This book ends where it began – at Macpherson's Badenoch estate at Belleville (now Balavil, just outside the town of Kingussie). In his elegy for Seumas Bàn, Duncan MacKay reflects on the grandeur of Macpherson's Highland home and the impossibility of capturing ‘The wonders he wrought’ through his long and varied literary and political career. As MacKay suggests, there is a certain ‘madness’ in trying to make sense of how a young, Gaelic-speaking Highlander like Macpherson could rise from relatively modest beginnings as the son of an impecunious tacksman, and on the fringes of the Clan social elite, to become a writer of world renown and a politician of power and wealth, spending his final years in the late Palladian mansion designed by Robert Adam. But all this and more can be said about James Macpherson, and this book, we hope, has added a further dimension to this story: that in addition to the literary achievement and subsequent controversy of Ossian, we need to also consider Macpherson as an Enlightenment historian and intellectual.

Macpherson's return to the Highlands in the 1780s as a successful writer, politician and man of empire indicates how important it is to understand him as a proud Gael. For several years before he built Belleville, Macpherson had campaigned for the return of the forfeited Clan Macpherson estates to the current Chief, Duncan of the Kiln. Apparently declining the lands himself, Macpherson's powers of political persuasion at Westminster were decisive in restoring the Cluny estate to Colonel Duncan in 1784.