The Men of the Moss-Hags

In The Men of the Moss-Hags, S.R. Crockett takes as his theme the persecution of the Covenanters in seventeenth-century Scotland, a favourite subject of Scottish historical novelists. Steeping himself in the documentary sources and oral traditions of 'The Killing Time', Crockett weaves a thrilling adventure romance, carrying the reader off with him on a perilous journey across the moss-hags - the peaty bogs of the Galloway moorland. With a new introduction by Richard D. Jackson, which outlines Crockett's rivalry over the subject with Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as his treatment of sources and the publishing history of the novel, this edition restores to print a work which, like Scott's Old Mortality, Hogg's The Brownie of Bodsbeck and Galt's Ringan Gilhaize, captures the sufferings and torments of Scotland's blood-swept past. Richard D. Jackson is a graduate of the University of St Andrews. A former schoolteacher, HM Inspector of Schools and retired senior administrative civil servant, he co-edited The Forest Minstrel for The Collected Works of James Hogg, contributes regularly to Studies in Hogg and his World and has published essays in other journals on Walter Scott, John Buchan and Philip Larkin.