By the middle of the 1960s, the only people living in the northern half of the Hebridean island of Raasay were crofter Calum MacLeod and his wife. All their neighbours had left, largely because of the refusal of the local authorities to build a road into the area. So one spring morning Calum placed a pick, an axe and a shovel into his homemade wheelbarrow, and trundled south along the narrow bridle path that was his link to the outer world and, at the point where the path ended, he started to build a road. Calum was then in his fifties, and his road would take him twenty years to complete singlehanded, in his spare time. It was just under two miles long, but it wound across inhospitable terrain, and has entered West Highland folklore. This wonderful book, required reading for every customer, isn’t just about how Calum made his road, it is about how things reached a point that he felt he had to make it, and about a way of life now largely gone.

Alexander McCall Smith calls it ‘A gem of a book’. David Crane, reviewing it for The Spectator said 'A story of heroic anti-authoritarian, anti-socialist, anti-mainland, antic-council,anti-bureaucratic bloody-mindedness...... It has an immediacy, feel and sympathy that does its subject full justice'.

This really is a splendid book; read and enjoy! 184 unillustrated pages. 2 maps. Paperback. Birlinn