I've spent a good part of my life exploring the outdoor world for the national parks service, for books, newspapers, and magazines. Each trip down a river, across a lake, up a mountain, or through a desert or swampland reminds me, as Wallace Stegner once suggested, that wilderness is as much a state of mind as it is a complex set of ecosystems. Wilderness is the geography of hope. Without the hope that comes with the wilderness experience, we would be lost. In my explorations, I've come to appreciate how much we still do not know about the natural world and how much hope there is that we can get through the challenges that climate change brings.
This is a book about language and how we have lost so many words that clarify our understanding of the natural world.For my book Swamplands, I borrowed from MacFarlane’s glossary of words describing peat. Yarpha, for example, is an Orkney word for peat that is full of fibers and roots, Water-sick is a Cumbrian word for peatlands that are saturated with water. The book reminds us that we need to be more explicit in describing nature in all of its manifestations. It is also addictive. You can start from the middle and read to the beginning or to the end, It never fails
From the bestselling author of UNDERLAND, THE OLD WAYS and THE LOST WORDS
'Few books give such a sense of enchantment; it is a book to give to many, and to return to repeatedly' Independent
Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land,…
When I stepped off the ferry onto Mainland Orkney, a piece of myself I never knew was missing suddenly slotted into place. Orkney became my geographic soulmate and I knew that The Darkest Court trilogy’s final book—and final battle—would have to take place there. Whenever I find myself longing to return, I pick up one of these books and throw myself back into the stories and histories that caught hold of my imagination all those years ago. I hope they stir your sense of magic and wonder the same way.
Orkney is home to more historical sites and monuments than I can name, but for those of us who celebrate the Winter Solstice, Maeshowe is a critical pilgrimage site. This official souvenir guide to Maeshowe and other Neolithic sites is a perfect companion to the stories and historical facts woven by tour guides. It also doesn’t hurt that you can pull it out, stare at the beautiful photographs, and imagine yourself back in Orkney every time you long to return.
Nature has been a source of play, exploration, community, and solace for me since I was very young – as an adult, I find myself fascinated and alarmed by our species’ relations with the living world. Nature writing gives me a way of bringing my attention to this relationship and exploring it in a very close way. I often think of that well-worn phrase: We cannot protect what we do not love; we cannot love what we do not know. Literature, it seems to me, offers one route to better knowing and loving the world.
I must have read this book hundreds of times! I teach it to creative writing students every year, and every year, I find some new connection or detail I hadn’t noticed before.
Jamie has such an unusual, peculiarly alive connection to her surroundings. She describes landscapes that are local to her – a curious combination of domestic and wild spaces and a beautifully subtle mode of narration.
It's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Award-winning poet Kathleen Jamie has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary writer.
Whether she is following the call of a peregrine in the hills above her home in Fife, sailing into a dark winter solstice on the Orkney islands, or pacing around the carcass of a whale on a rain-swept Hebridean beach, she creates a subtle and modern…
My motto is: we are techno-humans. Whatever nature or God created, we re-created. We move in cars, chat via the Internet, and eat industrial food. Technologies shape our bodies, identities, even imagination. That’s why the energy transition fascinates me. We propose to rip out and replace the technological foundations of the global economy. No less than the data revolution, energy transitions are about human re-invention. So, what kinds of human futures are we engineering? And can we design energy futures that make human futures better, more inclusive, more just? Figuring that out is my job as Director of the Center for Energy & Society at Arizona State University.
At their best, anthropologists open up for readers the infinite variety of what it means to be human. Laura Watts is the best. More than just an incisive cultural analyst, Watts is a skilled poet and storyteller. Her book about renewable energy innovation in the Orkney Islands takes us, literally and figuratively, to the end of the world. We learn what it means to live in a world wrought by energy technologies. We walk among all different kinds of people who have the imagination and the gumption to try to re-imagine and re-energize that world in radically new ways. And along the way, we begin to see how all of those people come together, in one place, in odd collaborations, to make futures for the rest of us.
