So I have wanted to illustrate this book because it is among the best informing my inner voice about living culture, tradition and story-telling. The narrator has a firm, insistent and patient voice which also seems to maintain the view that wonder is the most valuable thing in the world.

He relates a long rolling great feats of memory concerning the oral tradition from start to finish. These stories seem to have an invisible line that crosses into fantasy without claiming to define where truth ends and pure story telling begins. As a patient listener I find solace here and amazement that I should be capable of hearing the same voices in the wind when alone in the hills or trying to make sense of my own theories and stories.

It is not illegal to have an imagination but seems that most stories need checking up these days. Today’s story-teller is more common to me as a gossip who never stretches to myth. Social political opinions are of less worth to them than their own casual opinions and importance. Stories these days across the media have dubious origin, cutting us off from history. Interesting seems to have lost value . Nothing is to be learned, the facts are just observations reinforcing of everyday life for the teller. Little weight is on honesty but usefulness.

An interesting tale with genuine pushing of boundaries tests the listener to raise moral sympathies. I think as much solid ground as can be introduced stops a mythical story being mocking. More communication is helpful. Better stories, better illustrated.

As facts leave me searching for truth, the rural communities in these stories are close to nature and are close to my heart it seems. Certain not to be unanimous and feel lucky to have read it, I have been drawn closer not to my own geographical background but the wider part of the cultural mix of the British Isles. How I hear these voices so loudly that they get between the modern life and reinform me of my traditional upbringing is the result of a good story teller. It shows that new things can be learned and shared in literature and I feel compelled to say they make a picture, like art.

I have also lived where this book was in part from and it came to life (rural coastal communities still inhabited with seals). It is like an old culture actually exists much closer to the stories told than anywhere else I have been. I am not sure how this is due to the usual actual lack of old things or older living people so find even more reason to share widely the content. These stories bridge cultures according to touching a human level which the imagination knows is right.

Highland landscape like this does still ring where there are the seals, playful and inquisitive. The landscape is truly as brackish and mellow as a dream of whisky and loose tongues finding the thread. The major characters in many of the tales and folklore not lost upon being heard again. I think it is in fact the prevalence of wild nature that they came to life for me but pictures help it stay longer.

Rural life in fact still prevails across the entire British Isles. As a hillwalker and climber I have travelled widely and been surprised off the beaten path. To find old stories alive again in my heart, oh deepest comfort.