'Just inside the fir-dusk a hollow oblong of stones now showed, brown and damp with that stupefied or browbeaten look of an abandoned croft-house ... Here was Unnimore.' Here, too, was David Craig, groping through a wilderness in Morvern in search of a long-abandoned hamlet; his treasure-trove the remains of eight little houses, their stones covered with 'whiskery grey lichens'. A hundred pages on, our intrepid explorer is being driven across the shingle of Hudson Bay by 'a sturdy black-eyed woman of Highland Cree descent', in a three-wheeler with a rifle aboard in case of polar bears, on the track of a lost settlement of folk cleared from Kildonan. His reward this time is a crumbling gravestone, with a name and a date - 1813 - still legible, probably the furthest-north relic left by any exiled Highlander.

LRB 20 December 1990 | PDF Download