The Prince in the heather

Eric Linklater was arguably Scotland's finest historian of the last century (the 20th). In this book, Linklater not only traces the journey of the "wanderings" but places the land and the culture in a greater perspective. What is particularly appealing about this work is his examination of the people of the Highlands and Islands who risked their lives and turned away a great fortune to shelter and protect a leader whom many of them knew was championing a losing cause. Linklater puts this steadfastly loyal Highland character in historical and cultural context in a way that other writers have not. The fine writing is accompanied by stunning photographs which together create an evocative and deeply moving book.

Eric Linklater was a natural choice of author for a book and documentary film about Bonnie Prince Charlie, when the idea came up in the mid 60s. Compton Mackenzie might have been an equally obvious choice - he had already written one book about Charles Edward Louis Philippe Casimir Stuart. However, regardless of the choice of author, the style of the text was somewhat fixed from the start, since it was meant to back up a documentary film (as a published book) and so was not an individual writer's earnest appraisal of either the history or the legend.Nevertheless, settling upon Linklater ensured a certain native expertise and charm, so to speak, since by the time he wrote this, he was a very able writer with numerous books to his credit. So "The Prince in the Heather" followed its predicted path and became a sort of odyssey, as Linklater and a film crew revisited the major haunts of the Prince during his lengthy (and often recounted) escape through the islands off Scotland's west coast. It is not a book that can be read as history so much as a story of now and then. The author intrudes (somewhat apologetically) from time to time, in order to periodically give the story a modern angle. Most of the text is devoted to the doings of 250 years ago, however, and under the competent pen of this first-rate Scottish writer, the Bonnie Prince once more comes out from the shadows. It is not an original work, and I do not think it is mandatory reading for historians. Yet it is a perfectly good read (a bonnie book shall we say) and if you pick up the original edition from somewhere, as I did, you'll find it is a well presented volume complete with a number of pertinent photographs.