Includes 67 rarely seen original Magic Lantern hand coloured glass slides from the 1880s depicting scenes from Oban to St Kilda.

In 1885 Aberdeen photographers George Washington Wilson and Norman Macleod set out to travel through the Western Isles to St Kilda. They took many photographs along the way and their collection of pictures, ‘From Oban to Skye and the Outer Hebrides’ was shown in magic lantern lectures throughout Scotland. In 2004 Mark Butterworth purchased the set, complete with the original lecture notes.

The images and text in this book come from this double set of lantern slides which was produced in the late 1880’s Individually hand coloured onto the glass plates, these images capture the Western Isles and their way of life in evocative details. Published here for the first time as a complete set, many of the images, particularly of St Kilda and its inhabitants are iconic, well known among enthusiasts of Western Isles history. However, these contemporary hand coloured slides are rarely seen and present a new light on life in the Western Isles, produced fifty years before colour photography came to Scotland.