Calum's Road

the long version

"For almost all his life, Calum MacLeod lived in the north of the Hebridean island of Raasay, where he worked as a crofter, postman and tender of the Rona lighthouse. Yet, due to clearance and neglect, the population of northern Raasay dwindled during his lifetime to just two people - Calum and his wife." "Calum had an idiosyncratic response to this decline. One spring morning, he took his homemade wheelbarrow, a pick, an axe and a shovel, trundled south from his crofthouse down a narrow, rutted bridle path, across rough hillsides, along the edge of hazardous cliff-faces, through patches of stunted hazel and birch and over quaking peat bogs. Then, alone in an empty landscape, he began to build a road. 'With a road, ' his former neighbour Donald MacLeod said, 'he hoped new generations of people would return to the north end of Raasay.' It would become a romantic, quixotic venture; an obsessive work of art so perfect in every gradient, culvert and supporting wall that its creation occupied almost twenty years."--BOOK JACKET.