<p>The islands of the Outer Hebrides are home to some of the most remote and spectacular scenery in the world. They host an astonishing range of mysterious structures - stone circles, beehive dwellings, holy wells and 'temples' from the Celtic era. Over a twelve-day pilgrimage, often in appalling conditions, Alastair McIntosh returns to the islands of his childhood and explores the meaning of these places. Traversing moors and mountains, struggling through torrential rivers, he walks from the most southerly tip of Harris to the northerly Butt of Lewis. The book is a walk through space and time, across a physical landscape and into a spiritual one. As he battled with his own ability to endure some of the toughest terrain in Britain, he met with the healing power of the land and its communities. This is a moving book, a powerful reflection not simply of this extraordinary place and its people met along the way, but of imaginative hope for humankind.</p>

Poachers Pilgrimage

Politics & Social Sciences

Alastair McIntosh

Philosophy

Birlinn Ltd.

It is easy to feel helpless in the face of the torrent of information about environmental catastrophes taking place all over the world. In Soil and Soul, Scottish activist and academic Alastair McIntosh shows how it is still possible for individuals to take on the might of corporate power and emerge victorious. Alastair's beliefs are rooted in his upbringing on the Isle of Lewis. In the first part of his book he explores the ways in which the old way of life in the Hebrides was threatened with extinction by global capitalism; he does not advocate a return to some kind of preindustrial golden age, but balances the gains of modernity against what has been lost - in particular the disintegration of communities governed by a sense of mutual responsibility. The second part of the book demonstrates how Alastair's principles of community empowerment can be successfully put into practice. Working closely with the inhabitants of the Isle of Eigg, Alastair was partly responsible for the first-known case in which Scottish tenants cleared a laird from his own estate. The people of Eigg raised sufficient funds to purchase their island from their landlord, very much against his will, thus galvanizing public demands for widespread land reform in Scotland. Plans to turn a Hebridean mountain into a superquarry were overturned after Alastair persuaded Native American War Chief Sulian Stone Eagle Herney to come to Scotland and testify at the public enquiry. This extraordinary book incorporates theology, economics, ecology, history and politics as the author journeys towards a radical new philosophy of place. The daring and imaginative responses to the destruction of the natural world he describes make this an uplifting, empowering and inspirational read.

Soil and Soul: Dispatches of a Celtic Ecowarrior

Business & Money

Economics

Aurum Press Ltd

Healing Nationhood: Essays on Spirituality, Place and Community

Curlew Productions

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Books by Alastair McIntosh