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Calum's Road

In 1920 Calum McLeod’s parents asked the council to build a road on the Hebridean island of Raasay. Decades later, after bureaucratic inaction had led the island’s population to dwindle, Calum set out with a pick and shovel to build one himself through the granite and peat. Drawing on meetings with McLeod and other islanders, Roger Hutchinson recounts his epic struggle, and the revival of Hebridean culture it inspired.
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Product information:
  • Publisher: Birlinn
  • Year: 2008
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 204pp
  • Illustrated: No
  • Dimensions: 196x128mm
  • ISBN: 9781841586779
  • Condition: New
  • Weight: 0.2kg
Product code:
530005
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'An incredible testament to one man's determination' - The Sunday Herald



Calum MacLeod had lived on the northern point of Raasay since his birth in 1911. He tended the Rona lighthouse at the very tip of his little archipelago, until semi-automation in 1967 reduced his responsibilities. 'So what he decided to do', says his last neighbour, Donald MacLeod, 'was to build a road out of Arnish in his months off. With a road he hoped new generations of people would return to Arnish and all the north end of Raasay'.



And so, at the age of 56, Calum MacLeod, the last man left in northern Raasay, set about single-handedly constructing the 'impossible' road. It would become a romantic, quixotic venture, a kind of sculpture; an obsessive work of art so perfect in every gradient, culvert and supporting wall that its creation occupied almost twenty years of his life. In Calum's Road Roger Hutchinson recounts the extraordinary story of this remarkable man's devotion to his visionary project.
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