Willie Gavin, Crofter Man

Willie Gavin, Crofter Man PDF Author: David Kerr Cameron
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 0857903292
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Willie Gavin, Crofter Man is a portrait of a crofting life in the bare and sometimes bitter landscape of Scotland's North-east lowlands. It is the closely reconstructed life of one man in particular, and beyond that, the wider story of a croft and its people, assembled from the family's folk memories. Willie Gavin's real identity has been blurred, but this is essentially a true story and is illustrated with a fascinating selection of period photographs. Through the eyes of Willie Gavin we experience the hardships and wretched lifestyle endured by crofters throughout Scotland. But with deep understanding David Kerr Cameron reveals too their love for the land, the fragile bonds of friendship forged by crafting families, the weddings and the festivals they enjoyed, and the children who were raised in that life without luxury. The traditional crofting way of life began to break down in the early-twentieth century, but David Kerr Cameron has captured and recorded for future generations a culture and a landscape that have now gone forever. Willie Gavin, Crofter Man is the second part of Cameron's trilogy of rural life; the other books are The Ballad and the Plough (about life on the farmtouns) and The Cornkister Days (which focuses on agricultural practices).

Willie Gavin, Crofter Man

Willie Gavin, Crofter Man PDF Author: David Kerr Cameron
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 0857903292
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Get Book Here

Book Description
Willie Gavin, Crofter Man is a portrait of a crofting life in the bare and sometimes bitter landscape of Scotland's North-east lowlands. It is the closely reconstructed life of one man in particular, and beyond that, the wider story of a croft and its people, assembled from the family's folk memories. Willie Gavin's real identity has been blurred, but this is essentially a true story and is illustrated with a fascinating selection of period photographs. Through the eyes of Willie Gavin we experience the hardships and wretched lifestyle endured by crofters throughout Scotland. But with deep understanding David Kerr Cameron reveals too their love for the land, the fragile bonds of friendship forged by crafting families, the weddings and the festivals they enjoyed, and the children who were raised in that life without luxury. The traditional crofting way of life began to break down in the early-twentieth century, but David Kerr Cameron has captured and recorded for future generations a culture and a landscape that have now gone forever. Willie Gavin, Crofter Man is the second part of Cameron's trilogy of rural life; the other books are The Ballad and the Plough (about life on the farmtouns) and The Cornkister Days (which focuses on agricultural practices).

The Cornkister Days

The Cornkister Days PDF Author: David Kerr Cameron
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 0857909096
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
With a knowledge and a skill that reveals his passion for the land and its people, David Kerr Cameron picks his way through the rural upheavals and developments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries towards the landscape we recognise today. In doing so he provides a wide-sweeping and unforgettable view of our rural history and completes his great rural trilogy portraying the old farming landscapes of Scotland's North-east Lowlands. Both nostalgia and great understanding are revealed as the author recalls a society based on the plough, a society that moved 'against the tapestry of the year: 'This was the backcloth against which the farmtoun folk lived out their days; its seasons and rituals governed their lives, and ultimately their destinies. Here now is that story, the story of a landscape all but lost before the onward march of agri-business and agri-technology'. The days recalled are the days of the Clydesdale horse and the hired man, the cottar and crofter, the farmtoun tenant and his laird.

A Final Grain of Truth

A Final Grain of Truth PDF Author: Jack Webster
Publisher: Black & White Publishing
ISBN: 1845027590
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Jack Webster has had a lifetime of adventure as a respected and highly-commended journalist, meeting the rich and famous and experiencing what the world has to offer. From his upbringing in rural Aberdeenshire - where he survived a serious heart condition and had to overcome a debilitating stammer - to a glittering career which took him all over the world, it has been an incredible journey and a life well lived. Now, to complete his autobiographical trilogy, A Final Grain of Truth brings his story up to date, reliving magical encounters with incredible people like Charlie Chaplin, Muhammad Ali, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Field Marshal Montgomery, Barnes Wallis, Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame), Hitler's friend and mentor Dr Ernst Hanfstaengl, Christine Keeler, oil billionaire Paul Getty and a host of others as he reflects on his work, his life and his own remarkable story. Full of wonderful anecdotes and written with style and panache, A Final Grain of Truth is entertaining, heartwarming and full of enlightening insights and reflections culled from a life rich with experience.

Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

Scotland: A History from Earliest Times PDF Author: Alistair Moffat
Publisher: Birlinn
ISBN: 085790874X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
In this book, Alistair Moffat brings vividly to life the story of this great nation, from the dawn of prehistory through to the twenty-first century. Ambitious, richly detailed and highly readable, Scotland: A History From Earliest Times skilfully weaves together a dazzling array of fact and anecdote from a vast range of sources. The result is an imaginative, informative, balanced and varied portrait of Scotland, seen not just through the experience of the kings, saints, warriors, aristocrats and politicians who populate the pages of conventional history books, but also through that of ordinary people who have lived Scotland's history and have played their own important part in shaping its destiny.

The Ballad and the Plough

The Ballad and the Plough PDF Author: David Kerr Cameron
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 0857903284
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
The era of the great farms of Scotland is over now. They flourished for nearly eighty years from the mid 19th century, and those years are renowned for the strength of their characters and the legendary status of their stories. Probably the finest and richest aspect of bothy life was the ballad. Often sentimental, sometimes simplistic, they nevertheless give unrivalled detail about a vanished way of life and work. Quoting generously from the ballads, David Kerr Cameron has written a book rich in anecdote and insight. The working day was hard and long, and mealtimes consisted mainly of porridge and potatoes. Yet laughter and generosity of spirit were commonplace. For these communities, horses were as important as people, and tens of thousands of noble Clydesdales helped to cultivate the land. Ploughmen, dairymaids, bailiffs and shepherds all appear in the pages of this unique testament to the Scottish countryside. Together with Willie Gavin, Crofter Man and The Cornkister Days, this volume forms a remarkable trilogy on life in rural Scotland.

Literature of Scotland

Literature of Scotland PDF Author: Roderick Watson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350308838
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Critics hailed the first edition of The Literature of Scotland as one of the most comprehensive and fascinatingly readable accounts of Scottish literature in all three of the country's languages - Gaelic, Scots and English. In this extensively revised and expanded new edition, Roderick Watson traces the lives and works of Scottish writers in a beautiful and rugged country that has been divided by political and religious conflict but united, too, by a democratic and egalitarian ideal of nationhood. The Literature of Scotland: The Twentieth Century provides a comprehensive account of the richest ever period in Scottish literary history. From The House with the Green Shutters to Trainspotting and far beyond, this companion volume to The Literature of Scotland: The Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century gives a critical and historical context to the upsurge of writing in the languages of Scotland. Roderick Watson covers a wide range of modern and contemporary Scottish authors including: MacDiarmid, MacLean, Grassic Gibbon, Gunn, Robert Garioch, Iain Crichton Smith, Alasdair Gray, Edwin Morgan, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, A. L. Kennedy, Liz Lochhead, John Burnside, Jackie Kay, Kathleen Jamie and many, many more! Also featuring an extended list of Further Reading and a helpful chronological timeline, this is an indispensable introduction to the great variety of Scottish writing which has emerged since the start of the twentieth century.

Scots Folk Singers and their Sources

Scots Folk Singers and their Sources PDF Author: Caroline Macafee
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004464417
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This book offers a detailed analysis of two major Scottish folk song collections, the Greig-Duncan Collection, and the Scots folk song material of the School of Scottish Studies Archives. This exhaustive study of song transmission includes all contributors, not only notable singers. The scattered information, marshalled into quantifiable data, throws light on such topics as transmission within and outside the family, the role of literacy, the public reticence of women singers, the association between the Travellers and the big ballads, and the impact of social changes in the late nineteenth century, and of broadcast music in the 1920s. The new opportunities opened up by digitisation are explored here for the first time.

White Settlers

White Settlers PDF Author: Charles Jedrej
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113436850X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
First Published in 1996. Feelings about the repopulation of remote rural areas are nowadays expressed in rather alarming terms, so that in the word of a Skye land-owner: 'the filling of empty glens with people, regardless of origin, is dangerous...because it can destroy the ancient culture which is so precious'. Yet it is remarkable that the depopulation which characterized the previous centuries was greeted with virtually the same reaction. The repopulation of rural Scotland, which since the beginning of the century, has been wished for as the solution to the great problem of rural depopulation, has provoked an ambiguous response. This book describes the local experience of recent population changes and addresses the 'problem' of repopulation. It analyses the paradoxes, ironies and ambiguities that form a complex structure of feelings, much of which is only partially evident at any one time.

Farm Servants and Labour in Lowland Scotland, 1770-1914

Farm Servants and Labour in Lowland Scotland, 1770-1914 PDF Author: Thomas Martin Devine
Publisher: John Donald
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This collection of essays provides a history of farm service and labour in lowland Scotland from the agricultural revolution of the late 18th century to the outbreak of the First World War.

Scotland

Scotland PDF Author: Eric G. Grant
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description