Assynt, Nova Scotia, and New Zealand are divided by a ’waste of sea’ yet united by one extraordinary man - the Reverend Norman McLeod. Each can boast a community of Gaelic origin which was inspired and led by him, and in two cases, owes its existence to him.
This is the story of Norman McLeod and his forty year search for a land where he and his followers could live their lives as they wished; of how, as a rebel minister from the Western Highlands, he emigrated to Canada in 1817; of how, thirty four years later, when he was seventy one, he led no fewer than 800 of his followers first to Australia and then to New Zealand where, in the settlement of Waipu, he was all-powerful for another fifteen years. This is also the story of these settlers and their indomitable will to survive as they exchanged one harsh environment for another. Nearly a hundred years after they left Scotland their descendants still spoke Gaelic and remembered the tradition and the man who brought them there.
Though McLeod could often be harsh, overbearing, and dictatorial he is also remembered as a man of granite-like integrity, with extraordinary charisma and great sense of purpose. His morality was as bleak and hard as the rocks of Assynt from which he sprung, yet he inspired in those who followed him a totality of devotion and loyalty. With McLeod there could be no compromise, and his memory still hangs over the west coast of Sutherland and the memorial cairn erected to him, and over the descendents of the people he took with him in the early 1800s.
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