With an area of 841 square miles it is the largest island in Scotland and the third largest in the British Isles, after Great Britain and Ireland.

The island is a place of great contrast in both light and land, from the largely flat peatlands of Lewis, where the majority of islanders make their home, to the mountains of Harris.

The Isle of Rust, is a collaboration with a large number of photographs accompanying an essay based on Johnathan Meades’ script for his 2009 film about Scotland, that included Lewis and Harris.

The title of the book not only refers to the countless corroding tractors, cars, weaving sheds and other visible signs of human settlement but also to the colours of the land.

The admirable photographs, ‘photographic sketches’ to use Alex Boyd’s term, show vividly the reds of deergrass and the purple moor grass which make up so much of the moorland.

These magnificent views of the outstanding scenery with extremely rugged land contain within them the grim reminders of abandoned property.

There is an afterword by Dan Hicks, professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford, who opines: “Rust is not ruin. There is in Meades-Boyd some kind of shared attention to the detritus of human life.”

This modestly priced and compelling book in a subtle way leaves the reader to ask whether anything is being done by anyone in authority about the abandoned property (and if not why not?).

Isle of Rust: A Portrait of Lewis and Harris by Alex Boyd (with Jonathan Meades and Dan Hicks). Published by Luath Press, 192pp, £14.99.