Overview

In this memoir of place, memory and motion, Linda Cracknell reels in the hidden lives of the women who went before her, crystallising her connection to them and to the sea. When Linda Cracknell's quest to connect herself and her mother to a seafaring family history finds her in a harbour, bracing herself to throw a line, she is struck by the parallel of this physical action to her years-long mission of reeling the past closer to the present, finding her place in a family tree full of mariners and ship-owners, whose lives were defined by the ebb and flow of tides. She travels the Scottish and South-West England coast where many of her ancestors lived by boat and foot; travels on a 121-year-old sailboat; joins a community effort to build and launch a rowing boat on a Highland loch; and lays a family palimpsest in the footsteps of her ancestors across marshes and clifftops. She finds that it is the women in her family who reach across the decades and centuries to catch the line she throws, and begins to understand them more clearly as the linchpins of the coastal communities they lived in, and as the undertow of her own identity. All the while, she is slowly untangling her complex relationship with her own elderly mother. What begins as a quest for legacy takes her well beyond, as she grows to understand something more elemental and unconscious in her pull to the sea, imagining her blood as salt-saturated, sea-marked.

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9781916812505

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Reviews

For Previous Work: ""Cracknell has a rare gift for conjuring experience."" The Great Outdoors Magazine ""Cracknell wonderfully explores the strange durability of the paths that we make in our lives, in our dreams and after our deaths."" Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland and The Old Ways ""A winning combination of memoir, travelogue and literary meditation."" Daily Mail ""Not so much a book to inspire you to do her walks, but to challenge you to enjoy your own walks more. Refreshing, lovely, fun: good walking and good writing."" Sara Maitland, author of From the Forest and A Book of Silence ""A poignant and passionate memoir ... a heartfelt exploration of the mental and physical landscapes that shape our lives."" Gavin Francis, author of Adventures in Human Being ""Like a multicoloured tapestry, memory and imagination are beautifully evoked by the varied landscapes where Linda Cracknell walked ... a joy to read."" Raja Shehadeh, author of Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape ""An object lesson in attentive looking ... wonderfully intense ... a small book, but a mighty one."" Scotsman

Author Information

Linda Cracknell is a writer of narrative nonfiction on the natural world, as well as of fiction and radio scripts. Her first story collection was nominated for Scotland's National Book Awards and the Robin Jenkins Literary Award for environmental writing, and her essay collection Doubling Back: Ten Paths Trodden in Memory, about journeys she took on foot in Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, and Kenya, was serialized for BBC Radio as a Book of the Week. All of Linda's writing is inspired first and foremost by place, and she teaches nature and place writing.

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