Reviewing a book like this is very difficult because the value of it depends on the beautiful pictures with their detailed descriptions. I think it will help us understand the book better if we understand why the book was done in the first place. Why are we all so interested in Romantic Scotland? The following is part of the introduction to the book and explains how this happened.

"What is revealing about this technicoloured view of Scotland is not so much that it's inaccurate or sentimental - even the most extravagant description cannot outrival the scenery - or that it ignores the hardship and misery that throughout history has too often been the Scot's lot, but that it reflects the modern tendency to equate the whole of Scotland with its poorest, emptiest region. Ironically, 250 years ago the exact reverse was the case: Scotland then meant only the Lowlands. The mountainous waste that lay to the north and west was regarded as a separate country, where any traveller (even, or particularly, if a Lowland Scot) was advised to take the precaution of making his will before venturing. As late as 1773, when Boswell escorted Dr Johnson on their famous tour, the greater part of the Scotland remained an unknown wilderness. The view from London and Edinburgh alike was of an alien territory no less remote than the wilds of Afghanistan and infested with savage tribes that had only recently been subdued. Thirty years after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, the kilt was still proscribed in Scotland as 'the garb of sedition'. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century the dangers had been forgotten, the power of the clans smashed with the consequent grudging merger of Highlands and Lowlands, and tartan (as worn by once proud warlike chiefs) become all the rage in London, Paris, even New York: the fashion for the Highlands that would reach its climax in the reign of Queen Victoria had caught on.

If a single event can be said to have inspired the idea of romantic Scotland, even before Robert Burns complained that his heart was in the Scotland, the distinction must go to the publication in 1760 of the Poems of Ossian. Presented as the lost effusions of an archaic west coast bard, discovered and translated from the Gaelic by James Macpherson (1736-96), an unknown Inverness schoolteacher with a literary bent, the Ossianic sagas retold the misty legends and folk tales of the Highlands and Islands in high-flown language that skillfully evoked the elemental grandeur of their storm-lashed locales. The authenticity of the poems was immediately questioned by, among others, Dr Johnson, who demonstrated that although loosely based on fragments of Celtic myth and legendry, the verses of Ossian were Macpherson's own composition. Doubts over provenance notwithstanding - Macpherson was never able to produce an original manuscript to back his claim - the impact of Ossian's primitive and sentimental poetry on Europe and its fledgling Romantic movement was extraordinary. The epic of Fingal, one of the most widely admired and imitated works in the history of literature, captured the imaginations of Goethe, Herder and later Felix Mendelssohn, who visited Fingal's Cave on Staffa to find inspiration for his haunting 'Hebrides' overture. Ossian's enthusiastic reception by the major poets, writers and composers of the age, including Schiller, Blake, Diderot, Scott, Byron, Massenet and most of the nineteenth-century French Romantics, raised Macpherson from obscurity to being for half a century the most influential poet in Europe. His rhapsodic celebration of the Highland scene had likewise put Scotland on the map, not only creating the idea of Gaeldom as a place of infinite romance, but making it the spiritual theme park of the Romantic movement itself.

The Ossianic fever that gripped Europe even awakened the interest of the English in their long-feared and despised northern neighbour. Among the first visitors to Scotland after the claymores of the '45 Rebellion had been safely sheathed was Dr Johnson, who, in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, declared himself no more taken by the bleak and barren country he travelled through than by its barbarous inhabitants. 'The finest prospect a Scotsman will ever behold', he pronounced, 'is the highroad that leads to England.' An earlier traveller, John English, had been even less complimentary, but the rapturous accounts of dramatic scenery and hospitable natives by Thomas Pennant and other eighteenth-century travel writers were more persuasive. In an age that extolled the virtues of the Noble Savage, the idea of simple, warm-hearted folk eking out poor but honest lives dignified by the natural majesty of their surroundings outweighed the discomforts of the voyage and made the Highlands and Islands an irresistibly exotic destination.

