The Cornkister Days: A Portrait of a Land and its Rituals

by David Kerr Cameron

With a knowledge and a skill that reveals his passion for the land and its people, David Kerr Cameron picks his way through the rural upheavals and developments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries towards the landscape we recognize today. In doing so he provides a wide-sweeping and unforgettable view of our rural history and completes his great rural trilogy portraying the old farming landscapes of Scotland's North-east Lowlands. Both nostalgia and great understanding are revealed as the author recalls a society based on the plough, a society that moved "against the tapestry of the year: " This was the backcloth against which the farmtoun folk lived out their days; its seasons and rituals governed their lives, and ultimately their destinies. Here now is that story, the story of a landscape all but lost before the onward march of agri-business and agri-technology.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

He may have spent most of his life as a journalist in London, but David Kerr Cameron never forgot the rigours of farming life in his native Aberdeenshire, which he wrote about with un-sentimental vividness in his three best-loved and award-winning books. The Ballad and the Plough (1978), Willie Gavin, Crofter Man (1980), and The Cornkister Days (1984), all of which won Scottish Arts Council Awards, gave the social history of the North-East a readability that drew comparisons with the work of the late John Prebble.

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