<div>Five hundred million years of Scottish history from the author of Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms: &ldquo;Deserves a prominent place in the history canon&rdquo; (Scots Magazine). Covering the Ice Age to the recent Scottish Referendum, the acclaimed historian and author explores the history of the Scottish nation. Focusing on key moments such as the Battle of Bannockburn and the Jacobite risings, Moffat also features other episodes in history that are perhaps less well documented. From prehistoric timber halls to inventions and literature, Moffat&rsquo;s epic explores the drama of battle, change, loss, and innovation interspersed with the lives of ordinary Scottish folk, the men and women who defined a nation. &ldquo;Moffat plunders the facts and fables to create a richly-detailed and comprehensive analysis of a nation&rsquo;s past and references a huge number of sources.&rdquo; &mdash;Scotland Magazine &ldquo;The great thing about Moffat&rsquo;s account is that, for all its emphasis on uncertainty, it rattles along with complete narrative certainty, to the extent that great events consistently take even a historically literate reader unawares.&rdquo; &mdash;Scottish Review of Books &ldquo;A very readable, well-researched and fluent account.&rdquo; &mdash;Scotland on Sunday</div>

Buy From US

Kobo

Google

Barnes & Noble

Apple

Amazon

Scotland

<div>A &ldquo;fascinating historical detective work&rdquo; that pins down the real story of the legendary medieval king and the court of Camelot (Spectator). The Holy Grail, the kingdom of Camelot, the Knights of the Round Table, and the magical sword Excalibur are all key ingredients of the legends surrounding King Arthur. But who was he really, where did he come from, and how much of what we read about him in stories that date back to the Dark Ages is true? So far, historians have failed to show that King Arthur really existed at all, and for a good reason&mdash;they have been looking in the wrong place. In this &ldquo;vivid and thought-provoking&rdquo; book, Alistair Moffat shatters all existing assumptions about Britain&rsquo;s most enigmatic hero (Birmingham Evening Mail). With references to literary sources and historical documents, as well as archeology and the ancient names of rivers, hills, and forts, he strips away a thousand years of myth to unveil the real King Arthur. And in doing so, he solves one of the greatest riddles of them all&mdash;the site of Camelot itself. &ldquo;A virtuoso performance.&rdquo; &mdash;Cardiff Western Mail &ldquo;Crammed with detail and follows a broad sweep across much of our history from the Ice Age to the Middle Ages.&rdquo; &mdash;The Scotsman</div>

Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms

<div>&ldquo;Some of the most fascinating, intriguing and, yes, brutal episodes of the region&rsquo;s past written in the fast-paced, involving style of an adventure novel&rdquo; (Italy Magazine, &ldquo;Book of the Week&rdquo;). With the perfect fusion of history, art, architecture, superb natural beauty, and weather&mdash;not to mention magnificent traditions of food and drink&mdash;Tuscany has cast its spell over visitors for centuries. What is it that makes this exquisite part of Italy so seductive? To answer this question, Alistair Moffat embarks on a journey into Tuscany&rsquo;s past. From the flowering of the Etruscan civilization in the seventh century BC through the rise of the powerful medieval communes of Arezzo, Lucca, Pisa, and Florence and the birth of the Renaissance, he underlines both the area&rsquo;s regional uniqueness and the vital role it has played in the history of the whole of Italy. Insightful, readable, and imbued with the author&rsquo;s own enthusiasm for Tuscany, this book includes a wealth of information not found in tourist guides. As the Herald raves, &ldquo;If you travel to the region, you&rsquo;ll want to take with you Moffat&rsquo;s Tuscany: A History; and if you read the book, you&rsquo;ll want to travel to the region.&rdquo; &ldquo;Compelling . . . Moffat takes the reader on a delicious trip through the geography, history and culture of the region&mdash;an impressive book.&rdquo; &mdash;The Sunday Telegraph &ldquo;Facts and figures are woven into a sun-drenched meditation on the character of the place and its people.&rdquo; &mdash;The Scotsman</div>

