Ring of Bright Water

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Railing against the way we treat our animals yet keeping a succession of wild animals that are not pets. His books represent – in their psychodramas and their ultraviolence – the dark side of British place-literature. Binding is sound but binding glue is probably a bit brittle due to age so book should be opened and used gently. I wrote the book to understand an obsession I had, and to remember a place I was in love with, and people who were kind to me. We’ve daytime and night-time selves, idle times and feeling-sorry-for-ourselves times, bouts of achievement and bouts of lying on the sofa gazing passively into the goggle-box.

The work is literate, well structured and richly illustrated; it offers a highly appealing picture of a truly spectacular place.I found the prose to be some of the most descriptive I have ever read despite the book being an account of one disaster after another. Two further volumes followed bringing the story full circle telling of the difficult last years and the final abandonment of the settlement. Within weeks of meeting, both were astonished to realise that they had separately written the same poem: bearing witness to near-identical visions of a mysterious rowan.

I can’t have been more than an early teenager, as evidenced by the faint impression of algebra indented in the book’s front cover, which I must have leant on during homework. I was uncomfortable with the very opening paragraph of Chapter 1 — the image of an otter, a wild creature asleep in Maxwell’s cottage. Today, on what would have been her 114 th birthday, let’s shine a light on the woman hidden at the heart of Ring of Bright Water. It documents a time in the study of the natural world, where ethics of ecological study was beginning to change and evolve. Maxwell also published two subsequent works, with further details about the author's obsession with otters and his rather brief life spent on this idyllic landscape one can only dream about.In a parallel universe, I think I would have liked to have sat with a newspaper and a pint at a table in a pub somewhere. But the deaths of the animals in Maxwell’s care, and the way in which he coveted them as pets, is also at odds with our modern attitude to wild creatures. One day after his wedding, during which Maxwell’s former boyfriend served as best man, a devastated Raine left for America. In den 50er Jahren beschließt Gavin Maxwell sich in ein verlassenes Haus an der schottischen Westküste zurückzuziehen.

The trilogy does not include the full text of the latter two volumes, but removes the tangential travel sections which take place outside Scotland. They can’t moderate their own waste energy but animals travel vast distances – and in vast numbers – to do this for all of us.It was a set-up discomfiting to modern sensibilities, though no allegations have ever been made against Maxwell and those who knew him best believe his desire to be around young boys was merely a product of his stunted emotional development. Fate, fame, and fire conspired against this paradise, and it, too, came to an end, though the journey was filled with incident and wonder. I carried the memories of the Maxwell’s descriptions of Scotland’s west coast when I escaped as a youth to the wilds of Shetland, the Outer Hebrides and as far as the Faroes, ending up for weeks aboard small ships on the rollicking storm-ridden Atlantic, counting whales and seabirds. In der übrigen Zeit geht er auf Reisen oder lebt in London, wo er Bücher über seine Reisen schreibt.