Kirjahaku

Ardkinglas is a 45,000-acre estate in Cairndow, a beautiful area of the Highlands at the head of Loch Fyne. Sir Andrew Noble, the author’s great-grandfather, bought the estate in 1905 and his family have run it ever since. The estate has become famous throughout Scotland and beyond for the Loch Fyne Oyster Bar, founded by Christina Noble’s brother, Johnny. This book is not just about the Nobles but the community Ardkinglas has become, the people who make and have made it and the story of how they have lived and worked. This is not a nostalgic memoir of the Noble family, a Downton Abbey saga of life in ‘The Big House’. Christina Noble’s aim is to try to capture the feeling of what it was like for all of the community, employers and employees, to live on a classic Highland estate during the twentieth century. It is a vivid tale, built up from letters and household diaries covering some periods and estate journals covering others. More recent decades are coloured by the personal memories of the author and many others who lived there, whose voices have been carefully recorded for this book. Ardkinglas: The Biography of a Highland Estate is illustrated throughout with pictures of the people who called Ardkinglas home, the places they knew and the activities which occupied them. As their stories are told, some key questions emerge. A Highland estate in the modern world: what is it for? What keeps it going? Who gets the benefit?

Christina Noble's story is one of bravery and resilience in the face of deprivation and abuse on a scale that most would find unimaginable. Her childhood in the Dublin slums barely merits the name: after the early death of her mother, her family was split apart, her alcoholic father unable to care for his children. Christina was sexually abused and later escaped from an orphanage to live in poverty on the streets of Dublin. Whilst in an abusive marriage, in a dream she found the will to fight. Christina's hope lay in a determination to work among the bui doi, the street children of Vietnam, and this was the starting point for the most extraordinary part of her story. Within two years of arriving in Ho Chi Minh City she had opened a medical and social centre and achieved worldwide fame. Outspoken, often angry, yet profoundly moving, Bridge Across my Sorrows is one of the most inspirational stories ever told.

In 1989, driven by a dream and the memory of her own past, Christina Noble travelled 6,000 miles to Vietnam, a country of great beauty where the terrible legacy of war is still being felt. Against extraordinary odds she opened the Christina Noble Children's Foundation, providing medical aid and schooling. Through this foundation the street children could find safety and new beginnings under the protection of 'Mama Tina'. In this vivid and moving book Christina's story continues with the amazing tale of what she and her foundation have achieved. She takes us from the streets of Saigon to the children's prisons of Mongolia. Finally she returns to Dublin where she is greeted by the president of Ireland herself. A staunch campaigner for children's rights, for Christina there are no frontiers, only a world filled with children reaching out.