Lady Nairne

Continuing the Book Week theme with this excellent biography of Carolina Oliphant of Gask. She was a contemporary of Robert Burns and was better known as Lady Nairne. Lady Nairne was born into a family which had taken an active part in the Jacobite campaigns and as a result forfeited but then recovered the family estate of Gask. Many of her songs, which were published anonymously reflect her Jacobite heritage and contain sometimes coded references to the cause. Her song 'The Auld Hoose' refers not, as I had always imagined, to a humble cottage but to the very grand House of Gask where Carolina spent her childhood.