The autobiography of Catherine Wells (nee Ross), daughter of a ploughman, born in Easter Ross in Scotland in 1914, who left school at 14 and spent most of her life in Dingwall and the Black Isle and who published her collected poems and short stories at the age of 86. The autobiography of Catherine Wells (nee Ross), an extraordinary woman. At the age of 86, with the help of Ross-shire Voluntary action, she published her collected poems and short stories and raised over UKL1000 for various cancer charities by sales around her home in Dingwall, Ross-shire, in Scotland. Growing up in a ploughman's family during the First World War and in the 1920s, she attended a number of schools around the Black Isle and Easter Ross. She left school at fourteen, but even at that stage she was keen on writing and had a great imagination. For the next seventy years, work, marriage, the Second World War and a near fatal injury to her husband, raising a family, and maintaining a wide circle of friends and relatives occupied her fully. She continued to write for pleasure and primarily for herself but still published numerous letters to the press, poems and short stories in a variety of collections and anthologies. Finally, in her eighties, she responded to some prompting from her younger daughter to collect a lifetime's material together for a publication, and Cathy's Collection for Cancer was the result. Subsequently, an extended visit to Australia resulted in Catherine Wells in the Footsteps of Burke and Wills: My Australian Adventures, and though this did not appear as a separate publication, elements of it found their way into the local press to the delight of her readers. In 2003 her daughter and son-in-law persuaded her it was about time she told her own story with a view to launching the biography on her 90th birthday in June 2004.