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The Clan Donald Book Shop at Amazon
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Title |
Calum's Road
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Author |
Roger Hutchinson |
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Details |
Hardback 224pp Birlinn Publishers |
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ISBN |
1841584479
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 You
may have heard the delightful strathspey by Capercaillie, now read
the story of the man himself. This book has become Scotland's
surprise No 1 bestseller and deservedly so. Delightfully written but
not romanticised, an ideal gift in time for Christmas.
This book is a parable: a moving
story of stubbornly heroic resistance and of extraordinary personal
achievement. It is the story of a statement made from the depths of
one man�s heart in the most practical and indisputable of ways
against the unnecessary destruction of his homeland.
Calum MacLeod had lived on the northern
point of Raasay since his birth in 1911. He tended the Rona
lighthouse at the very tip of his little archipelago, until
semi-automation in 1967 reduced his responsibilities. �So what he
decided to do,� says his last neighbour, Donald MacLeod, �was to
build a road out of Arnish in his months off. With a road he hoped
new generations of people would return to Arnish and all the north
end of Raasay ...�
And so, at the age of 56, Calum MacLeod, the last man left in
northern Raasay, set about single-handedly constructing the
�impossible� road. It would become a romantic, quixotic venture, a
kind of sculpture; an obsessive work of art so perfect in every
gradient, culvert and supporting wall that its creation occupied
almost twenty years of his life. In Calum�s Road, Roger Hutchinson
recounts the extraordinary story of this remarkable man�s devotion
to his visionary project.
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