Iris Macfarlane (1922-2007) was a poet, novelist, children's story writer, translator, historian, philosopher and painter. In this book of forty essays, which she wrote mainly under the heading 'Hebridean Diary', for the Scotsman newspaper between 1969 and 1977, she condenses all of the above qualities into a unique account of moving into a croft on the island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. With her husband Donald she explored a new world and found rest and beauty after a lifetime of travel and stress in India and England (briefly described in her Daughters of the Empire: A Memoir of Life and Times in the British Raj, re-published by Cambridge Rivers Press in 2017). The book is filled with longing, loss, peace and humour. It describes the moment when an older Celtic, pre-electric, crofting way of life was suddenly transformed and records the impressions of a sensitive southerner and her Scottish husband to these changes. And it summarizes a life of searching.The collection, which contains some of the sketches of Iris's daughter Fiona who still lives on the croft, is edited and introduced by her son Alan Macfarlane, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge University and a Life Fellow of King's College, Cambridge.