It was after our second family holiday in the West Highlands of Scotland, when I was thirteen, that someone recommended that we should all read 'The Flight of the Heron' by D.K. Broster, as it dealt with that part of the country at the time of the '45 rebellion. My mother bought it, and the most exciting period of my reading life began. I was possessed by a rapture, an ecstacy, for which nothing in all my experience, and certainly not religion, had prepared me. I remember the actual surroundings in which I sat reading the book, on a bench in Phear Park, for example, on a sunny Saturday morning.