Calum's Road

‘. . . wonderful, elegant and serious,’ –  The Telegraph

‘MacLeod defied powers outwith his control in the only way he could . . . paints a compelling picture of the man,’ –  Sunday Times

‘ An incredible testament to one man’s determination,’ – The Sunday Herald

’It’s inspiring to read about a man who wouldn’t succumb, wouldn’t let the Government threaten his way of life.’ –  Publishing News

’An extraordinary tale.’ –  The Bookseller

’This is an extraordinarily fine book, and one of the most important books to have come out of the Highlands and Islands in recent years,’ –  West Highland Free Press 

For almost all his life, Calum MacLeod lived in the north of the Hebridean island of Raasay, where he worked as a crofter, postman and tender of the Rona lighthouse. Yet, due to clearance and neglect. The population of northern Raasay dwindled during his lifetime to just two people – Calum and his wife.

Calum had an idiosyncratic response to this decline. One spring morning, he took his homemade wheelbarrow, a pick, an axe and a shovel, trundled south from his crofthouse down a narrow, rutted bridle path, across rough hillsides, along the edge of hazardous cliff-faces, through patches of stunted hazel and birch and over quaking peat bogs. Then, alone in an empty landscape, he began to build a road. ‘With a road,’ his former neighbour Donald MacLeod said, ‘he hoped new generations of people would return to the north end of Raasay.’ It would become a romantic, quixotic venture; an obsessive work of art so perfect in every gradient, culvert and supporting wall that its creation occupied almost twenty years.

The extraordinary story of one man’s devotion to a visionary project, Calum’s Road is a tale not simply of stubbornly heroic resistance and supreme personal achievement; it is also the story of a cry from the depths of one man’s heart against the erosion of his native culture.


Click here to see a BBC Scotland News article about Calum’s Road.