One of the nice additions to the book is the introduction done by James Naughtie, born and reared in the North-East and well known for among other things his excellent radio series on Scotland "Another Country". The following is that introduction.

"THIS IS A LAND OF RICH SOIL AND GREEN GRASS, stretching out to a rough and inhospitable coastline and up to the tops of bare mountains. It's territory where you can be alone easily, beside a still stretch of water on the Cairngorm plateau or on the empty acres of a lowland peat bog; but it's a stretch of Scotland where communities have anchored themselves deep in the land and where they still hold on to old ways that keep them together, like the language, so that they believe that they know themselves. Travellers moving northwards from the Tay who keep to the green path of the coastal plain find themselves passing through country sometimes fat with juicy farmland, bulging in its fertility, and sometimes scrawny and bleak, hardly welcoming at all. They'll find people everywhere, though, who have a kind of confidence in the place - a knowingness about its permanence. The whole of northeast Scotland, and the northern islands beyond it, is held together by a feeling about the past. It seeps out of the landscape and is caught in the voices but it's somehow kept in check, drained of excess sentimentality by the memory of hard lives and maybe by the cold east wind off the sea.

These photographs picture the place as you feel it, but seldom see it. Look down on Cuminestown, a spreading little village not far from Banff, surrounded by its fields and farms like a stone.spider in a great green web stretching to the horizon. You see how everything feeds off the land, how the communities seem to have sprung out of the earth: from above the place is explained. Along the coast you find fishing villages, always scrubbed clean, built to keep out the blasts and huddled together in a way that speaks of the closeness of these people, bound in interlocking families where the elements and sometimes the economy have tried to stop them going to sea, and failed. Looking down on this land you see the history of the place, in the churches and the burgh buildings where the shape of the medieval settlements was moulded into the planned villages of the eighteenth century. The bird's eye catches what we miss: the old marks of ancient peoples still visible on the land, the shape of the countryside which has been tamed and tilled but which still seems to be in control.

The first characteristic of the north-east is intimacy. Away from the Cairngorms themselves, and the swankiness of Deeside, there is no Highland pomposity in the landscape, and even the most devoted son of Buchan would have to confess that his motherland was flat, Mormond Hill aside. But take him away and he'll remember in his dreamy moments gentle sloping fields, grey stone walls and farm cottages as the marks of a rich, familiar life played out on the land and in the villages that have given the place its character. There's romance in this simplicity.

On my wall I have a postcard which shows a red piece of cardboard tied to a fence and little more. Behind you can just see the shape of a black beast, probably a bull, and the writing on the cardboard says: 'Turriff Show - First Prize'. What a world those words conjure up. Processions of cattle and sheep from all the countryside, gangs of sturdy farm folk on a day away from their labours, red-faced, bright-eyed, undemonstrative even with strong drink taken, happy. Most of all, the voices - the broad, back vowels of Aberdeenshire and amongst them the different twang of the city itself, indistinguishable to the southerner but to the country-dwellers a sound from outside. Even in territory swamped by some of the money of oil, and discovered by people from distant places, the old geography holds sway. Look at these pictures and you will see that after you leave Dundee and plunge into the great red-soiled land of the Mearns, running north to Aberdeen, there's a character in the landscape and in the towns that's consistent. The stone is grey, enough of the people have that squarish face with the broad smile to convince you that they're still in charge of their native patch, and the scene seems familiar all the way.

Painters speak about how a special light is characteristic of a certain place. In the north-east I think you see it best in the early evening. It's unmistakable. On the good days the landscape is washed in a steely, cobalt blue - not the fierce light of sunnier places and not the dreich greyness you often find to the west. This is a rich palette of grey-blue sky, sparkling granite and green fields, splashed with yellow broom and the satisfying warmth of newly ploughed earth. This is the country where Lewis Grassic Gibbon imagined Sunset Song and where the life of the old farm towns, the little communities gathered round the farmhouse, is recent enough to be still a culture that's cherished, and for its oral tradition to survive and flourish. - as their pillars, were drawn together by hard taskmasters. The black-clad group at the door of the kirk on Sunday morning wasn't looking grim by accident. A severe approach to life was the making of this place. All the celebration of education and of a sense of community built on individualism grew patiently and solidly, like a dry-stone dyke that will stand happily for centuries.

Gaze at Aberdeen. From the air you still see the grander streets stretched out, and the great hole of Rubislaw Quarry where all that granite lay. In Old Aberdeen, where some of the spirit of a fifteenth-century university has been preserved, you can still sense a place that has lasted despite recent ravages, and the harbour is still a harbour, though the fish are now few. Walk up Union Street, though, and it's a horror that you find. A chilling shopping centre has been built to sprawl on the very steps of Marischal College: it flattens out the contours of the city as it was. Aberdeen is still the meeting point of the north-east, where they come from north and south, but it isn't what it was.

You find the real place away from the city. Escape from it to the high corners of the mountains. You can walk through the Lairig Ghru and see hardly a soul on your way for mile upon mile, chased only by the mist. At either end you can descend, like a happy sheep sliding down an Alp to green pasture in the spring, and find yourself in a pleasing domestic landscape. This is the land of the smallish family farm, the engine of life here, where the communities were shaped and their values established, despite the hints, in the form of castles and evocative ruins, of a more swaggering history.

Simplicity and straightforwardness are in the landscape and the people. A journey north to Orkney and Shetland, especially by boat to the sound of fiddlers who won't sleep is the way for a traveller to put it into sharp focus. Here are wild islands; rough-hewn and bare. And everywhere there survives the evidence of ancient settlements, along with a mysterious atmosphere that speaks of ritual and darkness and perpetuity. It's much better to come to the north-east from this end, though hardly anybody does, than from the cities of the south. So much more is explained. Even in the hospitable mildness of the laich of Moray, or the obvious prosperity of the bigger Aberdeenshire farms, the history is of a life that was never easy, nor promised much. So, like so many places of that sort the people nurtured an independence for their communities. And it was an independence that produced not only riches from the land, all the best whisky in the world, and the fruits of the sea, but traditions in education and lifestyle that were exported happily as generations travelled wide.

The places pictured here, and their people, are proud of their bit of Scotland. Looking down on it, on the harbours and fields and rocky heights, it seems to me solid. This is country whose people will change, because they're subject to the disciplines of the world, but which itself can maintain its character and its power. The landscape can still flash easilv on the inner eye, the sounds of its voices still speak of its history and life, its ways still seem its own. From above, these pictures show a place that seems different, set apart by mountains and coast to go its own way. So it has, and so it will continue to do.
The book is divided into five chapters. The Land, Early Human Marks, Burgh, Village and City, Castle and Country House, and By Land and Sea. I found the Early Human Marks the most interesting to me because I was not familiar with the ancient history of Scotland. The narrative gives you good understanding of those times in North-East Scotland.

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