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