Particular because of the strong focus on a relatively small area; general because so much of what he has discovered applies equally to other parts of Moray and Banffshire, and to the beginnings of modern agriculture in Scotland. It comes too from the pen of one who knows the country itself intimately, who has a personal feel for it, and who, almost incidentally, but vitally for the quality of the work, can make good use of his professional expertise in the area of agricultural research. Lochnavando No More is completely ...
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Particular because of the strong focus on a relatively small area; general because so much of what he has discovered applies equally to other parts of Moray and Banffshire, and to the beginnings of modern agriculture in Scotland. It comes too from the pen of one who knows the country itself intimately, who has a personal feel for it, and who, almost incidentally, but vitally for the quality of the work, can make good use of his professional expertise in the area of agricultural research. Lochnavando No More is completely original. No work of this kind has hitherto been undertaken on the archives of the Gordon Cumming family, and little enough has been written authoritatively on the history of agriculture in that part of Scotland. Nor is the book a dry treatise. Characters emerge: lairds, factors, ministers and ordinary farm people, the criminal and the unfortunate, individual men, women and children appear briefly but clearly, in trouble and happiness, in events both ordinary and extraordinary, to remind us that history is really a pattern of biographies, and that feelings and emotions ran as strong in the past as they do today.
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