The Road to the Isles a daring Commando attack during Operation Roast in the Spring 1945 offensive in Italy, and also at the start of construction on Toronto's first subway line, under Yonge Street, in 1949. The lyrics mention first the hills of the Isle of Skye (whose memory is calling the traveller west); then the successive locations he will pass on the way across the Western Highlands and Inner and Outer Hebrides. The locations mentioned are (in this order): the Cuillin Hills (on the Isle of Skye), Tummel and Loch Rannoch(both in Perthshire), Lochaber (a district in the western Scottish Highlands), Shiel (east of
In the Faëry Hills second-hand language" at some points, derivative of Wagner and Debussy, although "there is still a great deal which is wholly individual". "The Musical Times" praised "a mystic glamour that could not fail to be felt by the listener" although the coherence of the piece "was not instantly discernible". The work has, at 2015, been recorded three times for CD, by the Ulster Orchestra conducted by Bryden Thomson (1985), the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and David Lloyd-Jones (1997), and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and Vernon Handley (2006). In the Faëry Hills In the Faëry Hills, to which the composer gave the