The story [Peter Marshall ] wants to tell is framed and filled by contact and conjunction. It begins in 1540, with the arrival in the islands of an illustrious royal personage, and ends in 1814, with the visit to Orkney of a scarcely less eminent national luminary.
Across the British Isles, in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ordinary people were submerged by successive waves of uninvited change. They experienced sweeping Reformation of religion; bloody civil conflict, rebellion and dynastic upheaval; the political union of once-sparring nations; the forging of empire, and the pursuit of warfare on a continental and global scale; an at first violent suppression, and then condescending dismissal, of folklore, magic and witches; a fitful flourishing of intellectual 'Enlightenment'; benefits, and costs, of commercial, agricultural and industrial 'revolution'

Sounded fascinating, but whatever, perhaps I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. Unfinished. ( )