Radio listener: An Outcast of the Islands: Lady Grange | Mark Goes to Memphis | Costing the Earth

Published on 12/08/2012 16:02

EVEN today, voyaging to the archipelago of St Kilda, lying more 
than 40 miles west of the Outer Hebrides, is no small consideration; in the mid-18th century it was a daunting prospect indeed.

An Outcast of the Islands: Lady Grange

Today, Radio 4, 4:30pm

Mark Goes to Memphis

Monday, Radio 2, 10pm

Costing the Earth

Tuesday Radio 4, 3:30pm

Yet in 1732 Lady Grange, a weel-kent figure in Edinburgh society, was abducted on the orders of her estranged husband, Scotland’s senior law lord, and immured on the Atlantic fastness of St Kilda.

James Erskine, Lord Grange, and his wife had been married 25 years, but following an acrimonious separation, Erskine claimed that the fiery-tempered Lady Grange had been stalking him. He also feared she might reveal his Jacobite sympathies to the Hanoverian establishment. One night, therefore, she was kidnapped from her Edinburgh lodgings, “by the lee light of the moon”, as one ballad-inspired chronicler put it, and spirited off to St Kilda, remaining in exile there, then latterly on Skye, until her death in 1745.

In AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS: LADY GRANGE, poet and author Kenneth Steven looks into this heartless episode, speaking to Margaret Macaulay, author of The Prisoner of St Kilda, while a letter from Lady Grange herself, preserved in the National 
Library of Scotland, is read by Siobhan Redmond.

On Radio 2, Mark Kermode also goes on a long journey, but of his own choosing, in MARK GOES TO MEMPHIS. The film critic is also no mean skiffle bass-player and a devotee of American roots music, so his journey to the 
Tennessee music capital with his band, The Dodge Brothers, to record at the legendary Sun Studios, is something of a pilgrimage. The programme accompanies Kermode on his journey, as he and the band play their way around the Southern metropolis.

Back at home, our climate is likely to take on a dramatically more southern character, if the experts are 
to be believed. According to the latest predictions on global climate change, within 50 years, Britain’s 
climate could resemble that of Madeira. In COSTING THE EARTH, Tom Heap visits the islands, some 350 miles off the Moroccan coast, to find out what that might mean.