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Seller's Description:
Diana Brown. Very Good in Very Good jacket. Blue cloth. 179 pages. Photos. Price-clipped dust jacket has a short tear to rear panel. Contents clean and tight.
In September 2008, my wife and I, along with 28 other American Elderhostelers spent 2 1/2 weeks in the home of Sir John Lister-Kaye (1946 - ), Eighth Baronet of that ilk. We were 20 minutes west of Inverness, Scotland, just outside the town of Beuly, farther north than Moscow, but warmed by the Gulf Stream not far from us toward the setting sun. Our base was the House of Aigas, called a Field Centre, the first of its kind in Scotland, a place for people from all over the world to study how environmentalists like Lister-Kaye are restoring the land, plants and animals of North Britain.
Sir John has told the story of the founding of Aigas in his 2003 SONG OF THE ROLLING EARTH: A HIGHLAND ODYSSEY, generally held to be not just his personal masterpiece but also a star in the constellation Environment. Two decades earlier Sir John wrote THE WHITE ISLAND, his first book. It is about a year he spent working on the few acres of the White Island, just off the coast of much larger Skye. He was the junior collaborator of world famous naturalist and author Gavin Maxwell. Together they would write a book cataloging the wild life of Britain. At the same time they would create on the White Island a zoo for tamed birds and animals of Scotland and elsewhere.
Gavin Maxwell, a prodigious smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer and died suddenly in September 1969. Both the book project and the zoo were abandoned. Lister-Kaye then set out on the journey which led him to the 1977 founding of Aigas Field Centre.
What a year John Lister-Kaye and a couple of associates had on their island, as Gavin Maxwell grew increasingly ill! The waters teemed with basking sharks, two kinds of seals, herring and many, many other fish. In the air were gulls, migrating birds from the arctic and the infamous stinging midges of northern Scotland. Most of the author's days went to designing and building the pens for the projected zoo. Among his animal companions were two tame African otters made famous in the works of Gavin Maxwell, as well as Owl, four young foxes who managed to escape their pens and eventually had to be hunted and exterminated, herons and other creatures lovingly described.
Sir John is a craftsman of language. What reader can henceforth think of a heron as anything other than "a glorified fish spear with wings?" (Ch. 10: Gulls and Gliders, p. 147). I began reading Lister-Kaye from a sense of gratitude to my Highlands host. I stayed with him through four books (so far) because he brings Scotland to life as few others since Sir Walter Scott. -OOO-
