Willie Gavin, Crofter Man: A Portrait of a Vanished Lifestyle

by David Kerr Cameron

Willie Gavin, Crofter Man is a portrait of a crofting life in the bare and sometimes bitter landscape of Scotland's North-east lowlands. It is the closely reconstructed life of one man in particular, and beyond that, the wider story of a croft and its people, assembled from the family's folk memories. Willie Gavin's real identity has been blurred, but this is essentially a true story and is illustrated with a fascinating selection of period photographs. Through the eyes of Willie Gavin we experience the hardships and wretched lifestyle endured by crofters throughout Scotland. But with deep understanding David Kerr Cameron reveals too their love for the land, the fragile bonds of friendship forged by crofting families, the weddings and the festivals they enjoyed, and the children who were raised in that life without luxury. The traditional crofting way of life began to break down in the early-twentieth century, but David Kerr Cameron has captured and recorded for future generations a culture and a landscape that have now gone forever. Willie Gavin, Crofter Man is the second part of Cameron's trilogy of rural life.

Genres: Scotland

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

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.

Read more at: http://www.scotsman.com/news/obituari...

Reviews

[Shona · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this as research for something I was doing at work. I really enjoyed a look at how things used to be.