Rum: A Landscape without Figures

This is an account of Rum, one of the Hebrides and the people who contributed to its story. The site of some of the earliest settlements in Scotland, Rum’s history extends back to the Mesolithic period. It was also an isolated haven for the early Celtic Church in the figure of Beccan the Solitary, and later formed part of the territories of the Vikings and Clanranalds, and ultimately the Macleans of Coll. Its population were driven out to North America between 1826 and 1828 and the Bulloughs, a family of Lancashire industrialists, bought the island towards the end of the nineteenth century and left a bizarre legacy of Edwardiana in the form of Kinloch castle and its grand contents. This work paints a picture of the island as a rich cultural and natural heritage that eminently justifies its status as one of Scotland’s finest nature reserves.

Reviews of Rum: A Landscape without Figures

"We could see among the deserted fields the grass-grown foundations of cottages razed to the ground; but the valley, more desolate than the one we had left, had not even its single inhabited dwelling: it seemed as if man had done with it for ever… all the more lonely in its aspect from the circumstances that the solitary valleys, with their plough-furrowed patches, and their ruined heaps of stone, open up shores every whit as solitary as themselves, and that the wide untrodden sea stretches drearily around… Not a man nor a man's dwelling could the eye command. The landscape was one without figures. -Hugh Miller, 1845 'the most interesting book I've read for many years… well laid out and put together.. an exceptional book' – Program Choinnich, Radio Nan Gaidheal 'I… have been astonished at the range of sources of information brought together… a book to be read carefully by anyone who loves these islands' – West Highland Free Press