Only the Ancestors

Hugh Graham lived from the start of the 20th century to the start of the 21st, in the sea-girt Highland Parish of North Knapdale in Argyll, Scotland. Great changes occurred in his lifetime, and the centuries before - changes in land use and culture that saddened him, even angered him, but he had ever the serenity and pragmatism of the West Highlander - the Gael. In this place the Irish Gaels arrived over 1,500 years ago, establishing the proto-Scottish nation, in a green place amidst the ancient grey crags, with the blessing of the monks in the holy island of Iona on Argyll's North-Western edge. Amidst the craggy hills and raised lochs of Knapdale, and prehistoric standing stones and burial mounds of wide Kilmartin Glen, and old chapels on the long peninsulas reaching into the Hebridean Sea, and the ruins of villages in the now-sheep-cropped glens, lived Hugh Graham and his ancestors.