A LIFE IN THE HILLS
Katharine Stewart was born in 1914 in Reading. Following the Second World War and after a spell running a hotel in Edinburgh she moved with her husband, Sam Stewart, and daughter Hilda, to the croft at Abriachan near Loch Ness, where she began her writing career with A Croft in the Hills. For many years she wrote a weekly column, On the Croft and Country Diary, for the Scotsman, as well as several other books on Highland life including those collected in this Omnibus. Later she trained as a teacher before, on the death of her husband, becoming the local postmistress at Abriachan. She died in 2013 and is survived by her daughter, Hilda.
A LIFE IN THE HILLS
The Katharine Stewart Omnibus
This combined edition first published in 2018 by
Birlinn Ltd
West Newington House
10 Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.birlinn.co.uk
A Croft in the Hills was first published in 1960 by Oliver and Boyd
New editions published by Melven Press in 1979,
by Mercat Press in 1991 and by Birlinn Ltd in 2012
Text Katharine Stewart 1960, 1979 and 2012
Illustrations copyright Anne Shortreed 1960
A Garden in the Hills was first published in 1995 by Mercat Press
A new edition was published in 2012 by Birlinn Ltd
Text Katharine Stewart 1995, 2012
Illustrations Anne Shortreed 1995
A School in the Hills was first published in 1996 by Mercat Press
Text Katharine Stewart 1996
The Post in the Hills was first published in 1997 by Mercat Press
Text Katharine Stewart 1997
The moral right of Katharine Stewart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher
ISBN: 978 1 78027 507 9
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Set in Bembo at Birlinn
Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
CONTENTS
A CROFT IN THE HILLS
TO MY FAMILY
All of you with little children... take them somehow into the country among green grass and yellow wheatamong treesby hills and streams, if you wish their highest education, that of the heart and the soul, to be completed.
Richard Jefferies
INTRODUCTION
to the First Edition
WHY, you may ask, record the simple fact that three people took to the hills and lived quiet lives under a wide sky, among the rock and heather, working with the crops and beasts they could manage to raise there, in order to feed and clothe themselves. There is certainly little room for dramatic highlights in this story of ours. But we heard the singing and we found the gold. And I believe that each small stand taken against the shrill wind of disenchantment which is blowing across the world has more positive human value than many of the assertions being made by science today.
Science says: Here is a stone. It weighs so much. It measures so much. It is so-and-so many years old. But a man needs to discover that the stone is strong, so that he can stand on it, and cool, so that he can lay his head against it: that it is beautiful and can be fashioned as an ornament, or hard and can be built into his home.
How does he make these discoveries? With his own eyes, his own wits, his own imagination. His assessment of the stone includes a measuring of his own stature. And as his hand passes over the firm surface his brain is alert, his imagination lit. He is alive.
If the human being is to hold to his identity, he must, somehow or other, keep on making his own discoveries. The tragedy of today is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for him to do so. He is even in danger of becoming a back number, for the powers that would govern his life have found that the machine is, for competitive purposes, so much more efficient and reliable than he is.
When you have lived for a few years in the bare uplands, where life has been precarious from the start, you learn, first, not to panic. Then you are ready to love wholeheartedly what need no longer be feared. You become so deeply involved in the true drama of cherishing life itself that mere attitudes and the pursuit of possessions are discarded as absurd. You discover that under snow there is bread, the secret bread, that sustains.
Panic gone, you can plot a course with steady hand and eye. And, after all, human steadfastness is the only ultimate weapon fit to guarantee survival in a real sense.
That is why I thought it worthwhile to record the process by which three small human beings, completely re-enchanted with their world, found the strength to walk without fear among the astonishing beauty of its wilderness.
I should like to thank Mrs. Anne Shortreed for capturing so delightfully, in line, the spirit of life in the uplands. And my special thanks go to Mr. Neil Gunn, who gave the book his blessing.
KATHARINE STEWART
FOREWORD
to the First Edition
by
NEIL M. GUNN
The typescript of this adventure story reached me out of the blueor very nearly, for the croft is about a thousand feet above Loch Ness: marginal land, hill-top farming, where on a February morning the blue may be vibrant with lark song or obscured by a snow blizzard. This is the oldest of all Highland adventures and will be the last. It is heartening and heart-breaking. Why do people go on thinking they can make a living out of a hill croft? In particular, what drives strangers, not bred in crofting traditions, to make the attempt? This is the story of such an attempt, with all the questions answered, and it is told so well that I find it absorbing.
For the author and her husband see everything with new eyes. They meet their problems as they arise, and they arise daily. Their capacity for work is all but inexhaustible. If I hesitate to use the word heroic it is because there are no heroics in this human record; only day-to-day doings, the facts of life, but, again, facts that spread over into many dimensions, the extra dimensions that give the book its unusual quality, its brightness and its wisdom. For the attitude to life is positive; it somehow contrives to survive the frustrations; and that today is rare. Often, too, this is seen in coloured threads running through the main texture, as in the growing up of their child to school age and her responses to the myriad influences of the natural scene; or in the spontaneous help given by, and to, neighbours at difficult or critical timesthe old communal warmth that survives the hazards, or is there because of them.
I commend this book to all those who are interested in such things and may have sometimes wondered if there is any meaning in the ancient notion of a way of life.
