Skirly Crag

About the Book: 

Skirly Crag: a hill in the Scottish highlands, in the heart of which nestles a very special lochan.

Helen Percy’s working life as a shepherd takes her away from her home in the lee of her beloved Skirly Crag for many months of the year.

Forget beribboned Bo-Peep dresses. Think instead unbecoming waterproofs, the same shirt worn for a week, jeans smeared with gobs of birth-fluid and mustard-coloured lamb-skitter. Calf-length crinoline gowns are so out of fashion for the modern shepherdess!

Why do I do this job, I ask myself? Why am I up at sparrow’s fart each day, with no days off, a pitiful rate of pay and bosses who are variously cantankerous, cussed or crazy?

Then there is a rare day on the hill when the lark rises into the clear air above Skirly Crag, thrilling the glen with its reedy melody, and all is well with the world.

Reviews: 

As highlighted in The Sunday Times, Scotland

Cold Comfort Farm with bells on. ALAN TAYLOR

Helen Percy's description of farming life is so brilliantly accurate, it will make even the most city dwelling reader feel the wind on their face or smell the mud on their boots. JIM SMITH, Perthshire farmer and comedian

I enjoyed this book immensely. JANE SMALL

Praise for Scandalous Immoral and Improper

More complex, more shocking, more fascinating by far than the story the church and media made up. The truth usually is. SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

. . . an astonishing story and told without self-pity and even with a glimmer of humour. Remarkable. BRIAN MORTON

Helen’s book is a modern version of an old song. Read it and weep. RICHARD HOLLOWAY

About the Author:

HELEN PERCY, a former Church of Scotland minister, decided to change her life and become a shepherd. In her first book, Scandalous, Immoral
and Improper (Argyll 2011), Helen tells of endurance and survival of both familial and ecclesiastical abuse. Since leaving the Church of Scotland in 1997 she has worked with victims of child rape in South Africa and donkeys in the Kalahari Desert. Back home in the Highlands, she has contracted for a number of eccentric farmers throughout Scotland and Northern England, often travelling in a small van with her sheepdogs, a tame duck and an epileptic hare.