The Birlinn imprint publishes Scottish and general UK interest books, from biography to history, military to politics, and Scottish Gaelic. The name comes from the old Norse word ‘birlinn’, meaning a long boat or small galley used especially in the Hebrides and West Highlands of Scotland in the Middle Ages
What’s new from Birlinn?
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£14.99Red kites were once Britain’s most common bird of prey. By the early 1900s they’d been wiped out in Scotland and England following centuries of ruthless persecution. When some reintroduced kites began roosting on their 1,400-acre farm at…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£9.99In 1971 Alec Crawford is determined to make his fortune from ship salvage. Early attempts lead nowhere until he teams up with a new partner, Simon Martin. Diving in Hebridean waters, they explore remains of the Spanish Armada, and the wreck of the…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£20.00Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh is widely regarded as one of the most significant gardens in Britain. In addition to being a spectacular example of garden design, it also features almost 300 artworks by Finlay…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£12.99Mairi Hedderwick embarks on a six-month-long journey to 40 islands from Arran to Lewis, recounting her pilgrimage around the archipelago of the Western Isles with which she has had a lifelong love affair. Filled with wit and wisdom that is matched…
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Hardback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£14.99‘Deserves to sell like hot cakes’ – Allan Massie, The Scotsman From the Indian Mutiny to the London Blitz, offering a ‘nice cup of tea’ has been a stock British response to a crisis. But tea itself has a dramatic, and often…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£14.99‘It may perhaps interest you if I mention a few figures in connexion with the construction of the bridge. Its extreme length, including the approach viaduct, is 2,765 yards, one and one-fifth of a mile, and the actual length of the cantilever…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£14.99This is the ideal guide to the whole route, so rich in history and natural beauty. Designed to be used by walkers on the Path or visitors to any point along it, it introduces a wealth of castles, churches, harbours, monuments and red-roofed…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£8.99All over the world people associate the bagpipes with Scotland. In this informative and entertaining book Stuart McHardy introduces Scotland’s national instrument – its history, development and repertoire – and examines the part…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£9.99The brainchild of bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith, historian Alistair Moffat and artist Andrew Crummy, the Great Tapestry of Scotland is an outstanding celebration of 420 million years of Scottish history and achievement. Involving a…
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Calendar | Pub: 27 May 2021£9.99Following the continued success of the 2021 Scottish Maps Calendar, Birlinn is once again proud to collaborate with the National Library of Scotland. This new calendar features more of the most beautiful maps of Scotland ever made. From the very…
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Calendar | Pub: 27 May 2021£9.99This calendar features distinctive full-colour paintings by one of Scotland’s best-loved authors and artists and is a wonderful celebration of the extraordinary natural beauty of the Hebrides throughout the seasons. Mairi Hedderwick’s drawings,…
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Hardback | Pub: 27 May 2021£12.99This hardback desk diary is illustrated throughout with Mairi Hedderwick’s beautiful sketches of the Hebrides through the seasons. Featuring distinctive full-colour paintings by one of Scotland’s best-loved authors and artists, this exquisite…
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Hardback | Pub: 27 May 2021£7.99This hardback pocket diary is illustrated throughout with Mairi Hedderwick’s beautiful sketches of the Hebrides through the seasons. Featuring distinctive full-colour paintings by one of Scotland’s best-loved authors and artists, this exquisite…
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Hardback | Pub: 06 May 2021£20.00Scotland has its rugged Hebrides; Ireland its cliff-girt Arans; Wales its Island of Twenty Thousand Saints. And what has England got? The isles of Canvey, Sheppey, Wight and Dogs, Mersea, Brownsea, Foulness and Rat. But there are also wilder,…
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Paperback | Pub: 06 May 2021£9.99In a life stranger than any fiction, Grace O’Malley, daughter of a clan chief in the far west of Ireland, went from marriage at fifteen to piracy on the high seas. She soon had a fleet of galleys under her commander, but her three decades of…
Coming soon
