This volume is made up of contributions from a range of local people. Much of what you find here was also included in the events and exhibitions held right across the area during April and May 2005.  This book provides an account of some of the topics which have been explored in the course of the past year.A team of seven part-time staff and three core volunteers was created and given a year to gather together as much material as they could about Mackay Country the parishes of  Assynt, Eddrachillis, Durness, Tongue and Farr in North West Sutherland. Their main task was to create a new visual and oral history record to complement written sources through audio recording, video, photography and the establishment of a Mackay Country wide photographic archive.  Through photography over one hundred participants young and old recorded life today and their hopes for the future.  Through oral history recordings a further fifty people discussed life in the past and possibilities for the future. 

 

The aim is to find out what Mackay Country is today, what is was in the past and what local communities want it to be in the future.  This work provides a way of shaping the future by looking at the past.  Each contribution merely serves to give a small insight and a brief excursion into the vibrant miscellany which is Mackay Country past and present, only a brief flavour of that diversity. In the course of this work we have assembled the material necessary for a standard Area Profile a summary of the key social, economic and environmental aspects of the local area and compares these local aspects with patterns and trends at the county, regional and national level.  They are more meaningful because they consider how past forces, human, cultural, geological and environmental have shaped the place we know today. The purpose of this is to see in what ways local circumstances, strengths and challenges differ from or mirror regional and national concerns. 

 

 

A history and profile of the communities of North West Sutherland