Windswept

A beautiful memoir of what it means to live in the rugged, awe-inspiring Scotland Highlands. Annie Worsley is a Professor of Environmental Change. A few years ago, she took the plunge and moved to the remote North West Highlands of Scotland. It is a land of unquenchable spirit and severe wildness. In the Highlands, life is ruled by the great elemental forces – light, wind and water hold sway over how land forms, where the sea sits, and what grows. It also dictates how its people live. Annie returns to prehistory to tell the epic story of how Scotland’s valleys were carved by glaciers, how rivers scythed paths through the mountains, how the earliest people found a way of life in the Highlands – and how she then found a home there millennia later. This is a vibrant memoir that will illuminate the beauty and force of the wild Scottish Highlands; Worsley’s paean to a beloved place, one richer with colour, sound and life than perhaps anywhere else in the UK.

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.

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.