Argyll after the Forty-five: a French-Scots gentleman comes to a ruinous castle on Loch Fyne carrying a purse of Jacobite gold and a fencing master's manners, into a country where every second man is an informer. Munro was born illegitimate to a kitchen maid at Inveraray and rose to edit a Glasgow paper; he wrote the Highlands as a native who could not be sentimental about them, and Doom Castle is his best plot. Fifty-nine plates of castles, ruins and rough weather, from Nasmyth to Bellotto, keep the Highland light and the Jacobite shadow always in view.
