Undiscovered Scotland

 

"Wild Galloway: From the hilltops to the Solway, a portrait of a glen" by Ian Carter is a lovely book, a joy to read, the sort of book that provides much-needed relief from everything that's going wrong in the wider world.

In his opening chapter, Ian Carter tells us that he spent a quarter of a century in the flatlands of the Cambridgeshire fens before retiring early and moving to mid-Devon to indulge his interest in wildlife. Yet he still found himself ill at ease, with regular trips to the west coast of Scotland providing a constant reminder that bigger and more impressive wild landscapes were available within these islands. Family compromise resulted in the purchase of somewhere a little closer to England than the Highlands: a house on a farm track in a glen leading into the hills above the village of Auchencairn in Galloway.

This book is about the author's interactions with the wild world he's discovered in his new surroundings: and while the geographical remit of the book is tight, many of the lessons the author draws are applicable much more widely. Each chapter takes a different point of focus: hills, coast, farmed landscapes, islands, the domestic environment, squirrels, eagles, stone walls and so on. Each provides a fascinating insight into another part of the jigsaw, with the pieces fitting together in a highly satisfactory way to give the reader an overall view of the natural history of the glen the author now calls home.

You get a good sense of the book from the publisher's description of it: "Ian Carter has always loved wildness and living in places where wildlife takes centre stage. His new home is tucked away between the high, heather-clad hills of Bengairn and the shining, silver Solway with its merse, mudflats and spectacular cliffs. Guarding the bay is whale-backed Hestan Island with its raucous seabird colonies. Here, once the tide moves back in across the causeway, there is only wildlife for company. Sights and sounds in the glen are dominated by the more-than-human world. Red squirrels peer in through the windows, pine martens patrol the woods and on a good day a golden eagle will cruise overhead, helping to complete the place. Pink-feet and barnacle geese swirl above the autumn fields and thousands of common scoter, one of the Solway’s special birds, dot the murky offshore waters."

It continues: "There is something special about this place. It encompasses the full range of Galloway's wildlife habitats. Within walking distance of home there are moors, plantations, flower-rich meadows, fragments of native woodland, and a little, stony burn that rushes down through the farms to the Solway: this glen is wild Galloway in miniature. Ian's book is, at once, a portrait of a singular patch of ground, and an introduction to Galloway's wild places and the wildlife that lives there."