AARON IS ‘BIRDS OF LOCHABER’ WINNER Iain Ferguson The May edition of Lochaber Life featured a competition ‘Carry on Nature – Birds of Lochaber’ which asked you to identify the birds (one was actually a mouse) featured in 10 pictures. Thank you to all of who took the time a trouble to email their entries, but unfortunately there could only be one winner. Ten-year-old Aaron MacLellan from Caol correctly named each pictures and his name was the first to be drawn out of the bag. Congratulations go to him, along with a superb book of Garden Birds which was kindly donated by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). Aaron, a pupil of St. Columba’s school took part in the competition as part of a home-schooling project set by his P6 teacher, Miss Anna Marshal, and like many of his classmates he enjoyed researching and naming the birds featured.
The answers were: 1) Bullfinch, 2) (Field) Mouse, 3) Starling, 4) Robin, 5) Feral or Urban Pigeon, 6) Blackbird, 7) Long Tailed Tit, 8) Collared Dove, 9) (House) Sparrow, 10) Blue Tit. Most people were absolutely right with their choices, so thank you again for taking time to send in your entries.
ARDNISH TRILOGY REVIEW Rob Fairley Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy The Scot’s Quair is known to generations of schoolchildren who were introduced to Kincardineshire, The Mearns, through reading Sunset Song – though I suspect few completed all three books! Angus MacDonald’s Ardnish Trilogy is in many ways the West Coast equivalent, though whereas Grassic Gibbons best book was the first, MacDonald leaves the best of his three until the end. Ardnish, while containing all the minutia of historical research that MacDonald’s first two books do so well, this adds a personal metaphysical or spiritual conundrum. Donald
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John Gillies is on his death bed in Peanmeanach on Ardnish, he needs to make his last confession but the only priest available is his son. What he can confess to a priest but does not want to tell his much-loved son is the story behind this fine book. In the two previous novels the Tarantino like blending of multiple stories and time frames is efficient but clunky, here however we have Donald John moving from his present but fading reality to remembering or dreaming back to his service and adventures in South Africa during the Boer War. It is masterful and works wonderfully. The stunning coup de théâtre at the end will bring tears to the readers eyes – do not, as a close friend does,
read the end first! MacDonald as yet may not quite be in the Grassic Gibbon class but Ardnish shows he is a fine storyteller, a superb historian and a writer whose work grows in stature.
| august 2020
Lochaber Life August 2020.indd 8
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