Paperback: "If the human being is to hold to his identity, he must, somehow or other, keep on making his own discoveries. The tragedy of today is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for him to do so. He is even in danger of becoming a back number, for the powers that would govern his life have found that the machine is, for competitive purposes, so much more efficient and reliable than he is. When you have lived for a few years in the bare uplands, where life has been precarious from the start, you learn, first, not to panic. Then you are ready to love wholeheartedly what need no longer be feared. You become so deeply involved in the true drama of cherishing life itself that mere attitudes and the pursuit of possessions are discarded as absurd. You discover that under snow there is bread, the secret bread, that sustains. Panic gone, you can plot a course with steady hand and eye. And, after all, human steadfastness is the only ultimate weapon fit to guarantee survival in a real sense. That is why I thought it worthwhile to record the process by which three small human beings, completely re-enchanted with their world, found the strength to walk without fear among the astonishing beauty of its wilderness," wrote Katharine Stewart in her Introduction to the First Edition.
A Croft In The Hills, first published in 1960, is now acknowledged as a classic among Highland books. It captures, in simple, moving descriptions, what it was really like trying to make a living out of a hill croft near Loch Ness fifty years ago.
A couple and their young daughter, fresh from city life, immerse themselves in the practicalities of looking after sheep, cattle and hens, mending fences, baking bread and surviving the worst that Scottish winters can throw at them.
Their neighbours are few, but among them they find the generosity and community spirit that has survived in the Highlands for generations. Working as a tight family unit, they learn to cope and in time grow to love their little croft.
As Neil Gunn writes in his Foreword, their lives gain extra dimensions that 'give the book its unusual quality, its brightness and its wisdom'.
This reprint was published in 2012.
About the author: Katharine Stewart (1914-2013) was one of the Highlands' most celebrated author, a crofting champion, a local historian and lecturer and postmistress. She published her last book in 2010 but continued alert and working to the end. It is hardly surprising she became a writer. Her father, Richard Dark, was a school master at Loretto and a published author, and her mother a teacher of modern languages. The young Katharine Dark read French and Romance Philology at Edinburgh, graduating in 1937 before moving to Paris for a diploma at the Sorbonne. She was still in France and Italy in 1939, skiing and climbing in the Alps and working at Perugia University, and was lucky to get home on one of the last boats at the outbreak of the Second World War.
After the war she came home to Edinburgh where she met and married Sam Stewart, commencing their married life by running a small hotel at Balerno on the edge of the Pentlands. When their daughter was born in 1947 they determined to try to find a life in farming, something that had been a latent passion for both of them. With a three-year-old at heel they headed north and made the move that would define the rest of her life and career.
Of the dozens of books by crofters and about crofting published in the 20th century, none is as enduring and celebrated as A Croft in the Hills, first published by Oliver and Boyd in 1960 with a foreword by her friend Neil Gunn, and still selling consistently throughout Scotland. It describes the life of her family in a remote croft in the 1950s. After her husband died in 1979, other books followed - Crofts and Crofting (1980); A Garden in the Hills (1995); A School in the Hills (1996); The Post in the Hills (1997); The Crofting Way (1999); Abriachan, The Story of an Upland Community (2000); The Story of Loch Ness (2005); Women of the Highlands (2006); Cattle on a Thousand Hills (2010); as well as regular newspaper columns and magazine articles, short stories for radio and a series of books for children. Not content with this burgeoning career, she took a teacher training course so she could teach French at Inverness and Glenurquart high schools.
She was awarded The British Empire Medal for services to the community at Abriachan as postmistress, local librarian, election officer and keeper of the flame during the sad years of depopulation and A Saltire Society Award for her contribution to the understanding of Highland culture.
Her words and her unquestioning friendship touched the lives of tens of thousands, perhaps millions of people; she would be sorely embarrassed to be told she had become the dramatic highlight of her own remarkable story. Katharine Stewart leaves a daughter, grandchildren and great grand-children. She ended her long, full life at Abbeyfield House in Inverness sixteen months before her 100th birthday in 2013.
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