The Shepherd's Calendar

Reviews / Votes

An important and addictively readable addition to the Scottish canon. -- Christopher Harvie The reader is not being treated to a quaint display of an outmoded lifestyle, but privileged with glimpses of a community possessed of special knowledge and internal laws. Hogg's shepherds are far removed from those of Virgil or Spenser, while even Wordsworth's Michael seems remote from the narrator who can describe the destruction of '12 scores of excellent ewes' with such calmness and compassion: 'when the snow went away they were discovered all lying dead with their heads one way as if a flock of sheep had dropped dead going from the washing. -- Fiona Stafford The stories are about storms, sheep, lairds, about farmers with designs on their servant girls, as in one of the most memorable, 'Tibby Hyslop's Dream', where a pious, winsome lass, prophesied over by a second-sighted, 'unco parabolical' great-aunt, copes with such designs - and the farmer in this case comes to one of Hogg's suicidal ends. -- Karl Miller