The book opens on Dark Mairi, a local healer and widow making her way back to the Strath where she, her grandson Davie and Elie (a young woman from the community) live.

Elie wanders the Lowlands destitute with her child but returns to the community an outcast just as the threat of clearance hangs over the whole Strath (this is carried out by a thinly veiled equivalent of Patrick Sellar called Heller).

[3] It deals with the social unrest which came with the decline of the Highland Clan System as chiefs became anglicised, the tacksmen emigrated and attitudes of laissez-faire capitalism and a belief in the inferiority of Gaelic culture arose to prominence in the 1800s.

[4] Whilst Riasgan is a fictional location, the Clearances are very similar to those carried out in Strathnaver and Strath Kildonan, including the death of 93 year old Margaret MacKay, allegedly through the neglect by Patrick Sellar and his men.

When asked why he never wrote more than one novel about the Clearances itself, he referenced the complicity of Lowland Scots and the Highland Gentry in the process saying it was due "To the shame of the thing.. because our own people did it.