A “kind and passionate” author who fell in love with the Highlands has died following a 30-year battle with Multiple Sclerosis.
Emma Wood wrote The Hydro Boys, Notes from the North and Peatbogs, Plagues and Potatoes: How climate change and geology shaped Scotland’s history.
Ms Wood, who has died at the age of 58, was originally from Yorkshire but fell in love with the Highlands during the 1980s after spending her holidays exploring in a van.
In 1987, along with her husband at the time, Paul Woodcraft, she moved to Culrain in Sutherland – a move prompted by their anti-Thatcher political stance and close affinity with Scottish people. She eventually settled in Conon Bridge.
The couple had previously been antique market traders in Norfolk, but after business dried up Ms Wood – a Cambridge history graduate – found more time to write.
Her passion for language also inspired her to become an English tutor for secondary school pupils, and she regularly honed people’s CVs to help them find work, especially those who had English as their second language.
It was during this time she developed her writing, publishing her first book, Notes from the North, in the 1990s. Based on research of English people who had moved to Scotland, the book focused on their perspective on life as incomes amid a period of political turmoil.
But The Hydro Boys was perhaps her most significant piece of work.
It described the history, politics and ecological implications of Scottish hydroelectricity and involved huge amounts of primary research interviewing people who either worked for the hydro, or had connections with people there.
Ms Wood, who had been living with MS for 30 years, and her family travelled to a clinic in Serbia in the summer to undergo stem cell treatment, which was successful.
Her 29-year-old daughter, Jasmine Miller, said that friends and family managed to raise a staggering £16,000 to pay for it by walking, running and cycling 1,000 miles, and that her mother was overwhelmed.
Mrs Miller, also of Conon Bridge, said: “My mother was a really passionate person. She was also really friendly, kind and generous. She was really well liked and had a good knack for getting on with everyone she met in every walk of life.”
Stem cell treatment was a topic which Ms Wood had recently started planning for in a new book, as well as beginning work on a sequel to Peatbogs.
Ms Wood was also a member of the Workers’ Educational Association and helped organise events in the north, while holding talks on historical issues such as the hydro. For the past five years, she also worked as a tutor at the Moniak Mhor creative writing centre, near Beauly.
Away from writing, she also dedicated much of her time to charity work, including fundraising for The Scottish Wildlife Trust, Bumblebee Conservation Trust and Medicine Sans Frontiers.
Ms Wood was also a passionate Leeds United supporter, played the guitar and enjoyed a wide range of music.
She and her daughter also regularly spent time exploring parts of the Highlands including the Hebrides, west coast and Orkney.
Ms Wood was born to parents John and Lucy Wood in on June 14, 1958. She die don October 21.
Her children are Jasmine Murray, of Conon Bridge and stepson Molloy Woodcraft, who lives in London.
