The Travel Diary of Isabell Burton MacKenzie by Allen E. Jones

Anyone who holds on to stereotypes of the pre-FirstWorld-War spinster lady traveller will have them quickly subverted by Isabell Burton MacKenzie.

MacKenzie’s diary is a vivid, well-informed account of what life was like in the Hebrides back then – far distant from the modern world, hard and materially deprived, and yet a stronger and more cohesive community than most of us can now imagine.

Expertly researched by local Ethnological Consultant and Practitioner, Alyne Jones, the diary is firmly grounded in economic realities – the facts and figures expose the realities of the tweed industry, the Truck system, the pitiful wages paid to the women. At the same time there are touching stories about individuals – the young girl going to school in an unknown world among strangers, Ann MacDougall living alone in her dark cave on North Uist, supporting herself with her knitting, the length of the agents’ thumbs when they come to measure the tweed… such vignettes are well-supported by the fascinating photographs of a lost world.