Poacher's Pilgrimage

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.
""What I wouldn't give to join Alastair McIntosh on a journey. Poacher's Pilgrimage doesn't simply take us on a trip. By taking us into the remote region of the Scottish Hebrides, it also takes us deep into ourselves so that we might learn to love and protect a world made to be savored and cherished.""
--Norman Wirzba, Professor, Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University, Divinity School
""If pilgrimage is a path to enchantment, there is no better guide than Alastair McIntosh. In Poacher's Pilgrimage we follow his pilgrimage through the Outer Hebrides, where he regales us with stories of enclosure, subjugation, exclusion, sacred stones and waters, ghost wolves and fairies; ruminates on the traumas that follow cultural disruption, and wrestles with theological debates about violence, sacrifice, and belonging, whilst describing fascinating encounters with lairds, crofters, soldiers, salmon, saints, Calvinists, atheists, Druids, and pagans. McIntosh is a good companion for anyone wandering a worldly way to awe and wonder.""
--Bron Taylor, author of Dark Green Religion: Nature Spiritualty and the Planetary Future
Praise for Poacher's Pilgrimage
""A book that operates on many levels . . . a metaphor for all of us who seek renewal from the land that Alastair McIntosh explores so superbly well.""
--Roger Smith, The Great Outdoors
""Poacher's Pilgrimage is a book of beautifully compacted writing--clear, strong and constantly surprising - a fortnight's walk that contains a universe.""
--Nick Hunt, Dark Mountain
""The Poacher of the title is the boy who grew up with his landless peers. He goes poaching as an act of solidarity. It could sound jokey, but it isn't.""
--Sue Weaver, Voice for Arran
""This is as much a journey into an unusual mind as it is about the Island.""
--Madeleine Bunting, Resurgence
""Hard to categorise: travelogue, biography, spiritual quest. Easy to rate: very, very good.""
--Professor James Hunter (by Twitter), WHFP Best Books of the Year
""A journey of people, history, geography and the deeper understanding of the connection between religion and nature""
--Lynne McNeil, Life and Work
""Much more than a nature book, he considers how religion, faeries and geology have shaped our history, politics, science, spirituality and imagination.""
--Toby Clark, John Muir Trust Journal
""What engages him is a deep search - not unlike the vision quest of native Americans - that a whole culture has lost and needs to rediscover.""
--Jim Griffin, Beshara Magazine
""The language is almost poetic, reflecting the writer's artistic gifts and his understanding of Celtic and pre-Celtic culture.""
--David Thomson, Press & Journal

""Poacher's Pilgrimage is a book full of generosity, spry in its thinking and detailed in its observations. It will beguilingly give each reader a lot to think about, a lot to wish to see, and a lot think about again.""
--Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
""Alastair McIntosh is already established as one of Scotland's greatest living authors... I re