Hardback edition of A Pronouncing Gaelic-English Dictionary by celebrated lexiographer, Neil MacAlpine, of Islay.
Inside cover board inscribed, ‘A.R. MacDonald, Cornaigbeg, Tiree. Personal Property’.
Gaelic to English and English to Gaelic, with phonetic key.
Re-printed from 1845 first pressing several times.
549pp.
Hardbacked edition of ‘A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World’, by Erika Rappaport. Published in 2017 by Princeton University Press. 409pp with black and white photographs.
‘A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in-depth historical look at how men and women – through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa – transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society. […] An expansive and orginal global history of imperial tea, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways that this fluid and powerful enterprise helped shape the contemporary world.’
Black and white photograph of unnamed seamen on a sailing boat in around the early 1900s, which formed the front page of a 1935 Gaelic school book (publication unknown). The item was found in Cnoc Ruadh, 10 Moss, Isle of Tiree.
Compact, leather-covered, Gaelic ‘Biobull / Bible’, produced by Comunn-Bhiobull Duthchail na h-Alba. On the inside front cover is written ‘Cornaig Sunday School. For Mary Ishbel MacDonald [Kenovay], with every good wish for the future, J Gillies, 28/8/46. John Gillies was the Church of Scotland Missionary on Tiree for 17 years (1937-1954), teaching Sunday School in Gaelic and English.
Hardback book ‘The Scottish Anthem Book’, 1922, revised from the original ‘Book of Anthems’, which was published in 1875 as and aid to singing hymns and psalms in the Church of Scotland. Belonging to Effie MacDonald (nee MacCorquodale), Kenovay, it is signed ‘Euphemia Cameron MacCorquodale, No. 8’.
Ochre-coloured stoneware mug commemorating the history of Tiree High School with its renaming in 1983. Similar to 2002.127.1 in blue as shown here.
Photocopy of a composition by Neil MacDonald Brownlie, 1987, about ‘The MacKinnon/Brownlie Connection’, detailing the history of the family from Barrapol.
Photocopy of an article titled ‘The crofters and the kelp’ by Roger Butler and published in Scottish Island Explorer magazine, Feb-Mar 2022. It gives an account of the kelp industry in the western islands of Scotland, including Tiree, in the early 19th century, and of the people who worked at it.
Photograph and sample of gutta-percha from a bale found embedded in the machair shore at Sandaig (NL 936 436) by visitor Jennie Hynd in September 2022. The extent of the lichen and vegetation on the bale suggests that it had been there for some time.
Gutta-percha is a stretchy, rubbery material, derived from the latex of the Palaquium gutta tree in Malaysia. During the second half of the 19th century, gutta-percha was imported into Britain in vast quanities and used as insulation for underwater electrical cables, golf balls, chewing gum and root canal treatment. Synthetic materials have since largely replaced it.
Bales of gutta-percha have been washed up on the beaches of western Europe for over 100 years, with many likely to have come from ships wrecked during WWI such as the Japanese liner Miyazaki Maru, which was sunk by a German U-boat off the Scilly Isles in 1917.
Two original monochrome postcards showing Scarinish Harbour and Island House. These are originals of digital copies already held in the collection. See 2000.230.4 and 2013.33.2, respectively.
