Robert Craig Maclagan

He was born in Edinburgh on 6 March 1839 the son of Elizabeth Allan Thomson and her husband, Andrew Douglas Maclagan, a surgeon.

[3] Alongside his medical career he was a military volunteer and held the rank of Colonel with the 5th Battalion Royal Scots.

[4] He died on 12 July 1919 at home at 5 Coates Crescent in Edinburgh's West End, where he had lived for at least 40 years.

[6] He worked in a team of dedicated collectors, in the West Highlands and they collected a huge amount of material, that covers topics as diverse as folk medicine, customs and beliefs, hero tales, material culture, rhymes and children's games, recipes and weather lore, place-name legends, the natural world and much more.

The manuscript itself totals more than 9000 pages and is held in the University of Edinburgh School of Scottish Studies Archive.

Maclagan's house at 5 Coates Crescent, Edinburgh
The Maclagan grave, Dean Cemetery , Edinburgh
Through a team of dedicated collectors, working in the West Highlands, Maclagan amassed an amazing array of material and during his lifetime he published a number of articles and books which reflected the diversity of the material that had been collected between 1893 and 1902.
The fragment of Folklore of the West Highlands manuscript by Dr Robert Maclagan