Ravens and Black Rain : The Story of Highland Second Sight : Sutherland

Ravens and Black Rain

By Elizabeth Sutherland

Published by Constable, London, 1985. First Edition. Hardback book with dust jacket, 8vo, 368 pages.

CONDITION
A very good first edition. The dust jackethas been price-clipped but is otherwise good. All contents present and pages very clean throughout. No writing or names to the book. Overall a good copy.

ABOUT THE BOOK
The Highland gift of second sight - spontaneous, unsought vision, foreknowledge of impending disaster, the gift that is accounted an affliction - was first documented in print towards the end of the seventeenth century, but ballads and folk-tales show that it was common in Highland experience for many centuries before that.Here are the visions of generations of Highlanders and the prophecies of past seers together with researches into second sight published from the seventeenth century to the present day.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Sutherland had an Orcadian father and a mother from Fife, which, she claims, makes her a Pict. After training at Edinburgh University to be a social worker, she married an Episcopalian clergyman and lived in four Scottish parishes, ending up in Fortrose, on the Black Isle.

On her late husband's retirement in 1982 she took over Groam House Museum in Rosemarkie and was responsible for its becoming a Pictish Centre. Her work on Coinneach Odhar - the Brahan Seer - established her as a serious historian. The subject was especially relevant, as he ended his days in a burning barrel of tar at Chanonry Point, Fortrose.

Recently she has turned her hand to Black Isle local history in a series of pamphlets for Black Isle Press.

(Location : Scottish Folklore Shelf)