David Toulmin's first collection of short stories, Hard Shining Corn, published in 1972, immediately established him as a Scottish writer in the same tradition as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and it could be said that Toulmin has done for Buchan what Grassic Gibbon did for the Mearns, in the sense that Buchan is now sometimes referred to as 'Toulmin country'.

There is vitality, humour and sensitivity in all David Toulmin's short stories, as he graphically describes the lives of the fee'd cottar folk and the farmers; their joys and sorrows, life and death, and the ever-changing seasons of the farming year.

Toulmin's recollections of farm life in his native Buchan were gathered from forty-four years working as a farm labourer in that airt, rearing crops and cattle in a harsh and forbidding climate.