06/08/2026
Great idea.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/192vDBAgev/
By the middle of the 19th century, Scotland had one of the highest literacy rates in Europe. This was not an accident. It was the direct result of a parish school system established in 1696, which required every parish in Scotland to maintain a school and a schoolmaster. The ambition was religious — the Church of Scotland wanted every person capable of reading scripture for themselves — but the outcome was broader than anyone had planned.
Among the communities shaped most quietly by this were shepherds. Their work placed them alone on hillsides for hours, sometimes entire days, with no company except dogs and livestock. For men who had been taught to read, that silence became an opportunity rather than a burden. Small books — psalters, portions of scripture, collected sermons, later poetry and natural history — were carried in jacket pockets worn smooth from use. These were not decorative. The books were handled constantly, read in pieces during resting hours, memorised in parts, and discussed on the rare occasions when shepherds met.
The pocket psalter in particular was so common among Highland and Lowland shepherds that several accounts from ministers and travellers in the early 19th century remark on finding men on remote hillsides who could recite long passages from memory and discuss theological questions with precision. The books themselves were built for this life — small enough to fit in a working pocket, printed in dense type, often bound in stiff leather that could survive weather and repeated handling.
This habit of reading on the hill was not a performance of piety. It was what literate men did when they had time and quiet. The solitude that might have been empty became, for many, genuinely rich. When those shepherds came home in the evening, they brought something back with them beyond what the day's work had asked for.
