An Old Song Ending is set in the period 1970 to 2000, and is about Dr Ranald Macdonald, an aristocratic scholar of the Gaelic language, and folklore collector, who has an estate on a Hebridean island and spends most of his time transcribing the hundreds of tape recordings he has made of Gaelic singers and storytellers. His wife Rosemary, a Canadian, is an artist who is collaborating with him on an illustrated book on the history, flora and fauna of the estate, called Leabhar nan Ros (The Book of the Peninsula). The Macdonalds have no children, and Dr Macdonald and Rosemary undertake the long journey to Tierra del Fuego, ‘The Land of Fire,’ in search of an heir, since an ancestor, who had been studying for the priesthood in Spain, left the seminary in mysterious circumstances and went to work on a Tierra del Fuego estancia for Alexander MacLennan, an actual historical figure known as the ‘Red Pig’ who massacred the Ona Indians because they interfered with sheep farming.

An Old Song Ending deals with the paranormal, which features so prominently in the songs and stories which Dr Macdonald has collected. But there is a more modern and sinister theme in that the heir he locates becomes involved with a woman who professes to have paranormal powers. The novel is also about the loss of status of the landed class.