Travel in the North may have lost its outlandish allure, but the modern visitor's expectations of Scotland have hardly changed. The promise of unspoilt countryside and unspoilt people, cast in the nostalgic glow of Brigadoon, Whisky Galore or Dr Findlay's Casebook, continues to draw Southrons to isolated villages and misty islands. If there's a risk of finding the locals outnumbered by 'white settlers' - the Isle of Mull, for instance, has become as overgrown with retired colonels and bank managers as Tunbridge Wells - one can still be reasonably sure of experiencing aspects of traditional Highland life that do not do violence to cherished stereotypes. The hospitality for which the Highlands and Islands have long been famous may be a legacy of clannish pride and sanguinary codes of honour, but the bonds of kinship that formed the bedrock of Celtic society have proved no less durable than the Anglo-Saxon preoccupation with class. The natives remain proud but friendly; the welcoming conviviality of the Scot, their unstrained warmth, the luxury they enjoy of being at ease in their own skins afforded by knowing who they are, lending sustenance and substance to the romantic myth.

In the heyday of the clans, the Highlands rivalled the Balkans as a place of simmering conflicts and shifting alliances where treachery and danger were ever present. The clan chiefs were little different than Chetnik warlords, as contemptuous of government as they were bloodily reliant on the economics of plunder, yet we prefer to see them now as heroic the splendid defenders of a fierce but doomed independence. Who but a Highland chief would have had his steward proclaim from the battlements of kisimul Castle, with only the seals and seagulls for an audience: 'Hear ye people, and listen ye nations. The great Macneil of Barra having finished his meal, the princes of the earth may now dine'? If such hubristic nonsense can engage our sympathy, it's partly because with hindsight we recognize in Macneil's magnificent challenge (to a world that had never heard of him) the melancholy shadow cast over the history of the clans by the ill-fated Jacobite rebellions. Already an anachronism at the outset of the eighteenth century, the clan system did not survive the debacle suffered by the Stuart army at Culloden in 1746. On that desolate moorland, where the mass graves of individual clans are still marked with rough weather-worn stones, the Highlanders died for their own lost cause, as well as for Prince Charlie's, going down in charge after charge of hopeless gallantry that as no victory could have done set the heather ablaze with legends of glory and pity.

One of the world's great romantic adventures, the '45, or Charlie's Year, as it was known in Scotland, helped form our modern attitude to the Scots. After Culloden, the brutal Hanoverian efficiency with which the Duke of Cumberland punished the clans loyal to Bonnie Prince Charlie - putting the countryside to 'fire and sword', forfeiting clan lands, stripping the chiefs of their powers and banning them along with their clansmen from wearing tartan or carrying weapons produced a revulsion of feeling that duly made martyrs of the Highlanders. As a determined effort to eradicate the Scot menace, it succeeded; the spirit of the clans was broken, the old way of life gone forever; but the sense of wrong done to a people lingered on, keeping alive a flame that might otherwise have blown itself out. In the aftermath of the rebellion, the destruction wreaked by Cumberland's troops was compounded by economic hardship and, after a brief period of relative prosperity, a population explosion that led among other drastic solutions (adopted too often by the Highland chiefs themselves) to wholesale evictions and forced emigration. The tragedy of the Clearances, the removal of people to make room for sheep and game, left another deep scar on the Scotland still visible today in far and empty glens where the grass ghosts of cultivation ridges or a few heaps of stone bear poignant witness to an abandoned clachan or settlement. But the wrenching of the Highlander from his ancestral lands also opened up another rich seam of pathos and sentiment and created an audience of exiles abroad with an insatiable appetite for songs, poetry and paintings that gave a nostalgic, often idealized view of home. In the anonymous lament of a nineteenth-century exile to Canada, the voice of the disinherited has retained all of its emotional force:

From the lone shieling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas;
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.
when the bold kindred, in the time long-vanish'd,
Conquer'd the soil and fortified the keep,
No seer foretold the children would be banish'd,
That a degenerate lord might boast his sheep.

For all of us who want a beautiful picture book of Scotland I highly recommend this paperback book. The price is well under most picture books and the text is extensive and well presented. This paper back book is available for £7.99 plus shipping/handling (Notice: cost is in pound sterling not US dollars like most of our other books). Order. If you want to pay with cash or call in the order go here.