Recent books with a Scottish flavour
A History of Scotland’s Landscapes
Fiona Watson with Piers Dixon (Historic Environment Scotland, £30) Beautifully illustrated with maps, photographs and drawings, and with scholarly texts by a medieval historian and an archaeologist, this book tells how Man shaped Scotland’s landscape, from erecting standing stones 5,000 years ago to building windfarms today.
Scotch Baronial
Miles Glendinning and Aonghus Mackechnie (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, £65) This is architectural history with a relentless political agenda, but covers all of Scotland’s castle architecture, from martial buildings of the First Castle Age and Adam-style castellated Classicism to full-bodied Bryce baronial, Old Scots revival and the tower houses of today. An academic study that merits better editing and illustrations, it makes an invaluable contribution to the story of architecture in Scotland.
Eilean
Edited by Fiona J. Mackenzie (Birlinn, £25) The beauty of the Hebrides and the warmth of the people and their vanished way of life are captured in 200 photographs taken over six decades from the 1920s by Margaret Fay Shaw 1903–2004). With her husband, John Lorne Campbell, she created one of the world’s finest repositories of Hebridean song, image, language and folklore, now curated by the National Trust for Scotland at their former home on Canna.
The Photographs of Archie Chisholm
Michael Cope (Thirsty Books, £14.99) Charting life in the Hebrides a generation before Margaret Fay Shaw arrived with her camera, and thus an excellent complement to Eilean, this book of images has been put together from museum archives and private collections. Archie Chisholm recorded the landscape and activities of crofting communities when he lived there (as Procurator Fiscal) from 1881–1913, capturing everything from whaling and fairs to fishing expeditions and evictions.
Clanship to Capitalism
Richard Sidgwick (To order, email rts@milestonehill.com, £45) A portrait of the estates of Lochaber from 1745 to today, with detailed knowledge of their history and owners from a former partner of West Highland Estates. The book includes numerous historic and modern maps, pictures and photographs, as well as chapters on Lady Landowners and the future for Highland estates.
Scotland: Her Story
Edited by Rosemary Goring (Birlinn, £20) This anthology offers a new perspective, drawing on material from court records and diaries to chapbooks and eyewitness accounts to record life through the eyes of famous and unknown women. It features everyone from Queen Margaret, Mary, Queen of Scots and Lulu to herring gutters and the mother of a child massacred at Dunblane.