Ralph Peden comes down the Cairn Edward road to spend a summer with his father's Galloway congregation and meets a girl in a lilac sunbonnet in the Long Wood of Larbrax, which settles the theology question for good. Crockett was a Free Church minister who resigned his charge to write full time and produced a book or two a year afterwards. The Galloway is exact and the courtship is conducted almost entirely in dialect. Fifty-four plates after Raeburn and Constable carry the same Lowland light and country gardens the story moves through, from 1787 to 1898.