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£14.99Polly Pullar has had a passion for red squirrels since childhood. As a wildlife rehabilitator, she knows the squirrel on a profoundly personal level and has hand-reared numerous litters of orphan kits, eventually returning them to the wild. In this…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£12.99The Outer Hebrides lie 40 miles to the west of mainland Scotland, forming a barrier to the North Atlantic. Culturally distinct from early prehistory, the islands contain a wealth of historical and archaeological monuments, including the standing…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£9.99The brainchild of bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith, historian Alistair Moffat and artist Andrew Crummy, the Great Tapestry of Scotland is an outstanding celebration of thousands of years of Scottish history and achievement, from the end of…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£12.99On a hillside near Ballachulish in the Scottish Highlands in May 1752 a rider is assassinated by a gunman. The murdered man is Colin Campbell, a government agent travelling to nearby Duror where he’s evicting farm tenants to make way for his…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£16.99The Deeside Way is a long-distance path running for 66km (41 miles) from Aberdeen, the oil capital of Europe, to Ballater in Royal Deeside in the Cairngorms National Park. Mainly following the course of old Royal Deeside Railway line, it is suitable…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£8.99June 1945. Hitler has triumphed, Britain is under German occupation and America cowers under the threat of nuclear attack. In the dead of night, a figure flits through the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey, searching for a hidden document he knows could…
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Calendar | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£9.99The Great Tapestry of Scotland is an outstanding celebration of 420 million years of Scottish history and achievement. Involving over a thousand volunteer stitchers who worked on 160 separate panels, the Tapestry is one of the biggest community arts…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£8.99The Great Tapestry of Scotland is one of the most ambitious community arts projects ever undertaken. The brainchild of bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith, historian Alistair Moffat and artist Andrew Crummy, it was created by a team of over a…
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Hardback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£30.00The Great Tapestry of Scotland is an outstanding celebration of thousands of years of Scottish history and achievement, from the end of the last Ice Age to Dolly the Sheep and Andy Murry’s Wimbledon victory of 2013. The 1000+ stitches spent a…
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Paperback | Pub: 05 Aug 2021£17.99Paul Murton journeys the length and breadth of the spectacularly beautiful Scottish Highlands. In addition to bringing a fresh eye to popular destinations such as Glencoe, Ben Nevis, Loch Ness and the Cairngorms, he also visits some remote and…
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Hardback | Pub: 02 Sep 2021£14.99In May 2018 NASA called a press conference to announce the successful test-run of their tiny nuclear reactor KRUSTY (Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology). This revolutionary technology, which runs on heat alone, may have profound…
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Hardback | Pub: 02 Sep 2021£25.00Neville Chamberlain is remembered today as Hitler’s credulous dupe, the man who proclaimed in September 1938 that the Munich agreement guaranteed ‘peace in our time’. Unjustly dismissed as one of the great losers of history, this…
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Paperback | Pub: 02 Sep 2021£14.99Jim Sillars as a working-class schoolboy was told by the Deputy Rector at Ayr Academy that he would end up a ‘common labourer’, and by the Rector that he would ‘make nothing of himself’. He went on to be elected an MP twice, reaching high…
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Hardback | Pub: 07 Oct 2021£20.00From the wild glens of the Cairngorms National Park and the bountiful fishing villages of the Moray Coast to Loch Ness, Fort William, Ullapool, the rugged bays and barren moors of Caithness and Sutherland and the rich sea lochs and glens of Argyll,…
We think you might like:
Alistair Moffat
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Paperback | Pub: 08 Nov 2019£9.99
In an epic narrative, sometimes moving, sometimes astonishing, always revealing, Moffat writes an entirely new history of Britain. Instead of the usual parade of the usual suspects – kings, queens, saints, warriors and the notorious – this is a…
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Paperback | Pub: 21 Sep 2017£14.99From the Ice Age to the recent Scottish Referendum, historian and author Alistair Moffat explores the history of the Scottish nation. As well as focusing on key moments in the nation’s history such as the Battle of Bannockburn and the Jacobite…
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Paperback | Pub: 06 Mar 2017£12.99Hadrian’s Wall is the largest, most spectacular and one of the most enigmatic historical monument in Britain. Nothing else approaches its vast scale: a land wall running 73 miles from east to west and a sea wall stretching at least 26 miles down…
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Paperback | Pub: 20 Mar 2017£9.99History has always mattered to Scots, and rarely more so than now at the outset of a new century, with a new census appearing in 2011 and after more than ten years of a new parliament. An almost limitless archive of our history lies hidden inside…
