O Little Town

On the southern edge of the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides there is an arm of land, the Ross of Mull, that reaches out westwards towards the holy island of Iona. On the map, the end of this peninsula looks a little like a hand wearing mittens, or perhaps a cat’s paw reaching towards a mouse. The inlet between the hand and the thumb is Loch na Làthaich, and on the shores of the loch sits the village of Bunessan. This is a landscape defined by the brown-green of the hills and the grey-blue of the sky and sea. It is a beautiful landscape but also a harsh one, where crofters scraped out a precarious living. Bunessan village viewed from Lower Ardtun © JaneMcArtney [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Just outside Bunessan is a stone monument commemorating a woman named Mary MacDonald. In some ways Mary’s life was unremarkable: in outline it was the same as hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other women who li...