Making local energy futures, from marine energy to hydrogen fuel, at the edge of the world.
The islands of Orkney, off the northern coast of Scotland, are closer to the Arctic Circle than to London. Surrounded by fierce seas and shrouded by clouds and mist, the islands seem to mark the edge of the known world. And yet they are a center for energy technology innovation, from marine energy to hydrogen fuel networks, attracting the interest of venture capitalists and local communities. In this book, Laura Watts tells a story of making energy futures at the edge of the world.…
I have always loved fairy tales, myths, and fantasy, having developed a vivid imagination during childhood because we lived far from friends. When I began studying French, I discovered a love for medieval legends such as Tristan et Yseult. During trips to France, I explored troglodyte caves of the Loire Valley and prehistoric grottos, such as La Grotte de Lascaux. The more I researched legends and myths, the more my fantasy world of paranormal romance and shapeshifting warriors evolved.
Magnar is the Leader of the Wolves of Clan Sutherland, a band of
shapeshifting warriors who fight to defend their kingdom in the Orkney Isles of
medieval Scotland. This tale of the sizzling paranormal romance between Magnar
and Elspeth is filled with Fae magic, Celtic legend, and men who transform into
fierce, savage wolves.
I love chivalrous tales of knights defending their Lady, and shapeshifting warriors who struggle to tame the beast within. A fiery, passionate, and intense romance with an unlikely hero, just like the French Romanticism that I adore!
Known as the Barbarian, Magnar MacAlpin is a fierce ruler for those under his command. As leader of the Wolves of Clan Sutherland, his loyalty and obedience lies with Scotland. However, the king's last demand is not something Magnar will tolerate. After Elspeth Gunn's brother the Chieftain of Castle Steinn is murdered, she flees with her nephew, and finds safety amongst a band of men who are rumored to be part wolf. When the king forces her to wed a heathen Northman, she fears losing her heart and soul not only to the man, but the beast as well. In…
I live on the Atlantic in Portugal, where a member of my women’s group is Victoria Whitworth’s sister. She mentioned Swimming with Seals, when one evening, our group met for a cold water swim, the backdrop to Victoria’s unusual memoir.
Flowing from one topic to the next with the ease of the accomplished writer that she is – incorporating her Facebook posts on the weather, tides, and temperature – she chronicles her daily cold water swims off Orkney Island, her encounters with seals, orca, and birdlife, while narrating her personal story, juxtaposed with historical anecdotes, myth, and folklore.
I’m not a fan of cold water swimming, but I loved reading about it, especially as an allegory for embracing life’s ebbs and flows.
A book about intense physical and personal experience, narrating how Victoria Whitworth began swimming in the cold waters of Orkney as a means of escaping a failing marriage.
This is a memoir of intense physical and personal experience, exploring how swimming with seals, gulls and orcas in the cold waters off Orkney provided Victoria Whitworth with an escape from a series of life crises and helped her to deal with intolerable loss.
It is also a treasure chest of history and myth, local folklore and archaeological clues, giving us tantalising glimpses of Pictish and Viking men and women, those people…
I grew up on a Viking battlefield, in an English coastal village once raided then occupied by Norsemen. We had ancestors who lived on the Isle of Orkney, and in the Celtic south-west. From a young age, I read Norse and Celtic myths and legends, and went on to study history and philosophy – and then became an author. Now, I have family in Sweden and grandchildren of Ash and Elm. My list offers pure escapism, but also shows how our ancestors lived in an age with no electricity or compulsory schooling. It’s the wonderful combination of the ‘other world’ myths and history that I believe makes us who we are.
This beautifully written novel showed me what life must have been like on the island of Orkney in the Dark Ages and trapped me in a gripping, almost ‘other-world’ coming-of-age tale.
Full of fascinating descriptive details and wise human insight, the story tells of the developing, sometimes tender, sometimes aggressive, relationship between two homeless adolescents in a very dangerous adult environment.
