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Kintyre is essentially a book about the ordinary people of this south-western peninsula of Argyll. It combines thorough and objective scholarship together with the personal voice of its author, who is a native of Kintyre and knows its geography intimately. The greater part of the book is based on original research in a wide range of documentary sources (notably the nineteenth-century registers of the poor). Some of these sources have been entirely neglected by social historians until now. This book also includes much that has been passed on through oral tradition.Angus Martin traces the evolution of the extraordinarily mixed stock of Kintyre from the Gaelic settlement, around the fifth century, through the subsequent settlements of the Lowlanders and Irish, and explores the nature of these diverse cultural legacies. The darker aspects of social history such as epidemic diseases, sanitary and housing conditions, and destitution are also explored, and the sinister activities of grave-robbers in nineteenth century Kintyre are substantiated for the first time. Martin also includes new information on Irish immigrant families and surviving Gaelic elements in the dialect.