The Guga Stone

The Guga Stone PDF Author: Donald S Murray
Publisher: Luath Press Ltd
ISBN: 1909912425
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
In 1930, the last inhabitants of the isle of St Kilda were evacuated to the mainland. Shortly afterwards, following several acts of vandalism by local fishermen, Calum MacKinnon was sent back to the island to guard against further damage. Alone on the deserted island, he begins to re-imagine the conversations and stories from his years in the island port of Village Bay. He also recalls some of the experiences of its people in exile on the mainland, showing their difficulties in adjusting to a new way of life, and a diet no longer based mainly on seabirds. The vivid prose is interspersed with poetry and illustratios, creating a colourful and insightful ficionalisation of life on remote St Kilda. BACK COVER Acrobats, airmen, cormorants, cragsmen and angels leap, climb, shimmer and swoop through these pages as the story of how Calum Mackinnon was sent to guard the houses in Village Bay, St Kilda shortly after its evacuation in 1930 unfolds. While there, Calum conjures up conversations with the island's former residents, providing, through both prose and verse, fresh and often surreal insights into life on Scotland's western edge. Humorous and moving, surprising and enchanting, The Guga Stone celebrates the miracles and wonders of an existence eked out on cliff and crag, sea-rock and skerry, the exile of its people, too, far from their native shores. Enlightening as fulmar oil, exquisite as the flavour of the guga itself, The Guga Stone reveals the small and great truths of the human imagination as it recreates that island's tales and legends for our time.

The Guga Stone

The Guga Stone PDF Author: Donald S Murray
Publisher: Luath Press Ltd
ISBN: 1909912425
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1930, the last inhabitants of the isle of St Kilda were evacuated to the mainland. Shortly afterwards, following several acts of vandalism by local fishermen, Calum MacKinnon was sent back to the island to guard against further damage. Alone on the deserted island, he begins to re-imagine the conversations and stories from his years in the island port of Village Bay. He also recalls some of the experiences of its people in exile on the mainland, showing their difficulties in adjusting to a new way of life, and a diet no longer based mainly on seabirds. The vivid prose is interspersed with poetry and illustratios, creating a colourful and insightful ficionalisation of life on remote St Kilda. BACK COVER Acrobats, airmen, cormorants, cragsmen and angels leap, climb, shimmer and swoop through these pages as the story of how Calum Mackinnon was sent to guard the houses in Village Bay, St Kilda shortly after its evacuation in 1930 unfolds. While there, Calum conjures up conversations with the island's former residents, providing, through both prose and verse, fresh and often surreal insights into life on Scotland's western edge. Humorous and moving, surprising and enchanting, The Guga Stone celebrates the miracles and wonders of an existence eked out on cliff and crag, sea-rock and skerry, the exile of its people, too, far from their native shores. Enlightening as fulmar oil, exquisite as the flavour of the guga itself, The Guga Stone reveals the small and great truths of the human imagination as it recreates that island's tales and legends for our time.

The Guga Hunters

The Guga Hunters PDF Author: Donald S. Murray
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 0857907654
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This Scottish Highlands history celebrates the traditional Gaelic bird hunt undertaken each year on the island of Sula Sgeir north of the Outer Hebrides. Every year, ten men from Ness, at the northern tip of the Isle of Lewis, sail north-east for some forty miles to a remote rock called Sula Sgeir. Their mission is to catch and harvest the guga; the almost fully grown gannet chicks nesting on the two-hundred-foot-high cliffs that circle the tiny island, which is barely half a mile long. After spending a fortnight in the arduous conditions that often prevail there, they return home with around two thousand of the birds, pickled and salted and ready for the tables of Nessmen and women both at home and abroad. The Guga Hunters tells the story of the men who voyage to Sula Sgeir each year, capturing their way of life and the drama of their exploits. They speak of the laughter that seasons their time together on Sula Sgeir, as well as the dangers they have faced. Delving deep into the social history of Ness, local historian Donald S. Murray also reveals the hunt's connections to the traditions of other North Atlantic countries. Told in his district's poetry and prose, Murray shows how the spirit of a community is preserved in this truly unique tradition.

Metamorphism

Metamorphism PDF Author: Ákos Moravánszky
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 3035608067
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Materiality is a recurring and central issue in architecture. This book explains how materials are "constructed", how they become cultural substances. Metamorphism investigates the complex relationship between natural materials and technology, science and sensuality. Gottfried Semper (1803–1879) made the notion of Stoffwechsel the key element of his theory. With this concept he intended to explain how a structural form originally bound to a method of processing is transferred from one material to another, liberated from its original function. For the first time, the book investigates the subject from a historic point of view whilst reflecting on current interdisciplinary research. Examples from Aalto to Zumthor illustrate the specific aspects of historic and contemporary material concepts.

The Girl on the Ferryboat

The Girl on the Ferryboat PDF Author: Angus Peter Campbell
Publisher: Luath Press Ltd
ISBN: 1909912565
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
I loved her from the moment I saw her, and that love has never wavered. It has encased every choice I have ever made, and I have never done anything in my life which didn't involve her image somewhere... I'm so sorry for it all This is the latest English-language novel from award-winning Gaelic poet, novelist, journalist, broadcaster and actor, Angus Peter Campbell, and the first to be published simultaneously in Gaelic and English. Vividly evoked Scottish tale of chance encounters and of family memories, regret, love and loss. Combines myth, music and linguistics to recount the memory of a hazy summer's day on the Isle of Mull.

Outer Hebrides

Outer Hebrides PDF Author: Mark Rowe
Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides
ISBN: 1784770361
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
adt's new guide to the Outer Hebrides: The Western Isles of Scotland, from Lewis to Barra, by experienced writer and journalist Mark Rowe is the only full-size guide to focus solely on the islands of Lewis, Harris, St Kilda, North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist, Eriskay, Barra and Vatersay. Masses of background information is included, from geography and geology to art and architecture, with significant coverage of wildlife, too, as well as all the practical details you could need: when to visit, suggested itineraries, public holidays and festivals, local culture, plus accommodation and where to eat and drink. Walkers, bird-watchers, wildlife photographers, beach lovers and genealogists are all catered for, and this is an ideal guide for those who travel simply with curious minds to discover far-flung places of great cultural, historical and wildlife interest. The Outer Hebrides is an archipelago of 15 inhabited islands and more than 50 others that are free of human footprint. Huge variations in landscape are found across the islands, from Lewisian gneiss, which dates back almost three billion years, to rugged Harris with its magnificent sands running down its western flanks and the windswept, undulating flatness and jagged sea lochs of the Uists. This is a land where Gaelic is increasingly spoken and ancient monuments abound, where stunning seabird colonies and birds of prey can be watched, and where the grassy coastal zones known as the machair are transformed into glorious carpets of wildfllowers in late spring and summer. Whether visiting the Standing Stones of Callanish, the Uig peninsula, Barra's Castle Bay, or historic St Kilda, or if you just want to experience the romance of the Sound of Harris, one of the most beautiful ferry journeys in the world, Bradt's Outer Hebrides: The Western Isles of Scotland, from Lewis to Barra has all the information you need.

The Gannet

The Gannet PDF Author: John Henry Gurney
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gannets
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description


Herring Tales

Herring Tales PDF Author: Donald S. Murray
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472912187
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Scots like to smoke or salt them. The Dutch love them raw. Swedes look on with relish as they open bulging, foul-smelling cans to find them curdling within. Jamaicans prefer them with a dash of chilli pepper. Germans and the English enjoy their taste best when accompanied by pickle's bite and brine. Throughout the long centuries men have fished around their coastlines and beyond, the herring has done much to shape both human taste and history. Men have co-operated and come into conflict over its shoals, setting out in boats to catch them, straying, too, from their home ports to bring full nets to shore. Women have also often been at the centre of the industry, gutting and salting the catch when the annual harvest had taken place, knitting, too, the garments fishermen wore to protect them from the ocean's chill. Following a journey from the western edge of Norway to the east of England, from Shetland and the Outer Hebrides to the fishing ports of the Baltic coast of Germany and the Netherlands, culminating in a visit to Iceland's Herring Era Museum, Donald S. Murray has stitched together tales of the fish that was of central importance to the lives of our ancestors, noting how both it - and those involved in their capture - were celebrated in the art, literature, craft, music and folklore of life in northern Europe. Blending together politics, science, history, religious and commercial life, Donald contemplates, too, the possibility of restoring the silver darlings of legend to these shores.

Ten Thousand Years of Cultivation at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

Ten Thousand Years of Cultivation at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea PDF Author: Jack Golson
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760461164
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
Kuk is a settlement at c. 1600 m altitude in the upper Wahgi Valley of the Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea, near Mount Hagen, the provincial capital. The site forms part of the highland spine that runs for more than 2500 km from the western head of the island of New Guinea to the end of its eastern tail. Until the early 1930s, when the region was first explored by European outsiders, it was thought to be a single, uninhabited mountain chain. Instead, it was found to be a complex area of valleys and basins inhabited by large populations of people and pigs, supported by the intensive cultivation of the tropical American sweet potato on the slopes above swampy valley bottoms. With the end of World War II, the area, with others, became a focus for the development of coffee and tea plantations, of which the establishment of Kuk Research Station was a result. Large-scale drainage of the swamps produced abundant evidence in the form of stone axes and preserved wooden digging sticks and spades for their past use in cultivation. Investigations in 1966 at a tea plantation in the upper Wahgi Valley by a small team from The Australian National University yielded a date of over 2000 years ago for a wooden stick collected from the bottom of a prehistoric ditch. The establishment of Kuk Research Station a few kilometres away shortly afterwards provided an ideal opportunity for a research project.

Handbook of the Panjáb, Western Rajpútáná, Kashmír, and Upper Sindh

Handbook of the Panjáb, Western Rajpútáná, Kashmír, and Upper Sindh PDF Author: Murray
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description


Ecocriticism and the Island

Ecocriticism and the Island PDF Author: Pippa Marland
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786607093
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Islands have long been the subject of cultural fascination, but in recent decades, they have exerted an increasingly powerful centrifugal force, sending writers to the outer edges of the British-Irish archipelago in search of inspiration and insight. Drawing on contemporary ecocritical approaches, island studies, and emergent archipelagic perspectives, Ecocriticism and the Island explores a wide selection of island-themed creative non-fiction. Through a combination of textual analysis, and, where possible, original interviews and archival research, Pippa Marland offers new insights into the work of Tim Robinson, Brenda Chamberlain, Christine Evans, W.G. Sebald, Stephen Watts, Amy Liptrot, Kathleen Jamie, Adam Nicolson, Robert Macfarlane, and David Gange. In assessing the ways in which these authors negotiate existing cultural tropes of the island while offering their own distinctive articulations of “islandness,” this book represents an important intervention into island literary studies. At the same time, it contributes to the development of an archipelagic strand of ecocriticism—one that offers a valuable perspective on human-environmental relationships in an Anthropocene context.