87 Books Like Witch Wood

By the author of the wonderfully wicked Flashman novels, this is simply the best book I know on the Reivers (Rustlers) of the Scottish-English Borderlands C14-16th. I referred to it often when constructing Rose Nicolson and Fair Helen. As with Flashman, it depicts resourceful, desperate men and women, trying to survive and prosper amid the shambles of History – in this case, the ungovernable Borderlands. Finely researched, vivid and balanced, Fraser brings to life the extraordinary people of Borders myth and history. Imagine a Wild West that lasted some 300 years of horse and cattle rustling, kidnap and ransom, protection rackets (the words gang and blackmail - black meal or black rent - come from the reivers exploits), with some great narrative poetry and jokes grim or hilarious. A Borderer himself, Fraser gets the romance and the less romantic necessities that governed these intensely-lived, skillful, precarious lives.

 I love this as something quite different – essentially a close encounter with the Border by bicycle. He knows his history, writes well, and brings it all down to ground level, and conveys the lasting atmosphere (lovely, bleak, ruinous, enduring) of these Debatable Lands. A fine piece of historical travel writing by a deeply knowledgeable and astute writer. Makes you want to go and experience for yourself – if you do, take this book in your pannier (preferably waterproof).

I have re-read this classic several times since I was a child.

The abridged version I read in 4th grade. RLS himself said, “The characters took the bit in their teeth; all at once they became detached from the flat paper, they turned their backs on me and walked off bodily…”

Not long after being introduced to Alan Breck Stewart, we hear him exclaim, in a ship’s cabin filled with the blood of villains he has shed, “Ah Davy, am I no’ a bonnie fighter!” How often, as a lad, I imagined myself taking on that crew with my broadsword!

Young David Balfour, in his quest to get back his inheritance, learns from Alan and his complex character that the Jacobite cause in Scotland is not clearly a matter of right and wrong. Did Alan kill “the Red Fox”? This is debated among Highlanders to this day! 

So it is not a novel, but might as well be for its twists, turns, and transformations. Edinburgh in 1572 was a small town of some 3,000 families, so my real-life narrator William Fowler would know and meet one of its most notable citizens, Preacher John Knox of Haddington, along with his young and socially aristocratic second wife (the latter attribute was more a matter of gossip and criticism than the thirty-seven years age gap), and witnessed him being helped up into the pulpit at St Giles to give his congregation a last good talking to. This is the most recent (drawing on a major new cache of letters), and highly readable, life of the man who pushed Scotland towards a Presbyterian Calvinist form of Protestantism – crucially distinct from that evolving in England under the Auld Hag aka Elizabeth I. He is revealed as a much more complex and… show more.

Much Scottish historical fiction is set at the time of the 1745 uprising against the Hanoverian King George II by supporters of Charles Edward Stuart, known as Bonnie Prince Charlie. This is not surprising since it was a deeply traumatic time, which has left scars to this day. The first I read as a young teenager was written by an Englishwoman, D.K. Broster, in the 1920’s: The Flight of the Heron, the first of a trilogy (the others were The Gleam in the North and The Dark Mile). 

This book made me into a Jacobite, despite my own forbears being mostly Lowlanders, who would probably have fought for King George. It tells the exciting, tense, and tragic epic of the ’45 through the stories of Ewen Cameron of Ardroy, a kinsman of Cameron of Lochiel, and a discontented army officer called Keith Windham; their paths cross several times… show more.

D.K. Broster dedicated The Flight of the Heron ‘To Violet Jacob in homage’. Violet Jacob’s Flemington (published in 1909) must be the most underrated novel about the Jacobite rising written in the 20th century. Jacob (probably best known these days as a vernacular poet) was born and bred in Angus on the east coast of Scotland, and her tale is set there; unusually it is mostly told from the Whig point of view. Again it is one of agonisingly divided loyalties. The descriptions of the landscape are pure poetry, but there is humour, nerve-jangling tension, and apt characterisation as well.

Neil Munro’s Scottish tales, especially the Para Handy stories, were very popular in his lifetime, but I prefer his historical novels. In my opinion, the best is The New Road. The title refers to the military road into the Highlands, made in the 1730s by General Wade, which was a major reason why the Highlanders were defeated, since it enabled the army to bring artillery to bear at the Battle of Culloden in April 1746. But the road also brought the possibility of greater prosperity, through trade, to the benighted Highlands. Munro came from Inverary in Argyll, and so does the hero in this thriller, who sets out to find the killer of his Jacobite father years before, during the uprising in support of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s father, James. It is an exciting story but with underlying serious themes, for example about progress and change in traditional societies.

I received this as a prize at school when I was fifteen and passages like this spoke to me: “...you wanted the words they'd known and used, forgotten in the far‑off youngness of their lives, Scots words to tell to your heart, how they wrung it and held it.” My Ayrshire community spoke Scots so it was life changing to read this message by an author from a different time and a different place who was  intensely relevant to my own situation. Being discouraged or even punished for speaking Scots in school, led us to learn English pretty quickly and this bi-lingual tension gave us an advantage learning other languages like French and German which I studied at University. But I will always be grateful to Sunset Song for making me aware of how important the Scots language was to our identity as Scots: “And the next minute that passed… show more.

A personal favorite as I bought this book as a teenager during the 350th-anniversary commemorations of the civil wars in the 1990s.  An underrated book and an excellent introduction to the conflict for anyone interested in the period. Covering major events in Scotland, England, and Ireland it has a multitude of beautiful colorful illustrations that bring the period to life.  The main narrative is interspersed with text boxes focusing on fascinating individuals, events, and cultural and social aspects conveying the richness and diversity of the conflict.   

Samuel Rawson Gardiner’s comprehensive and detailed account of the civil wars has laid the foundation for many of the subsequent histories of the conflict. It was the first account of the civil wars written by a professional historian who had spent a lifetime exploring the expansive and diverse first-hand accounts of the conflict.

All the books in this series are fantastic and highly recommended.