The Hidden Ways Quotes

“I compiled an archive of the feet.”
― Alistair Moffat, The Hidden Ways: Scotland's Forgotten Roads

“In a direct and obvious sense, the past never leaves us, it is embedded in the present, is veined through our beliefs, our diet, our traditions, our way of moving through the landscape and much else.”
― Alistair Moffat, The Hidden Ways: Scotland's Forgotten Roads

“about Scotland’s history, I saw parts of it in a completely new light. In Jim Hunter’s memorable phrase, I compiled an archive of the feet.”
― Alistair Moffat, The Hidden Ways: Scotland's Forgotten Roads

“Being in my late 60s, what my wife calls the cocktail hour of life, some of these walks were much more tiring than I anticipated, even though my farm work keeps me reasonably fit. But that is the nature of research.”
― Alistair Moffat, The Hidden Ways: Scotland's Forgotten Roads

“The Romans are vivid because they left records and a great deal of archaeology, but they were incomers, not the ancestors of my own people. Perhaps precisely because the native people left so few marks on the landscape, were little more than grey figures who barely emerge from the darkness of the long past, these nameless farmers seemed to me to deserve all and any respect I could give them.”
― Alistair Moffat, The Hidden Ways: Scotland's Forgotten Roads

“Anyone who wants to understand something of the elemental nature of our history should try to walk through it, should listen for the natural sounds our ancestors heard, smell the hedgerow honeysuckle and the pungent, grassy, milky stink of cowshit, look up and know something of shifts in the weather and the transit of the seasons and feel the earth that once was grained into their hands.”
― Alistair Moffat, The Hidden Ways: Scotland's Forgotten Roads

“Old woods can be more than atmospheric, more than merely picturesque; they are sometimes magical. In their shadows wisps of ancient belief can be glimpsed. In what is now called lore, but is actually the residue of belief, Gaelic culture remembers the Creideamh Sith, frivolously translated as ‘the Fairy Faith’.”
― Alistair Moffat, The Hidden Ways: Scotland's Forgotten Roads

“And it should be remembered that before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons in the sixth and seventh centuries, dialects of Old Welsh were spoken the length of Celtic Britain.”
― Alistair Moffat, The Hidden Ways: Scotland's Forgotten Roads