Ghillie Basan and her husband decided to leave their home in Edinburgh and set up in a remote hillside cottage at the foot of the Cairngorms. Aiming to restore the cottage and build photographic studios out of the barns, the pair are constantly thwarted by the weather—bold, dramatic, and sometimes treacherous. But the beauty of the landscape almost compensates for the bleakness of such an existence, and the story is peppered with tales of whisky-breathed farmers, boiler engineers with a penchant for dressing in cowboy suits, the birth and death of lambs, the night skies and the northern lights, mothers-in-law arriving in high heels, getting stuck in snow drifts, and finally, two babies.