Katharine Stewart

Katharine Jeanne Stewart, who has died just 16 months before her 100th birthday, was one of the Highlands' most celebrated authors. A crofting champion, a local historian and a lecturer, she published her last book in 2010 but continued alert and working to the end.

It is hardly surprising she became a writer. Her father, Richard Dark, was a school master at Loretto and a published author, and her mother a teacher of modern languages. The young Katharine Dark read French and Romance Philology at Edinburgh, graduating in 1937 before moving to Paris for a diploma at the Sorbonne. She was still in France and Italy in 1939, skiing and climbing in the Alps and working at Perugia University, and was lucky to get home on one of the last boats at the outbreak of the Second World War.

As a consequence of her academic achievements and her fluent French she was offered a job at Bletchley Park, but turned it down in favour of the Admiralty, where she spent the war years working 24-hour shifts in an underground bunker plotting transatlantic routes for convoys.

After the war she came home to Edinburgh where she met and married Sam Stewart, commencing their married life by running a small hotel at Balerno on the edge of the Pentlands. When their daughter was born in 1947 they determined to try to find a life in farming, something that had been a latent passion for both of them. With a three-year-old at heel they headed north and made the move that would define the rest of her life and career.

The croft they bought at Abriachan, perched 1000 feet above Loch Ness, was 40 acres of arable and another 60 of rough grazing with shared out grazing on the moor. In the middle of it all stood a solid little croft house built in 1911 in the traditional style with a small steading. It possessed neither sanitation, piped water, nor electricity.

Of the dozens of books by crofters and about crofting published in the 20th century, none is as enduring and celebrated as A Croft in the Hills, first published by Oliver and Boyd in 1960 with a foreword by her friend Neil Gunn, and still selling consistently throughout Scotland.

At first the book was seen to be a couthie tale of crofting life, but its prevailing honesty delivered in plain, unfussy prose, coupled with the author's palpable character of self-deprecating humility and positivity and its total absence of hyperbole, gave it the ring of authenticity that was to hallmark it as a reliable and important record of a fast-vanishing way of life.

The family had moved into a world now almost entirely lost. "The women all wore black," she observed, "and most were Gaelic speakers." Arable crops and hay cocks were tended by hand, oats stooked and carried on bowed backs. Little grey Ferguson tractors were the fullest extent of mechanisation; hens, working ponies and house cows were the norm. Katharine could see that modernity was encroaching far faster than such isolated communities could possibly adapt and they would soon be gone. For that reason she took over the village hall and created one of the first croft museums in the Highlands. She also became passionate about environmental education and issues long before they became fashionable. Then she took over as postmistress – placing herself at the heart of the community.

After her husband died in 1979, other books followed: Crofts and Crofting (1980); A Garden in the Hills (1995); A School in the Hills (1996); The Post in the Hills (1997); The Crofting Way (1999); Abriachan, The Story of an Upland Community (2000); The Story of Loch Ness (2005); Women of the Highlands (2006); Cattle on a Thousand Hills (2010); as well as regular newspaper columns and magazine articles, short stories for radio and a series of books for children. Not content with this burgeoning career, she took a teacher training course so she could teach French at Inverness and Glenurquart high schools.

In 1976 I opened Aigas Field Centre, only 10 miles from Abriachan. We badly needed a lecturer on crofting and local history. Not only was she able to work with us, but for many years we were also able to take groups of students to her expanding croft museum. Our happy association lasted for more than 35 years. She was our longest serving lecturer and always hugely popular. She spoke with engaging charm and humour and her lively intellect was made the more absorbing by her utterly artless modesty.

Her diligence brought her literary recognition and awards for her support for Gaelic culture and folklore from the Saltire Society and the Inverness Field Club. In 2003 she received the British Empire Medal for her community work at Abriachan as postmistress, local librarian, election officer and keeper of the flame during the sad years of depopulation.

In the Introduction to A Croft in the Hills, she wrote: "Why record the simple fact that three people took to the hills and lived quiet lives under a wide sky, among rock and heather, working with the crops and beasts they could manage to raise there, in order to feed and clothe themselves. There is certainly little room for dramatic highlights in this story of ours. But we heard the singing and we found the gold."

Her words and her unquestioning friendship touched the lives of tens of thousands, perhaps millions of people; she would be sorely embarrassed to be told she had become the dramatic highlight of her own remarkable story.

Katharine Stewart leaves a daughter, grandchildren and great grand-children. She ended her long, full life at Abbeyfield House in Inverness.