When I stepped off the ferry onto Mainland Orkney, a piece of myself I never knew was missing suddenly slotted into place. Orkney became my geographic soulmate and I knew that The Darkest Court trilogy’s final book—and final battle—would have to take place there. Whenever I find myself longing to return, I pick up one of these books and throw myself back into the stories and histories that caught hold of my imagination all those years ago. I hope they stir your sense of magic and wonder the same way.
I’m a sucker for pretty much any saga, those pieces of literature where legend and myth and history mingle into a perfect mixture of inspiration for the creative mind. This saga gives us a who’s who of historical figures, as well as poetic stories about journeys, battles, and political maneuverings. My favorite bits are the smaller, easier to overlook details though, such as the cause of Sigurd the Powerful’s death. The Orkneyinga is a consuming read about the history of Orkney through medieval eyes.
Written around AD 1200 by an unnamed Icelandic author, the Orkneyinga Saga is an intriguing fusion of myth, legend and history. The only medieval chronicle to have Orkney as the central place of action, it tells of an era when the islands were still part of the Viking world, beginning with their conquest by the kings of Norway in the ninth century. The saga describes the subsequent history of the Earldom of Orkney and the adventures of great Norsemen such as Sigurd the Powerful, St Magnus the Martyr and Hrolf, the conqueror of Normandy. Savagely powerful and poetic, this is…
When I stepped off the ferry onto Mainland Orkney, a piece of myself I never knew was missing suddenly slotted into place. Orkney became my geographic soulmate and I knew that The Darkest Court trilogy’s final book—and final battle—would have to take place there. Whenever I find myself longing to return, I pick up one of these books and throw myself back into the stories and histories that caught hold of my imagination all those years ago. I hope they stir your sense of magic and wonder the same way.
The best way to learn a new place is to read its folk tales. Muir’s curated collection not only gives a sense of the community values found throughout the wide spread of Orkney islands, but also of magic and wonder that pervades the place. You can easily take a tour to the specific locations mentioned in the stories, and I can assure you that rereading the stories in those places, with Muir’s charming, poetic prose, makes them come to life in fascinating new ways.
The Orkney Islands are a place of mystery and magic, where the past and the present meet, ancient standing stones walk and burial mounds are the home of the trows. Orkney Folk Tales walks the reader across invisible islands that are home to fin folk and mermaids, and seals that are often far more than they appear to be. Here Orkney witches raise storms and predict the outcome of battles, ghosts seek revenge and the Devil sits in the rafters of St Magnus Cathedral, taking notes! Using ancient tales told by the firesides of the Picts and Vikings, storyteller Tom…
Not just another whisky-tasting book, A Sense of Place is an
enlightening travelogue through Scotland’s picturesque whisky regions,
exploring both old and new distilleries, their past and more importantly and
uniquely, their present and future.
Investigating from the ground up, Dave Broom takes you on this
journey with him as the third wheel behind him and the superb photographer,
Christina Kernohan.
Reporting on the expedition as a welcoming diary, it is
simultaneously warm and informative with wide-ranging topics covering the
archaeology of the Orkney Islands, the role of peat through time and even
touching on the politics of the 18th and 19th century
that led to the ‘business’ of whisky, while seamlessly connecting them to the
current effects of climate change and the sustainable whisky making movement of present-day distillers and their diversity.
I was left with Mr. Broom’s
optimism for the future in general and of whisky in this…
'A Sense of Place blends pin-sharp writing with evocative photography in a book to savour and treasure.' - Ian Rankin
'Mr. Broom, who was born in Glasgow and has been writing about spirits for decades, is the perfect author for this beautiful, evocative book. He knows the whisky territory intimately and the people well, and he has the senses of wonder, empathy and history to tie them altogether, as well as the skill to conjure up the smell of the salt air, the sound of barley shimmering in the wind, the vibrations of hammers shaping copper into stills and the…
