Highlands and Islands of Scotland

There are few landscapes in the western world more bewitching than the mountain glens of the Scottish Highlands and the scattered islands of the Hebrides. From its bleak mountains to its flower-filled meadows, from savage sea-cliffs to pure white beaches, it has inspired an equally varied oral heritage. There are the works of gentle scholar saints, epic tales of murderous clan rivalry, Norse legends of monsters and unsubdued spirits and the romantic tale of how an exiled prince came back to rescue his land and crown, though his defeat brought ruin to this ancient culture. More recently, it is the landscape and its animal inhabitants that have inspired some of the greatest of the poems captured here by Mary Miers, whose feel for the spirit of the Highlands and islands is unerring. She combines the sensibility of a native from the island of South Uist with the eye of a travelling scholar of architecture. Small books that open our vast landscapes of the mind.