Alison’s Highland Holiday by Sheila Stuart was published in 1946. This one was a real blast from the past for me although I didn’t remember anything about the story, I know that I read this ‘Alison’ series when I was about ten years old and I absolutely loved the books. In fact I told my mother that when I grew up I was going to live in a wee white cottage in the Highlands. That never came to pass.

In Alison’s Highland Holiday, brother and sister Niall and Alison Campbell are aged 15 and 13, the youngest of four children who have been orphaned in recent years. They’ve just travelled north from Edinburgh by train to Sutherland, to stay with their Uncle  George over the school summer holidays. It’s an idyllic place for them as there’s a great salmon river nearby and the two of them adore fishing.

Sadly the new laird who owns the river has told their uncle that he has guests staying with him and he wants them to have the river to themselves while they are there. Niall and Alison are so disappointed, they know that they daren’t poach because their uncle would be furious with them. They’ll have to spend their time hill walking and doing a bit of fishing for tiddlers in a small burn.

While out walking by the river they meet a strange girl, Neill is impressed by her as she’s able to swim in the river.  It turns out that she’s also spending the school holidays in the area. Her name is Shona and she’s a bit of a wild one, she seems to think that rules are made to be broken.

I enjoyed the setting but as the youngsters had fishing competitions I did wonder about the amount of young fish that they were catching, there was going to be a serious lack of fish in the future in that river! It’s changed times in Scottish rivers now as you have to put anything you catch back in.

I had quite a few of the books in this series when I was a youngster but my mother gave them away when she decided I had grown out of them. Annoyingly they are now quite difficult to obtain and so are quite expensive when they do turn up.