Newspaper Article

John McNeillie; As writer Ian Niall, he excelled in natural history and captured the rawness of countryside life

McNeillie, Andrew

2002

Overview

A fourth novel, No Resting Place, proved too violent for his original publisher, Putnam & Co, but it was seized on eagerly by Heinemann and appeared in 1948, as a first novel by [Ian Niall]. McNeillie's second debut proved no less remarkable than his first. Set in southwest Scotland, though the location isn't precisely disclosed, No Resting Place relates the fortunes, feuds, and misfortunes of the Kyle family, a tribe of \"tinkers\". The celebrated documentarist, Paul Rotha, took the book up and filmed a treatment of it, in County Wicklow, with Michael Gough in the key role, and a cast of Abbey Players, including Jack MacGowran, Noel Purcell, Eithne Dunne, Maureen O'Sullivan, and Diana Campbell in support. Some 18 months after his birth, during an outbreak of meningitis, in which his younger sister died, the infant McNeillie was sent to Galloway to be cared for by his paternal grandparents, [John Kincaid McNeillie] and Elizabeth McNeillie, then tenants of the Vans Agnew family of Barnbarroch, at North Clutag farm. It was in this horse-drawn time- warp, closer to the world of Robert Burns both in speech and custom than to the twentieth century, that McNeillie spent his childhood. It was a world and time he would never escape, an Eden that formed the backdrop to almost all he wrote, and almost all he cared dearly to talk about.

• Publisher: Gannett Media Corp
• Subject: McNeillie, John Kincaid / Niall, Ian