Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34440 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-19
• Binding: Hardcover
• 196 pages

Sunday Herald, 27 August 2006
"An incredible testament to one man's determination not to fold against a
far-off bureaucracy."

Sunday Times, 3 September 2006
"Compelling."

West Highland Free Press, 15 September 2006
"An extraordinarily fine book ... The story this one tells is as good as
stories get."

Customer Reviews

King of the road
This is a great read, part history, part politics and part single mindedness all combine to give a view of the problems Raasay residents in particular, but also of wider Scottish society have faced. Passion and the harsh reality of life for the islanders are always present in the text. Calum should be an inspiration to all in the way he lived.

love this book!
loved this! it's really factual, and just a wonderful book about a really great man.

One man and a wheelbarrow
When I began reading about Calum's road project, some of the evocative writing of Lewis Grassic Gibbon and man's battle with unforgiving nature came to mind. Set on the island of Raasay, this is an account of one man's dramatic response to decades of local authority indifference, in this instance the continual prevarication over replacing the track that serves the rough northern part of this island with a motorable road. Calum gives up the lobbying in despair and takes on the task himself, reading up on how it should be approached and labouring on the task with shovel and wheelbarrow in between his various other duties such as running a croft and tending the lighthouse on North Rona.
However, `Calum's Road' is not just about a one-man construction project. It is the story of demographic change on Raasay across two centuries. Using sources such as testimony from the 1884 Napier Commission, it narrates how, during the nineteenth century, the island's population was evicted from the fertile south to make way for sheep and deer and how they were contained in the rocky north by Raasay's own `Berlin Wall', Rainy's Wall. When the effects of the Wall are eventually breached, it is then the north of Raasay that loses its population. It is this reverse migration that Calum MacLeod tries to stall by the construction of his road. He gains particular satisfaction by making a physical breach of Rainy's Wall during the course of his one-man mission.
This is not just the story of a road and the man who built it, but is the story of a Hebridean community which reflects dynamics that have a familiar ring throughout much of rural Scotland. The author presents a moving human narrative in his telling of this story.