Landscape as history, tragedy and autobiography
|
'On the Crofter's Trail' describes in chilling domestic detail not just what happened during the Scottish clearances but what successive generations of crofters' descendants remember and still feel about these harrowing experiences. David Craig writes in a way which is at once intensely personal, allowing us to see his own responses to the beautiful, bleak and tragic land that we have inherited from this period and to the stories he collects en route, but also entirely self-effacing, so that we only glimpse details of a life beyond the pages of the book - a walker and climber, a poet and historian with a passion for Scottish lives and landscapes.
I bought this book to explain the sense of disruption and loss which I encountered on my first visit to the Outer Hebrides. Read this to understand scenery which utterly defies attempts to capture it for shortbread tins and tourist brochures and to recognise that this longstanding history of injustice, inhumanity and environmental destruction is repeated to this day around the world.
|
|
|
Overlooked Gem
|
|
This is exactly the sort of book that everyone should read but that hardly anyone ever does. I suppose a few of these discursive narrative histories (like Anna Funder's outstanding Stasiland) percolate upwards but the rest remain fairly untapped. The author is a poet and I think this might be his only venture into prose which is a shame as he is an assured and wonderful writer: he melds together the landscape of Scottish Highlands with the stories of the banished crofters thrown off in favour of profit-making sheep and he traces them to the ends of their journey of displacement. The wilds of Nova Scotia, Cap Breton and beyond. There is so much hurt and loss and sorrow in this tale and people are so ignorant of the clearances. This is the sort of book that should make it onto the GCSE and A Level history syllabus rather than the semi-regurgitated pap my son seems to be encountering. Sigh.
|
|
|
United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada