This book is written from the point of view of some scholarship, and from the point of view of someone whose historical and ethnographic research work has been done mostly from Judique in Cape Breton.

The author’s imaginative and stimulating blend of personal reminiscence and rigorous research demonstrates that Highland history can almost always be, and often best is, done from a local starting point. It exposes the first struggles from ruralism into industrialism on the fringes of Lochaber and Ardgour and what happened in a depopulated area of Gaelic Scotland for a century from 1840.

John G. Gibson is a scholar of Gaelic culture and musicologist who lives in Judique, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Traditional Gaelic Bagpiping, 1745–1945 and Old and New World Highland Bagpiping. Born in Edinburgh in 1941, he spent much of his childhood in Craigag near Glenfinnan but attended both school and university in Edinburgh before his emigration to Canada.

John G. Gibson's profile page

‘An unusual, ambitious and deeply rewarding book'

The Scotsman (Four Stars)