Mull and the Western Isles, 1651–1653 Historical Background Twenty years had passed since Martin MacGillivray was seized by armed men and thrown from his own kirk at the command of Murdoch Maclean of Lochbuie. Scotland had changed greatly in the years between, although peace had proved rather harder to establish than any of those who fought for it might once have imagined. The National Covenant of 1638 had challenged royal interference in the Scottish Church, and the struggle

Morvern and Kilninian, Mull, 1651 Historical Background By the spring of 1651 the fighting that had convulsed Scotland for more than a decade had changed shape again, but the Church was still reckoning with what men had done during the years of rebellion. The campaigns of James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, and Alasdair MacDonald - MacColla - had drawn deeply upon the western Highlands and Islands, where loyalties to king, Covenant, clan and local chief did not always point in

Mull, Iona and Argyll, 1645–1649 Historical Background By 1645, the quarrel that had begun with arguments over worship and the government of the Scottish Kirk had become a civil war in which religion, loyalty, land and clan could no longer be kept neatly apart. The Covenanters, who had bound themselves in 1638 to defend Scotland's Reformed religion, now faced Royalist forces fighting in the name of Charles I. In the Highlands the King's most successful commander, James Graham

Martin MacGillivray lived through one of the most turbulent periods in Scottish history. Minister, landholder, Gaelic scholar and, according to family tradition, a man rarely separated from his sword, his surviving records take us into the religious, political and everyday life of seventeenth-century Mull. These stories are based upon documented events. Where the records fall silent, historical fiction is used to restore the people, places and ordinary moments around them, wh