Tuscany

<div>Dive into Northern Britain&rsquo;s Dark Ages in &ldquo;a book which gives a satisfying and convincing account of this little-known part of Scotland&rsquo;s history&rdquo; (Undiscovered Scotland). Modern communications have driven motorways and pylons through the countryside, dwarfed us with TV and telephone masts, and drastically altered the way in which we move around, see, and understand Scotland. Recent politics and logistics have established borders and jurisdictions which now seem permanent and impervious. The Faded Map looks beyond these to remember a land that was once quiet and green. Alistair Moffat&rsquo;s &ldquo;tireless research . . . and commanding knowledge&rdquo; bring to vivid life the half-forgotten kings and kingdoms of two thousand years ago, from the time of the Romans into the early medieval period (Scottish Field). In this &ldquo;fascinating&rdquo; account, Moffat describes the landscape these men and women moved through and writes of a Celtic society which spoke to itself in Old Welsh, where the Sons of Prophesy ruled, and the time when the English kings of Bernicia held sway over vast swathes of what is now Scotland (Alexander McCall Smith, author of Dream Angus). Heroes rode out of the mists to challenge them and then join with them, and the faint echo of the din of ancient battles can be heard as he takes the reader on a remarkable journey around a lost Scotland.</div>

The Faded Map

<div>A &ldquo;beautifully written&rdquo; history of the Scottish Borders&mdash;from the Ice Age to present day&mdash;by the author of Scotland: A History from Earliest Times (Boston Sunday Herald). This is the story of the border: a place of beginnings and endings, of differences and similarities. It is the story of England and Scotland, told not from the remoteness of London or Edinburgh or in the tired terms of national histories, but up close and personal, toe to toe and eyeball to eyeball across the tweed, the Cheviots, the Esk, and the tidal races of the upper Solway. This is a tale told in blood, fun, and granite-hard memory. This is the story of an ancient place where hunter-gatherers penetrated into the virgin interior, where Celtic warlords ruled and the Romans came but could not conquer, where the glittering kingdom of Northumbria thrived, where David MacMalcolm raised great abbeys, and where Walter Scott sat at Abbotsford and brooded on the area&rsquo;s rich and historic legacy. &ldquo;Highly readable&mdash;a lively, clear style.&rdquo; &mdash;Northern History &ldquo;Quirky, learned and utterly absorbing.&rdquo; &mdash;Allan Massie, award-winning author of The Royal Stuarts</div>

The Borders

<div>A &ldquo;compelling, thought-provoking and entertaining history&rdquo; of Hadrian&rsquo;s Wall, one of Britain&rsquo;s most intriguing landmarks (Herald). Hadrian&rsquo;s Wall is the largest and one of the most enigmatic historical monuments in Britain. Nothing else approaches its vast scale: a land wall running seventy-three miles from east to west and a sea wall stretching at least twenty-six miles down the Cumbrian coast. Many of its forts are as large as Britain&rsquo;s most formidable medieval castles, and the wide ditch dug to the south of the Wall, the vallum, is larger than any surviving prehistoric earthwork. Built in a ten-year period by more than thirty thousand soldiers and laborers at the behest of an extraordinary emperor, the Wall consisted of more than twenty-four million stones, giving it a mass greater than all the Egyptian pyramids put together. At least a million people visit Hadrian&rsquo;s Wall each year, and it has been designated a World Heritage Site. In this book, based on literary and historical sources as well as the latest archaeological research, Alistair Moffat considers who built the Wall, how it was built, why it was built, and how it affected the native peoples who lived in its mighty shadow. The result is a unique and fascinating insight into one of the wonders of the ancient world. &ldquo;Wonderfully entertaining.&rdquo; &mdash;The Independent</div>

The Wall

<div>An &ldquo;exciting and dramatic&rdquo; history of the raiders who ruled the lawless Anglo-Scottish borderlands for over a century (Cumberland News). Nowhere else in Britain in the modern era, or indeed in Europe, did civil order break down over such a wide area, or for such a long time, as on the border country between Scotland and England. For more than a century, the hoofbeats of countless raiding parties drummed over the border. From Dumfriesshire to the high wastes of East Cumbria, from Roxburghshire to Redesdale, from the lonely valley of Liddesdale to the fortress city of Carlisle, swords and spears spoke while the law remained silent. Fierce family loyalty counted for everything, while the rules of nationality counted for nothing. The whole range of the Cheviot Hills, its watershed ridges and the river valleys that flowed out of them, became the landscape of larceny while Maxwells, Grahams, Fenwicks, Carletons, Armstrongs, and Elliots rode hard and often for plunder. These were the Riding Times and in modern European history, they have no parallel. This book tells the remarkable story of the Reivers and how they made the Borders.</div>

