Overview

Full Product Details

9780008278373

Table of Contents

Reviews

An extract from Life at Red River Croft: The great complexity of life and landform on the croft and surrounding coastal and mountain landscapes create an ever-changing panoply of colour, texture, light and shade. No two days are the same. Flux and motion are constant companions. As autumn progresses these complexities intensify; they become louder and bolder, overwriting the golden calm usually associated with September until the days themselves lose their gentle gold and silver fragility. A week or two after the equinox autumn spreads down from the hills and in from the sea. Large swathes of hill country, once so richly purples, darken. There are shadows on the hills like spilled tea. In the once-green flashes where bog cotton and moor grasses dances, there is a dry crispness, as if everything was made from tattered strips of parcel paper. But even these colours fade - rust to grey, cocoa to flax. More of the detailed shapes and forms of the fields and riverbanks are visible. Lumps and bumps appear everywhere; ditches and steps are revealed; the remains of houses, old fence lines, boulders and tree stumps emerge. What Cathma had disclosed through our growing friendship was emerging in the physical characteristics of the valley as vegetation slowly began to die back. In the low golden light of our very first autumn, the land slowly began to disclose its secrets. In subsequent years, secrets turned into stories.

An extract from Life at Red River Croft: The great complexity of life and landform on the croft and surrounding coastal and mountain landscapes create an ever-changing panoply of colour, texture, light and shade. No two days are the same. Flux and motion are constant companions. As autumn progresses these complexities intensify; they become louder and bolder, overwriting the golden calm usually associated with September until the days themselves lose their gentle gold and silver fragility. A week or two after the equinox autumn spreads down from the hills and in from the sea. Large swathes of hill country, once so richly purples, darken. There are shadows on the hills like spilled tea. In the once-green flashes where bog cotton and moor grasses dances, there is a dry crispness, as if everything was made from tattered strips of parcel paper. But even these colours fade - rust to grey, cocoa to flax. More of the detailed shapes and forms of the fields and riverbanks are visible. Lumps and bumps appear everywhere; ditches and steps are revealed; the remains of houses, old fence lines, boulders and tree stumps emerge. What Cathma had disclosed through our growing friendship was emerging in the physical characteristics of the valley as vegetation slowly began to die back. In the low golden light of our very first autumn, the land slowly began to disclose its secrets. In subsequent years, secrets turned into stories.

'Windswept isn’t only enjoyable and enriching, it contains some of the most striking descriptions of nature I’ve ever read … An instant classic of British nature-writing’ Horatio Clare, Sunday Telegraph ‘Let’s face it, few of us are likely to experience life as Worsley does: remote, wild, elemental, between mountains and sky. But we get a tantalising glimpse of this other world through these pages. It’s like breathing in pure, invigorating Scottish Highlands air and it is a very welcome interlude… Worsley is the Real Deal’ Daily Mail ‘Windswept is a wonderful work, prose-painted in bold, bright strokes like a Scottish Colourist's canvas. It is a story of learning to keep time differently, in one of the most spectacular landscapes in Britain. Annie Worsley has written a gorgeous almanac or year-book in which the minutes, hours and months are marked not by the tick of clock-hands but weather-fronts, bird migrations and plant-patterns of growth and decay’ Robert Macfarlane ‘Woven with the wisdom of both scientist and poet, Windswept is a beautiful account of life and landscape in one of the UK's most remote and dramatic enclaves. I was transported with every reading, left with gale-ruffled hair and a salty tang on my tongue’ Lee Schofield author of Wild Fell ‘A shaft of golden stormlight, a blast of pure Highland air, Windswept is an exhilarating account of life lived closer to the elements than most of us will ever have the chance to experience’ Melissa Harrison, author of All Among the Barley ‘I have read pages and pages of this wonderful book, swept away by its beauty and understanding, its chromatic brilliance, flickering and surging into colour at every turn, moulded to its mountains and all the subtleties of its winds and skies. Honestly it is a great, great book’ Adam Nicolson, author of Life Between the Tides ‘A compelling, abundantly descriptive portrait of a captivating place’ The Herald

Author Information

Annie O'Garra Worsley is a writer and blogger living in North West Scotland on a small-holding known as a croft. She is also a physical geographer with particular interests in spatial and temporal relationships between people and the natural world. Her doctoral research examined human impacts in the montane rainforests of New Guinea and her more recent work investigated long-term environmental change in the peat bogs, hills and coasts of North West England and the spatial and temporal history of pollution in urban environments. After a career break raising her four children, she returned to full-time academic life in 1999 and was awarded a Personal Chair in Environmental Change in 2009 by Edge Hill University.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available