The Emigrants

A few days holiday - hooray!

As we drove south we met the summer. Coats and jumpers in Orkney, shirt sleeves by Helmsdale.

I've stopped before to walk up to this powerful Gerald Laing sculpture outside Helmsdale. It commemorates families from the Highlands and Islands who had to leave Scotland to build new lives in far off lands. The father looks bravely, determindly out to sea; the wife, with a babe in her arms, is looking back at the life and home they are leaving behind.

The inscription includes the line: "their voices will echo through the empty straths and glens of their homeland."