After graduating she married Ronnie Hedderwick and worked for two years as a travelling art teacher in Mid Argyll (a historic county and registration county of western Scotland), qualifying at Jordanhill College of Education; then they moved to Coll where they lived for ten years, raising their two children Mark and Tammie.
After graduating she married Ronnie Hedderwick on 24 June 1962, and worked for two years as a travelling art teacher in Mid Argyll, qualifying at Jordanhill College of Education. The couple then spent eighteen months working respectively as a dairymaid and a cattleman on a large farm estate at Applecross in Wester Ross; but in 1965, three months after the birth of her first child, Mark Hedderwick, they moved to Coll, where they bought Crossapol, an isolated 19th-century farmhouse at the southern end of the island, with a big Rayburn stove and oil and gas lamps and a well, but neither electricity nor running water nor permanent road access, three miles from the next nearest house, at the end of a mile and a half of white sand beach. There the family lived for ten years, raising their two children Mark and Tammie. Argyll (/ral/; archaically Argyle, Earra-Ghaidheal in modern Gaelic, pronounced [ar.l), sometimes called Argyllshire, is a historic county and registration county of western Scotland. 
