David Craig, who died in 2021, taught creative writing at Lancaster. As well as poetry and fiction, he wrote books about climbing, such as Native Stones, and On the Crofters’ Trail and The Glens of Silence, about the Highland Clearances.
The condition (cancer) and the person (myself) Reeled towards each other over the years, Capsules slowly converging. Now they have docked – ‘Raped!’ the Soviet spacemen used to shout As the new arrival fitted in.
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Eight years ago, at Buaile nam Bodach on Barra, the landlady at the B&B had said, ‘My great-aunt was cleared from Pabbay’ – the next island but two to the south, the third-last joint in the backbone of ‘the Long Island’ of the Outer Hebrides. I was researching my book On the Crofters’ Trail at the time, collecting from people whatever their grand or great-grandparents had told them about the High-land Clearances, when landlords desperate to increase the income from their land forced many thousands of small tenants from their homes by a mixture of bribery, threats and the torching of their thatch, their roof-timbers and their looms.’‘
David Craig has an unfashionable concern with truth-telling in fiction. In his earlier role as a literary critic, he wrote a book called The Real Foundations in which he showed how some of the...
‘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,...
I admire mountain, rock and ice-climbing from a respectful distance. When young and foolish, I tried it. I even went up what some experienced climbers call ‘the milk run’ to the peak...
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