Fraser MacDonald teaches historical geography at Edinburgh.
Peat-cutting on the island of North Uist usually begins in mid-April, but the exact timing varies. One old crofter used to say that you should only start cutting when the yellow flag iris comes into flower because by then the oils in the bog will have risen, but not everyone waits that long. It might mean cutting too late, and then the peats won’t dry. If they’re not ready by...
There is a small but interesting literature on the sociology of schism. The classic studies draw on observations of revolutionary Marxists and Scottish Presbyterians, archetypes of fissile conviction, and show that schism isn’t always a mark of decline. The energy of opposition can bring renewal: Presbyterians sometimes split to survive. In the Highlands rival congregations exist side...
‘I’ll maybe put a match to the fire,’ my father would say. The tentative phrasing belied one of the great certainties of my childhood. The fire was lit most evenings, except in high summer, but in Aberdeen you were sometimes glad of it then too. Our 1960s decorative brick fireplace was the heart of the household. It was there for warmth, but it had a significance beyond the...
Iknow the road to Abriachan better on the map than on the ground. I can trace it back and forth up the hill as it rises above the old graveyard at Killianan, through the hazel woods, out to the open ground by Balchraggan, past the Balbeg mill that belonged, my father told me, to his great-grandfather. Abriachan is the place of my father’s people, a district of crofts plotted across a...
When Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was looking to name the site where the Curiosity rover touched down on Mars in August, ‘Bradbury Landing’ must have been an obvious choice. Ray Bradbury, who died in June, was a regular visitor to JPL. He wrote his first Martian stories in Los Angeles just a few months after the lab was founded in Pasadena in 1943. As a teenager in 1939, he had attended a meeting of the LA Science Fiction Society where he listened to the self-taught rocketeer Jack Parsons, one of the leading lights of the group that would become JPL. A devotee of Alesteir Crowley, Parsons carried out experiments in ceremonial sex magic as well as solid-fuel rocketry. He was killed in 1952 when he dropped a coffee can with mercury fulminate in it, blowing up his house. There’s an impact crater named after him on the dark side of the Moon.
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