New Releases and up-dates

KNOYDART
DENIS RIXSON
KNOYDART lies on the northern edge of the 'Rough Bounds' - the old name for the rugged terrain along the west coast of Scotland which also included Moidart, Arisaig and Morar. One of the most remote, beautiful and desolate areas of the Highlands, it has also had a long and troubled history.

Throughout the medieval period this was Clanranald territory and later provided some of the staunchest of Bonnie Prince Charlie's followers during the 1745 Rising. In the mid nineteenth century it witnessed one of the last and most brutal clearances in Scotland and in 1948 it was the scene of the famous land raid by the 'Seven Men of Knoydart. Today the area continues to draw attention to the relevance of land reform as an important issue within the Highlands.

Denis Rixson's book is the first full-length survey of this fascinating area and presents the moving struggle of a community to preserve itself amidst a harsh environment.

LAST OF THE FREE
JAMES HUNTER
Written by a man who is both an award-winning historian of the Highlands and Islands and a key figure in shaping the region's future development, Lost of the Free is a ground-breaking and definitive account of how the Highlands and Islands of Scotland evolved into the way they are today. Never before has the history of the region been recounted so comprehensively and in such fascinating, often moving, detail.

But this book is not simply the story of humanity's millennia-long involvement with one of the world's most spectacular localities. It Is also a major contribution to present-day debate about how Scotland - and Britain - should be organised. James Hunter's central contention is that the Highlands and Islands were most successful when the region possessed a large measure of autonomy, which turned places like Iona and Kirkwall into centres of European significance. That autonomy was destroyed, this book maintains, by medieval Scotland's monarchy, by seventeenth -century Scotland's parliament and by the British politicians who inherited the Scottish state's unrelenting determination to ensure that inhabitants of the Highlands and Islands had no worthwhile control over their own destinies.