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Particularly strong are some contributions by Hugh Cheape, Nigel Leask, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and John Bonehill. However, from the groundedness of tramping hill tracks with Hugh Cheape to the mental and emotional journeys of the historical imagination with John Bonehill, the old ways and new roads on which this beautiful volume will take you is well worth the modest financial outlay. John Bonehill, Anne Dulau Beveridge and Nigel Leask (eds), Old Ways, New Roads: Travels in Scotland 1720-1832. [Extracted from the article]

Despite the theorising of Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers, no crystallised notion of childhood was particularly widespread or applied in the rural north. However, the evidence does suggest gradual phases, contingent on class, gender and circumstance, which tended to commence between the ages of five and eight and were distinguished by formal education or starting to assist in the family economy in a meaningful way. At the other end of childhood, taking up full-time employment or leaving home to work, study or marry therefore tended to be the rite of passage through which youngsters entered either adolescence or adulthood, but the ages at which this happened were highly circumstantial. The evidence suggests that there was no widespread dominant notion of childhood as a distinct life stage requiring specialised care and attention in rural communities during the period in which it was becoming established among theorists and the urban middle classes. For most the daily realities of labour, challenging economic circumstances, densely populated households, let alone the upheavals of clearance and emigration that affected so many, meant there was little time, energy or mental and emotional space to absorb and implement new philosophies. Rather, the needs of families meant that continuing older practices of gradually increasing responsibilities and responding to circumstances made most sense among the thatched longhouses and blackhouses of Scotland's rural north. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This examination of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd (Gaelic-speaking area) extends beyond protestant ideas about the gendered family to how people actually implemented spiritual practices at home. The results complicate earlier conclusions, showing that family worship undermined as well as reinforced the patriarchal family. The challenge to fathers' authority came less from the influence of mothers than from children and non-family members who, through literacy, became better equipped than fathers for spiritual leadership. Examining family life shows how some Gaels used evangelicalism to reshape their culture while also exposing how others resisted this change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study focusing on problems in the use of the New Statistical Account (NSA) to research education in the Isle of Skye in Scotland in the 19th century. Topics include the inconsistency in education provision between the Isle of Skye's parishes, the schools operated by the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) and the Edinburgh Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools (ESSGS), and the inaccuracy of information provided by the NSA.

The article discusses the potential use of Protestant missionary society records to investigate nineteenth-century Highland Catholicism as of May 2014, focusing on the reported efforts to encourage Catholic historians to read Protestant religious history sources in order to reassess the apparently changing lives of Gaelic-speaking Roman Catholics. The historical records of the Edinburgh Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools and the National Library of Scotland are mentioned.

The article reviews the book "Scotland & America c. 1600-c. 1800" by Alexander Murdoch.