Isolation Shepherd

‘a moving account of the shepherd’s life’ – Rennie McOwan ‘a powerful, thoughtful book written by a keen observer of life who has something worthwhile to say’ – Bill Howatson ‘presents a picture of the elusive peace and happiness of an isolated shepherd’s existence in intimate and often harsh contact with the untamed world’ – Andrew Knight ‘Iain R. Thomson has [. . .] a keen eye for detail, a gift for art and poetry and a natural way with words . . . This is a detailed, moving and often funny book’ – Chris Nicolson, Scots Magazine In August 1956 a young shepherd, his wife, 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. Whether in stalking or gathering sheep for shearing or droving cattle over mountain passes, navigating the loch, in haymaking, finding firewood or cutting the peats, the ever present background splendidly portrayed is the grandeur of the Highlands - sometimes benign and magnificent, at others, harsh and relentless. Iain Thomson’s book vividly captures the splendour of one of Scotland’s most awesome landscapes, and depicts the numerous incidents that shaped the family’s life there before the area was flooded as part of a huge hydro-electric project. This book is the epitaph for a vanished land and a vanished life.