Previously extinct, the Large Blue butterfly has enjoyed its best summer for many years. A report in The Guardian stirs a memory of a much earlier sighting of the rare Maculinea arion in the unlikely setting of the Hebrides, which John Lorne Campbell diligently exposed as a fraud.
Tag: Canna Island (page 1 of 1)
Great news that A Little Bird Blown off Course, a new piece of music–theatre by Gaelic singer Fiona Mackenzie celebrating the life and Gaelic song collection of Margaret Fay Shaw, is to be performed in the islands and Highlands as part of the Blas Festival next month.
‘Alone in his attic study John Lorne Campbell made an astonishing discovery. Painstakingly going through old papers, he uncovered the family secret which had caused an unbridgeable emotional gap with his father and burdened his early years with heavy debt.’ Read more
When I was researching John’s story I came across unopened bottles of long-forgotten brands of whisky in his desk, relics of the SS Politician which foundered on Eriskay in 1941. Now, revising The Man Who Gave Away his Island for a new paperback edition, I am intrigued to find how often whisky works its way into the book. Perhaps that’s not surprising. As Addicted to Pleasure, Brian Cox’s diligently researched documentary records, Scottish history is saturated with uisge beatha, which no doubt accounts for the potent blend of fact and fantasy in so many stories. Read more
Canna in 1938 by Margaret Fay Shaw
In the 1930s it wasn’t that unusual for wealthy men to buy up whole islands, but John Lorne Campbell was an unusual young man.
A nice surprise in the post, a review in Farming Scotland Magazine which, not surprisingly, concentrates on John’s modernisation of the farm on Canna. Interestingly, it also highlights his essential belief that efficiency must go hand in hand with wildlife conservation and sustainability.
Welcome to the Spence family – Alison, Duncan, their children, two-and-a-half year-old Savourna and five month old Fergus, and two collies – who moved at the weekend into MacIsaac’s cottage, on Sanday [the picture above shows the restored cottage in its spectacular setting and the view is just as dramatic in the other direction as you will see below].
Today’s story in the Guardian moves me to write a letter to the editor. Severin Carrell’s report on the sudden depopulation of Canna draws attention to the difficulties of living in a small, remote community and the problems facing the National Trust for Scotland. The problem as always centres on land ownership.