The Reivers

<div>This unique &ldquo;fusion of science and the physical history&rdquo; traces the story of the Scots through their DNA (Sunday Herald). An almost limitless archive of our history lies hidden inside our bodies, and this book traces the ancient story of Scotland from that scientific viewpoint. The mushrooming of genetic studies, of DNA analysis, is rewriting history in spectacular fashion. In Scotland: A Genetic Journey, Alistair Moffat explores the history that is printed on our genes, and in a remarkable new approach, uncovers the detail of where Scots are from, where they have journeyed, and who they are&mdash;and in so doing, vividly colors in a DNA map of Scotland. &ldquo;[Moffat] is wonderfully able to communicate the epic elements of the story.&rdquo; &mdash;Scotsman</div>

The Scots

<div>A Scottish historian travels along the cultural and geographical border of the Highlands in this &ldquo;seductive travelogue&rdquo; (Scottish Field). Running from the northeast to the southwest of Scotland, the Highland Line is the most profound internal boundary in Britain. First recognized by the Roman general Agricola in the first century AD, it divides the country in many senses&mdash;signaling the border between Highland and Lowland; Celtic and English-speaking; crofting and farming. In Britain&#39;s Last Frontier Alistair Moffat makes a journey of the imagination, tracing the route of the Line from the River Clyde through Perthshire and the North-east. In addition to exploring the huge importance of the Line over almost two thousand years, he also shows how it continues to influence life and attitudes in 21st-century Scotland. The result is a fascinating book full of history and anecdote.</div>

Britain's Last Frontier

<div>This local history tells the centuries-long story of a Scottish Borders town through its battles, traditions and transformations from prehistory to today. Hawick, Scotland, is famous for its annual Common Riding festival, an equestrian tradition that traces its roots to the 16th century Battle of Hornshole. But in this lively history, Alistair Moffat takes the narrative much further back into the mists of prehistory, to the time of the Romans, the coming of the Angles and the Normans. Moffat recounts how Hawick got its name, where the old village stood, and who the early barons of Hawick were. He then charts the amazing rise of the textile trade, bringing the story up to the present day. Hawick has changed radically over the many centuries since people began to live between the Slitrig and the Teviot. All that experience in one place has created a rich cultural heritage, one which the people of Hawick proudly carry into the future.</div>

Hawick

<div>“This account of four west coast journeys in search of the remnants of the earliest Christian missionaries is intriguing . . . Moffat is an engaging guide.” —The Scotsman Fourteen centuries ago, Irish saints brought the Word of God to the Hebrides and Scotland’s Atlantic shore. These “white martyrs” sought solitude, remoteness, even harshness, in places apart from the world where they could fast, pray and move closer to an understanding of God: places where they could see angels. Columba, who founded the famous monastery at Iona, was the most well-known of these courageous men who rowed their curraghs towards danger and uncertainty in a pagan land, but the many others are now largely forgotten by history.  In this book, Alistair Moffat journeys from the island of Eileach an Naoimh at the mouth of the Firth of Lorne to Lismore, Iona and then north to Applecross, searching for traces of these extraordinary men. He finds them not often in any tangible remains, but in the spirit of the islands and remote places where they passed their exemplary lives. Brendan, Moluag, Columba, Maelrubha and others brought the Gaelic language and echoes of how the saints saw their world can still be heard in its cadences. And the tradition of great piety endures. “This account of four journeys to three small islands and a remote peninsula in the Scottish north-west has an air of exotic adventure.” —The Times Literary Supplement “I was drawn to Moffat’s personal response to pilgrimage as he retraced the spiritual journeys of the early monks . . . This delightful book is part history, part pilgrimage.” —Church Times</div>

In Search of Angels

<div>[an] exploration of Scotland's past through the eyes of a scholarly hiker ... Magnificent' - New Statesman, Books of the Year Fourteen centuries ago, Irish saints journeyed to the Hebrides and Scotland's Atlantic shore. They sought spiritual solitude in remote places, but their mission was also to spread the word of God to the peoples of Scotland. Columba was the most famous of these pioneers who rowed their curraghs towards danger and uncertainty in a pagan land, but the many others are now largely forgotten. Alistair Moffat sets off in search of these elusive figures. As he follows in their footsteps, he finds their traces not so much in tangible remains as in the spirit and memory of the places that lay at the very edge of their world.</div>

Alistair Moffat
Follow this author

Books By Alistair Moffat (12 Books)