Scots like to smoke or salt them. The Dutch love them raw. Swedes look on with relish as they open bulging, foul-smelling cans to find them curdling within. Jamaicans prefer them with a dash of chilli pepper. Germans and the English enjoy their taste best when accompanied by pickle's bite and brine. Throughout the long centuries men have fished around their coastlines and beyond, the herring has done much to shape both human taste and history. Men have co-operated and come into conflict over its shoals, setting out in boats to catch them, straying, too, from their home ports to bring full nets to shore. Women have also often been at the centre of the industry, gutting and salting the catch when the annual harvest had taken place, knitting, too, the garments fishermen wore to protect them from the ocean's chill. Following a journey from the western edge of Norway to the east of England, from Shetland and the Outer Hebrides to the fishing ports of the Baltic coast of Germany and the Netherlands, culminating in a visit to Iceland's Herring Era Museum, Donald S. Murray has stitched together tales of the fish that was of central importance to the lives of our ancestors, noting how both it - and those involved in their capture - were celebrated in the art, literature, craft, music and folklore of life in northern Europe. Blending together politics, science, history, religious and commercial life, Donald contemplates, too, the possibility of restoring the silver darlings of legend to these shores.

Herring Tales

Donald S Murray

Featherstone Education

Red Star Over Hebrides

Literature & Fiction

Short Stories & Anthologies

Taproot Press

Weaving Songs

The Guga Hunters

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Origin

In 1930, the last inhabitants of the isle of St Kilda were evacuated to the mainland. Shortly afterwards, following several acts of vandalism by local fishermen, Calum MacKinnon was sent back to the island to guard against further damage. Alone on the deserted island, he begins to re-imagine the conversations and stories from his years in the island port of Village Bay. He also recalls some of the experiences of its people in exile on the mainland, showing their difficulties in adjusting to a new way of life, and a diet no longer based mainly on seabirds. The vivid prose is interspersed with poetry and illustrations, creating a colourful and insightful ficionalisation of life on remote St Kilda.

The Guga Stone: Lies, Legends and Lunacies from St Kilda

Douglas Robertson

Literary

Luath Press

A novel of the Iolaire disaster. 
In the small hours of January 1st, 1919, the cruellest twist of fate changed at a stroke the lives of an entire community. 
Tormod Morrison was there that terrible night. He was on board HMY Iolaire when it smashed into rocks and sank, killing some 200 servicemen on the very last leg of their long journey home from war. For Tormod a man unlike others, with artistry in his fingertips the disaster would mark him indelibly. 
Two decades later, Alasdair and Rachel are sent to the windswept Isle of Lewis to live with Tormod in his traditional blackhouse home, a world away from the Glasgow of their earliest years. Their grandfather is kind, compassionate, but still deeply affected by the remarkable true story of the Iolaire shipwreck by the selfless heroism and desperate tragedy he witnessed. 
A deeply moving novel about passion constrained, coping with loss and a changing world, As the Women Lay Dreaming explores how a single event can so dramatically impact communities, individuals and, indeed, our very souls.

As the Women Lay Dreaming

Genre Fiction

Saraband

The Man Who Talks to Birds

Poetry

The Salt and the Flame

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Books by Donald S Murray