Crowdie And Cream And Other Stories

Download or read book 100 Best Routes On Scottish Mountains written by Ralph Storer and published by Sphere. This book was released on 2014-02-06 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From gentle afternoon strolls to challenging scrambles in remote mountain sanctuaries, this revised and updated guide covers walks in the Scottish highlands. All walks are circular and accessible by road. No rock climbing is involved and the routes, each including a peak over 2000 feet, have been selected by an experienced Scottish walker. All Highland regions are included and each walk can be completed in a day. Maps and information about difficulty rating, type of terrain and conditions in adverse weather is provided. * All walks are circular and accessible by road * No rock climbing is involved * Selected by an experienced Scottish walker * Each route includes a peak over 2,000 feet * All Highland regions are included * All walks can be completed in one day * Each route has a detailed sketch map and ratings for technical difficulty, type of terrain and conditions in adverse weather

Download or read book Fabric written by Victoria Finlay and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magnificent work of original research that unravels history through textiles and cloth—how we make it, use it, and what it means to us. How is a handmade fabric helping save an ancient forest? Why is a famous fabric pattern from India best known by the name of a Scottish town? How is a Chinese dragon robe a diagram of the whole universe? What is the difference between how the Greek Fates and the Viking Norns used threads to tell our destiny? In Fabric, bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it. She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to handspin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers at their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama - where in the 1930s, deprived of almost everything they owned, a community of women turned quilting into an art form. She began her research just after the deaths of both her parents —and entwined in the threads she found her personal story too. Fabric is not just a material history of our world, but Finlay's own journey through grief and recovery.

Download or read book The Sea House written by Elisabeth Gifford and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1860, Alexander Ferguson, a newly ordained vicar and amateur evolutionary scientist, takes up his new parish, a poor, isolated patch on the remote Scottish island of Harris. He hopes to uncover the truth behind the legend of the selkies—mermaids or seal people who have been sighted off the north of Scotland for centuries. He has a more personal motive, too; family legend states that Alexander is descended from seal men. As he struggles to be the good pastor he was called to be, his maid Moira faces the terrible eviction of her family by Lord Marstone, whose family owns the island. Their time on the island will irrevocably change the course of both their lives, but the white house on the edge of the dunes keeps its silence long after they are gone. It will be more than a century before the Sea House reluctantly gives up its secrets. Ruth and Michael buy the grand but dilapidated building and begin to turn it into a home for the family they hope to have. Their dreams are marred by a shocking discovery. The tiny bones of a baby are buried beneath the house; the child's fragile legs are fused together—a mermaid child. Who buried the bones? And why? To heal her own demons, Ruth feels she must discover the secrets of her new home—but the answers to her questions may lie in her own traumatic past. The Sea House by Elisabeth Gifford is a sweeping tale of hope and redemption and a study of how we heal ourselves by discovering our histories.

Download or read book A Superior Spectre written by Angela Meyer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-07-23 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeff is dying. Haunted by memories and grappling with the shame of his desires, he runs away to remote Scotland with a piece of experimental tech that allows him to enter the mind of someone in the past. Instructed to only use it three times, Jeff – self-indulgent, isolated and deteriorating – ignores this advice. In the late 1860s, Leonora lives a contented life in the Scottish Highlands, surrounded by nature, her hands and mind kept busy. Contemplating her future and the social conventions that bind her, a secret romantic friendship with the local laird is interrupted when her father sends her to stay with her aunt in Edinburgh – an intimidating, sooty city; the place where her mother perished. But Leonora’s ability to embrace her new life is shadowed by a dark presence that begins to lurk behind her eyes, and strange visions that bear no resemblance to anything she has ever seen or known… A Superior Spectre is a highly accomplished debut novel about our capacity for curiosity, and our dangerous entitlement to it, and reminds us the scariest ghosts aren’t those that go bump in the night, but those that are born and create a place for themselves in the human soul.

Download or read book The Finlay J. Macdonald Omnibus written by Finlay J. Macdonald and published by Little Brown. This book was released on 1991-03-28 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CROWDIE AND CREAM: Peopled with characters like Great Aunt Rachel, 'built like a Churchill tank and with a personality to match', these are the stories of a childhood, of the hard years of the Depression, and then the departure of the island's young men to fight in the Second World War. Together they bring alive the warmth and closeness of a unique Hebridean community. CROTAL AND WHITE: Finlay J Macdonald continues his story with a witty account of his adolescent years during the depression. Hard days for the villagers, but their sense of humour never deserted them. And when young Finlay won the bursary to secondary school in the Northlands it was with a mixture of joy and sadness that he prepared to leave behind him a community that would soon be changed forever...THE CORNCRAKE AND THE LYSANDER: As Finlay Macdonald set out for high school in Tarbert, Hitler's growing military strength had begun to menace the people of Europe. But to Finlay this was just one more exciting prospect along with living in Big Grandfather's house, making new friends and meeting the girls of his adolescent dreams.

Download or read book The Stornoway Way written by Kevin MacNeil and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2006-09-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Fuck everyone from Holden Caulfield to Bridget Jones, fuck all the American and English phoney fictions that claim to speak for us; they don’t know the likes of us exist and they never did. We are who we are because we grew up the Stornoway way. We do not live in the back of beyond, we live in the very heart of beyond ...’ Meet R Stornoway, drink-addled misfit, inhabitant of the Hebridean Isle of Lewis, and meandering man fighting to break free of an island he just can’t seem to let go of...

Download or read book Crotal And White written by Finlay J. Macdonald and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2016-02-04 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finlay J. Macdonald's impressions of a Hebridean childhood in Crowdie and Cream were hailed as 'the best portrayal of the Hebrides by an insider'. Now his journey continues into adolescence, and if his progress is sometimes hilariously inept, his commentary on his early village life, peopled as ever with larger-than-life characters involved in often break-neck escapades, is a valuable social document, which is none the less valid for being highly amusing. In the 1930s the people in the Western Islands of Scotland knew hardships against which the adversities of the 1980s pale into insignificance. The villagers' spirit, forged in the co-operative if independent times when cash was almost foreign to their economy, saw them through to the better days when tourism was beginning to bring its mixed blessings to the young Finlay's previously unspoilt home. Village life was getting easier and happier, and home life was being re-organised around the loom - paid for out of the gradually improving Macdonald family income - for the weaving of the wool that his mother spun and dyed in the traditional colours of Crotal and White. Economic sufficiency and the heightened social aspirations it brought with it served, paradoxically, only to increase the pressure on the 13 pupils of the village school in the Northlands - away from the village but still on Harris. And so it was that Finlay J. Macdonald had to leave behind him a life that could never be replaced, evoked here in a subtle blend of hard fact, wry comment and uproarious story-telling.