What is an ordinary life worth? A seasoned writer stumbles across an obituary and imagination is sparked. The brief words of memoriam describe a woman who was both extraordinary--eccentric, revered in her field, a renowned expert--but also utterly ordinary. How does a writer, intrigued by all that isn't said, create a story? Capture an unknowable woman and all the secret passions, choices and compromises that make up a life? In Machine Without Horses, Helen Humphreys explores the real life and the imagined internal life of the famous and famously private salmon-fly dresser, Megan Boyd, a craftswoman who worked for sixty years out of a bare-bones cottage in a small village in the north of Scotland.