Please could you tell us about what led you to write The People Are Not There and in particular, why Badenoch?
I spent 30 years teaching history at Kingussie in the heart of Badenoch, yet I could find little about the area in mainstream studies of highland history.
I was walking through a landscape of nameless ruins wondering who lived here and why did they leave, but Macpherson clan devotees assured me that Badenoch had never suffered clearances and no local lairds had ever evicted their people. So, on abandoning the chalk face, I decided to investigate further through aBut this was clearly an unfinished story and I was soon drawn into a sequel exploring the complexity of local depopulation, especially after unearthing the wonderful title quote – one that intriguingly tells us everything and nothing.
