This chronological account of Scalan, a small clandestine community set up for the training of Catholic priests when the Catholic religion was illegal, focuses on the personalities who shaped the community's life and character. The text shows how the experience of this small community encapsulates a whole range if issues, secular, and religious, relating the 18th-century Scotland, including mainstream education, syllabi and libraries; domestic, agricultural and architectural conditions; the famines of the 1770s and 1780s; tensions between the Highland and Lowland church; the penal laws, and late 18th-century developments of concepts of rights, use of law and freedom of conscience.