Roger Hutchinson
Personal Information
Description
Roger Hutchinson is a British author and journalist. After working as an editor in London, in 1977 he joined the West Highland Free Press in Skye. He has written for BBC Radio, The Scotsman, The Guardian, The Herald and The Literary Review. (Sources: Publisher's website)
Books
Into the Light
Martyrs
"In the 1830s and 1840s, the district of Glendale on the island of Skye was swamped by immigrants cleared from other Skye estates. The resultant overcrowding and over-use of land caused simmering discontent - not against the intruders, but against the landowners, who regarded their tenants as no more than chattels. This book is [an] account of what happened when the powder keg erupted and a full-scale land war ensued. Pitched battles with police, factors and bailiffs, military intervention, arrests, trials, imprisonment and the personal intervention of the Prime Minister were to have consequences for crofters all over the Highlands, who, ultimately were the victors. At the heart of the rising was a man named John MacPherson of Lower Milovaig in Glendale, a courageous, charismatic and articulate crofter who was twice imprisoned for leading a rebellion against a system which kept all but the wealthiest in a state of bitter servitude."--Book flap.
Calum's Road
"For almost all his life, Calum MacLeod lived in the north of the Hebridean island of Raasay, where he worked as a crofter, postman and tender of the Rona lighthouse. Yet, due to clearance and neglect, the population of northern Raasay dwindled during his lifetime to just two people - Calum and his wife." "Calum had an idiosyncratic response to this decline. One spring morning, he took his homemade wheelbarrow, a pick, an axe and a shovel, trundled south from his crofthouse down a narrow, rutted bridle path, across rough hillsides, along the edge of hazardous cliff-faces, through patches of stunted hazel and birch and over quaking peat bogs. Then, alone in an empty landscape, he began to build a road. 'With a road, ' his former neighbour Donald MacLeod said, 'he hoped new generations of people would return to the north end of Raasay.' It would become a romantic, quixotic venture; an obsessive work of art so perfect in every gradient, culvert and supporting wall that its creation occupied almost twenty years."--BOOK JACKET.