On Thursday 6th April 1820, a group of weavers set off from their home town of Strathaven in Lanarkshire, thinking they were going to join a French army. They’d been told this was encamped on the Cathkin Braes south of Glasgow, ready to mount a Radical attack on the city. The Strathaven Pioneers, as...
On the 6th of April 1820, during the course of Scotland’s brief but intense Radical War, a small army of weavers clashed with troops from the regular army and the local Stirlingshire Yeomanry, one of the many volunteer government militias of the time. The Radicals were led by Andrew Hardie of Townhead in Glasgow...
Hooray! After nearly two years of research, visiting the relevant sites and writing, One Week in April: The Scottish Radical Rising of 1820 will be launched tomorrow. This will be a virtual launch and everyone’s invited. Wednesday 1st April at 3 o’clock on Twitter. There will also be a link on Facebook (Birlinn Books)...
Dance to the Storm will be published as a Kindle ebook this Thursday, 20th February, paperback and audiobook publication to follow. You can pre-order here. You don’t have to have read Gathering Storm first but if you would like to, the ebook version is on at 99p for a limited period to celebrate publication of...
In Burghead in Moray in the north east of Scotland, a fire festival takes place on 11th January every year to celebrate Old New Year. Back in the mid 1750s, there was a discrepancy of 11 days between two calendars, the older Julian calendar and the more modern Gregorian calendar. Most European countries changed...
I’m delighted to be part of the launch event of the inaugural Paisley Book Festival. I’ll be speaking at the Paisley Arts Centre in the Abbey Close, Paisley on Thursday 20th February between 7 and 9 pm. The theme of the festival is Radical Voices and Rebel Stories, so I’ll be talking about my...
Delighted to announce that my next non-fiction book is One Week in April: The Scottish Radical Rising of 1820. This will be published on 9th April 2020, marking the 200th anniversary of the events of one turbulent week in Scotland’s history and their historical context. To read more about the book or to pre-order...
Really looking forward to giving a talk on the magical Isle of Skye on Saturday 17th August in a stunning venue. I’ll be speaking about the interesting times of 1745-6 and the men and women involved in those. The wonderful and talented Barbara Henderson and I are presenting separate events and then coming together...
This is a beautiful book, eloquent and evocative. Reading it felt like a meditation. Julie Blaxland lives with her husband Giles and Chuffy the brindle greyhound in the house of the title on a rapidly eroding part of the Suffolk coastline. Here is how she puts it: ‘I live in a house on...
Jane Haining was born in the village of Dunscore in Dumfriesshire in 1897 and died in Auschwitz in 1944, at the age of 47. In 1932, as a Church of Scotland missionary, she had felt called to work as matron to Jewish girls at the Church of Scotland mission and school in Budapest....