From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides

Margaret Fay Shaw's life spans a century of change. In her early teens she was dispatched from the idyllic surroundings of the Alleghenies to stay with a distant cousin near Glasgow. It was here that her love of Scotland was born. After studying music at New York and Paris, she returned to live for six years with two sisters in a cottage on South Uist. Life on South Uist at this time had barely changed from earlier centuries, and the island contained a repository of Gaelic lore and song. Margaret Fay Shaw's collections of this archive and her photography capture a world vanished from the Hebrides. Her autobiography is also a plea in defence of a Gaelic culture and world that is disappearing.