Dun Cow Rib

John Lister-Kaye

Description

John Lister-Kaye has spent a lifetime exploring, protecting and celebrating the British landscape and its creatures. His memoir The Dun Cow Rib is the story of a boy's awakening to the wonders of the natural world. Lister-Kaye's joyous childhood holidays - spent scrambling through hedges and ditches after birds and small beasts, keeping pigeons in the loft and tracking foxes around the edge of the garden - were the perfect apprenticeship for his two lifelong passions: exploring the wonders of nature, and writing about them. Threaded through his adventures - from moving to the Scottish Highlands to work with Gavin Maxwell, to founding the famous Aigas Field Centre - is an elegy to his remarkable mother, and a wise and affectionate celebration of Britain's natural landscape.

Sujets

• Sciences et techniques

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 17 août 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786891464
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Sir John Lister-Kaye is one of Britain's best-known naturalists and conservationists. He is the author of ten books on wildlife and the environment and has lectured all over the world. He has served prominently in the RSPB, the Nature Conservancy Council, Scottish Natural Heritage and the Scottish Wildlife Trust. In 2002 he was awarded an OBE for services to nature conservation. In 2016 he was awarded the Royal Scottish Geographical Society's Geddes Medal for services to the environment. He lives with his wife and family among the mountains of the Scottish Highlands, where he runs the world famous Aigas Field Centre. His book Gods of the Morning won the inaugural Richard Jefferies Prize.
Also by John Lister-Kaye
The White Island (1972)
The Seeing Eye (1979)
Seal Cull (1979)
Ill Fares the Land (1994)
One for Sorrow (1994)
Song of the Rolling Earth (2003)
Nature’s Child (2004)
At the Water’s Edge (2010)
Gods of the Morning (2015)

Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © John Lister-Kaye, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Extract from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition , edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass. Reprinted by permission of The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Excerpts from The Ring of Bright Water trilogy (UK, Viking, 2000) reprinted by permission of The Marsh Agency Ltd on behalf of Gavin Maxwell.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 147 1 e ISBN 978 1 78689 146 4
Typeset in Dante MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
For my mother
τροϕεῖα
‘A boy’s will is the wind’s will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.’
My Lost Youth , Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82)
‘If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.’
Part One: Life, VI , Emily Dickinson (1830–86)
Contents
Foreword: The Deep Heart’s Core
1. Wildcats and wilderness
2. Death of a dog
3. The Manor House
4. The Dun Cow
5. Ye hunter’s badge
6. Rheumatic fever
7. Hearts and minds
8. Hampton House
9. London
10. Bartonfield
11. The dragon’s den
12. The pain of injustice
13. Summer and the Arabian Nights
14. ‘All my holy mountain’
15. An innocence exposed
16. Hill Brow
17. ‘Upon thy belly shalt thou go’
18. Dark shadows, bright horizons
19. Rock of ages
20. The Pheasantry badgers
21. Ring of Bright Water
22. ‘Future plans for this island’
23. Great hopes, dire straits
24. Paradise lost and found
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Foreword
The Deep Heart’s Core
Years ago I built a hut overlooking a pond – a small loch or ‘lochan’ in Highland parlance – where, like Thoreau at Walden, I go to write or just bare myself to the effervescent mysteries of nature and life. It’s called the Illicit Still, named by my children because for years I kept a bottle of whisky locked away from their prying teenage eyes. It has a lumberjack’s oil drum stove, some rough and ready bunks, an old sofa, a table and chairs – just about everything serious contemplation requires. It has become a treasured centre of separateness, a place to muse, an escape.
Sheets of wind and light cruising the surface of the loch are there to distract me, and flights of mallard come streaming past to land squabbling in the marsh. On looping wings a heron often shoulders in to stalk leggily through the shallows, or house martins and swallows skim through like fighter jets, hawking flies across the cloud-brimming surface.
Occasionally a stream of bubbles grabs my eye and the quizzical mask of an otter peers from among the water lilies; or, ballerina en pointe , a roe doe tiptoes down to drink, and, every once in a while, an osprey crash-dives right in front of the hut. I jump up, concentration shattered like a brick through a window, to watch it lift off again with a brown trout writhing in its long, black talons – death and glory intertwined, the death of necessity and the glory of life eternal. My neck cranes to catch the last silhouetted image as it levers out of sight above the trees. I catch my breath. It’s a drama I have witnessed hundreds of times, but I still emerge swaying, dazzled, blanked, my work suddenly lost and meaningless. Such stark, irrepressible images have been etching themselves into my soul for more years than I care to remember.
I was there recently, supposed to be roughing out an article on Scottish wildcats. A lazy June afternoon of bright, backlit cumulus and sun shafts burning through the vitreous brilliance of spring leaf, dressing the birches and willows as precious gifts. Our spring has kept us on tenterhooks this year, it arrived, fled and came again, twice hijacked by a relentless northeasterly from somewhere above Russia. In May I lit the log stove in sunshine as sharp as chilled vodka. And it was there, in this vibrant corner of our little Highland world, emerging from the cold sun shimmer on the loch, that a familiar notion came rollicking in as it has done many times before. Yet this time it was strangely different, punching in with power and pizzazz, the way that a sun-burst spotlights something that you’d really never noticed before and forces you to look again.
It wasn’t exactly a surprise. It was a notion that had been there long enough, decades in fact, loitering, like something I’d been meaning to do for ages but kept forgetting. So I never pursued it. But the seed was set; as the years passed, slowly and silently it grew, becoming something altogether rounder and fatter than just a fanciful notion – yes, pressing and personal – more like a hunger, that signal shift from an ache to a pain, but much more urgent, refusing to go away, until I could ignore it no longer.
For forty years now, I have run a field studies centre from my home at Aigas, in Strathglass, one of northern Scotland’s wildest glens. Folk come from all over the world to learn about the ancient natural and cultural history of the Highlands and Islands. Our environmental education work for local schools serves thousands of youngsters every year, helping them to value and enjoy nature as well as grasp the essential ecological processes for human survival. It has never palled. I still get a buzz from the lectures reeled out by our dedicated young staff, or from our visitors raving about the acrobatics of the pine martens they watched from a hide last night. Seeing youngsters pond dipping for newts and dragonfly larvae in the shallows always makes me smile. It spins me back – back to the story of my own, not-so-lost-and-forgotten childhood all those decades ago.
It was Gavin Maxwell – one of Britain’s most celebrated non-fiction writers of the ’60s – who brought me, still in my twenties, to the Highlands of Scotland, a land so very different from the rest of Britain. In 1969 I headed north to work with him on a rocky lighthouse island in the straits between the Isle of Skye and the mainland – it could not have been a more extreme shift from my own English pastoral background and my unhappy job on the heavily polluted coastline of industrial South Wales.
The Highlands was a shock, a shock of joy and freedom, the heady thrill of escape, the tang of fresher air, new rock beneath my feet and the surging wave of the spirit. It was a rebirth, a release wholly intoxicating. I felt alive again for the first time since childhood. But such elation would be disastrously short-lived. When Gavin suddenly and unexpectedly died that September it seemed that my entire world had crashed in ruins around me. I was out of a job and a home. But the drug that is the magic of the Highlands had curved deep like the osprey’s talons, and was not about to let go. So I elected to stay and try to make a go of being a naturalist and a writer, to put down roots and find a home here – a tough call, but one I have never regretted.
On a crisp January day a few years later I discovered Aigas, an unloved, abandoned and faintly ridiculous Victorian mansion, all battlements, cannon spouts and spiky candle-snuffered turrets, arrestingly sited on a hillside overlooking the River Beauly – and condemned, within a month of being torn down, totally demolished. The roof leaked where thieves had ripped out the leadwork, windows were broken and plaster ceilings had come crashing down. When I first entered the house, snow had piled in through collapsed skylights and blanketed the hall floor. A car was parked outside, the front door wide open. I followed yeti-footprints through the snow and up the main staircase, on up a spiral stair and out onto the roof with no idea of whom or what I might find. A man in huge boots was standing there with a clipboard, assessing the scrap value of the building before demolition. ‘Who are you?’ he challenged. ‘I’m a prospective buyer,’ I said. The words just tumbled out. But it was a half-truth, and not the first time such a thought had entered my head. I had long nurtured the idea of starting a field studies centre somewhere. This time it had the ring of truth.
A sleepless night. The Victorian building wasn’t even a hundred years old. I loved its wild woods and fields; the tangle of its long-forsaken gardens and its shimmering loch tucked into a fold in the hills all seemed to be calling out to me. Its position overlooking the glen was magnificent and, besides, I’d seen swifts’ nests in the tower and a roe deer had frolicked away into the rhododendrons as I departed down the drive.
I had no idea what it would cost to restore the house and grounds or how to set about it, and if anyone had given me even the sniff of a