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THE BOOK
At the age of twenty-two the author cut short her nursing career in Edinburgh to marry, against enormous family pressure, the charismatic Euan Macpherson, her psychology tutor and twenty years her senior. Not long after, Euan inherited the family estate of Glentruim in Badenoch and Sandra Macpherson found herself the lady of a large and dilapidated manor. Despite an extraordinarily frosty reception by the staff of the house and other members of the Macpherson clan, who considered her too young to take on the role of lady of the house, Sandra rose to the challenge. This is her engaging and entertaining account of life at Glentruim, in an isolated and often harsh environment where the family were often snowed in for weeks at a time with no electricity or telephone. She describes the hardships of life - the struggle to keep human and animal inhabitants fed through the winter, and to meet the costs of maintaining the house and estate - but also the pleasure she and her two children took amid such natural beauty teeming with wildlife. With vivacity and humour she describes the various characters of the Glentruim community - teachers, doctors, ghillies and poachers - the events and dramas that punctuated their lives, not least the massed gatherings of Macpherson relatives she was called on to orchestrate. The Highland world, both natural and supernatural, is vividly evoked as Sandra recounts her efforts to combine a respect for tradition with the necessity to find ways to make the estate pay in the modern world, from cookery to haute couture and opening the doors of Glentruim to an American film company. The popular TV series Monarch of the Glen is filmed in the spectacular countryside around Glentruim, and the castle which appears in it used to belong to the Macphersons. Readers of A Strange and Wild Place will find Sandra Macpherson's true story every bit as entertaining and moving as its fictional counterpart.