His manuscript journal of life on these islands sparkles with the personalities of those who crossed his path - Mr Reeves, the Inspector of Post Offices for the isles, poor 'Sunderland Tommy', a cabin-boy stranded at the age of ten in Portree, and the smugglers they met at Sligachan on Skye. Nor less remarkable are the many original watercolours and line illustrations of landscape and individuals.
Atkinson was only twenty-three when he set out from Newcastle in 1831 with his brother Dick and the professional artist William Train, to explore the Western Isles and remote St Kilda. The following year he journeyed to the Shetlands but in 1833 returned again to Skye and the Western Isles while on his way to the Faroes.
The large leather-bound journals chronicling their adventures and largely unknown outside his family were richly embellished with original watercolours and drawings of his tours, made by some of the finest local artists of the day. His diary, while vividly resurrecting a living, breathing portrait of those whose lives added such colour to the landscape, also reveals a community in the painful throes of transition and at a watershed between the ancient and the modern.
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