John Dewar’s Islay, Jura and Colonsay

The strange burial customs of Jura ● A detailed account of the great battle between the MacDonalds and the MacLeans at Tràigh Ghruinneart in Islay ● The many smaller clan battles of Jura and Colonsay ● The extraordinary hunt for the last of the MacPhees on a tiny island off Oronsay ● The inhuman treatment meted out to the innocent people of Islay and Jura by a strangely composite Campbell figure called Mac Iain Riabhaich ● The wretched fate suffered by his still more vicious wife ● The good Campbell who saved the people of the Rhinns of Islay from their clutches ● The youthful exploits of the Campbell-hating Colonsay general Alastair mac Colla ● The courageous Islay woman who fled persecution and madness with her twelve children as far as the edge of Corryvreckan ● A murder mystery in Jura ● The people’s nickname for the rich Glasgow merchant who bought the island of Islay

— These are some of the fifty-odd stories collected in Gaelic by a plain but gifted man from Arrochar called John Dewar. Meticulously edited and set in their historical context, they offer a vivid bottom-up view of events in these Hebridean islands from about 1500 to 1840

This is the first volume in a planned series of ten covering the ‘people’s history of the West Highlands’ as recounted to Dewar by over 300 informants during the 1860s.