This image is the cover for the book Isolation Shepherd

Isolation Shepherd

In this classic memoir of rural life in the Scottish Highlands, a shepherd chronicles his years in a remote glen before the introduction of electricity.

In August 1956, Iain Thomson and his wife Betty, along with their two-year-old daughter and ten-day-old son, sat huddled in a small boat on Loch Monar in Ross-shire as a storm raged around them. They were bound for a tiny, remote cottage at the western end of the loch which was to be their home for the next four years. Isolation Shepherd is the moving story of those years.

Set against the awesome splendor of some of Scotland's most spectacular scenery, Thomson's classic memoir provides a sensitive, richly detailed account of the shepherd's life through the seasons. In vivid, poetic prose, he recreates the events that shaped his family's life in Glen Strathfarrar before the area was flooded as part of a huge hydro-electric project.

Iain R. Thomson

Iain R. Thomson is the author of three books, all of them vivid depictions of some of the wildest and most remote parts of the Highlands. A well-known figure in the Highlands and islands, he currently lives in Cannich in Inverness-shire.

Birlinn Ltd