Moving to the Hebridean island of North Uist in the late 1960s, Iris Macfarlane learnt Gaelic and published a book of translations of folk stories, The Mouth of the Night (1973). She also wrote a children’s story, The Summer of the Lame Seagull (1970). She contributed forty articles of a ‘Hebridean Journal’ to The Scotsman, upon which this book is based. Her poem 'I Climbed the Peaks of Glass With You' was recorded by the folk-singer Vashti Bunyan in the 1970s. The book is a combination of poetry, philosophy, ecology, history and literature, based on a lifetime of wandering, from India to the Hebrides. It records a unique moment both in the author's life and in the transition of the Outer Hebrides into the age of electricity and modern communications, the end of a certain kind of Gaelic community. There are echoes of Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water and Thoreau's Walden in a book which is a classic evocation of changing beauty and loss.