poacher’s Pilgrimage: A Journey into Land and Soul

The islands of the Outer Hebrides are home to some of the most remote and spectacular scenery in the world. They host an astonishing range of mysterious structures – stone circles, beehive dwellings, holy wells and ‘temples’ from the Celtic era. Over a twelve-day pilgrimage, often in appalling conditions, Alastair McIntosh returns to the islands of his childhood and explores the meaning of these places. Traversing moors and mountains, struggling through torrential rivers, he walks from the most southerly tip of Harris to the northerly Butt of Lewis.The book is a walk through space and time, across a physical landscape and into a spiritual one. As he battled with his own ability to endure some of the toughest terrain in Britain, he met with the healing power of the land and its communities. This is a moving book, a powerful reflection not simply of this extraordinary place and its people met along the way, but of imaginative hope for humankind.

Reviews of Poacher’s Pilgrimage: A Journey into Land and Soul

'Fascinating, provocative and, occasionally, very funny' — Joanna Kavenna * Times Literary Supplement * 'One of the most fascinating books I've read for a long while, if maddeningly hard to categorise' — David Robinson * The Scotsman * 'Poacher's Pilgrimage is a book full of generosity, spry in its thinking and detailed in its observations' * Scotland on Sunday * 'His honesty is humbling … he never skirts a question. He is on a mission, and having been Scotland's first professor of human ecology, he seems at times prophetic' — Polly Pullar * Scottish Field *