Unique, poetic book - read it with a dram of whisky.

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Product Description

This is the work of a man who has known and loved the Scottish Cairngorms for more than 30 years. Jim Crumley marries a poet's instincts to an uncompromising passion for the Cairngorm's arctic character, and for those wildlife tribes which thrive there. He marks nature's rhythms with thoughtful observations of bird and beast, flower and landscape. In the process he strives for a purer empathy with the wilds, seeks out the nourishing bond of man and landscape. Ultimately, the book asserts that the Cairngorms are nature's place. Crumley proposes a radical solution to safeguard the mountains from a threatening array of forces ranged against them. In his conclusion he invokes what Seton Gordon called "the spirit of the high and lonely places".

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #850196 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 164 pages

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Customer Reviews

A thoughtful, thought provoking book on a fragile place
While many authors who write about the natural environment are happy to describe landscape, flora and fauna, Jim Crumley is altogether more ambitious. The book describes the Cairngorms, the plants and wildlife in great detail, but also conveys the strong impression that the mountains and forest have left on the author and provides the reader with a sense of the grandure and the fragility of the area. The style of writing and arguments are uncompromising. It may take the reader a couple of chapters to appreciate the manner of the prose and it is unlikely that you will agree with all the opinions and proposed solutions. However, this does not alter the fact that this is a very fine piece of writing by someone who knows what they are talking about.
I would recommend that anyone who cares about the future of the Cairngorms or the wider natural environment read this book. I would further recommend that legislators who are responsible for such places also read this book.

Poem or Polemic?
No doubt about it, Jim Crumley has a fair turn of phrase, and this book, subtitled "Sanctuary and the Plight of the Cairngorms", reads on occasion like a poem rather than the polemic that it is.

Crumley's basic point is that the Cairgorms are too important to the spiritual well-being of our planet to permit of any human intrusion save on the very smallest scale, the scale of the individual who is completely in tune with the wilderness.

One can't but help agree in principal to most of his arguments, as he leads the reader on a circuitous approach to the massif itself, as though he is stalking some especially skittish deer. Beginning on the Speyside fringes of the plateau he inches inwards, step by step, season by season, exploring the corries, the glens, the lairigs, and ultimately the mountain itself.

In practise though, Crumley's message, if taken to heart and enacted in full, would restrict access to only a tiny few, not by actively barring admission, but by making it such an undertaking that only those most dedicated of mountaineers would ever make the journey.

That might not be a bad thing - it would certainly allow the mountain to heal, once the infrastructure of decades of tourism was removed - but then again I can't help but feel that allowing access on a wider scale (certainly not the massively over-simplified access provided by funiculars) might engender more sympathy with the landscape than Crumley realises.

Maybe the salvation of the Cairngorms will come from the consciousness-raising experience you get from just being there, in wilderness.

Agree or disagree with Crumpley though, this is a beautifully written book, with much to recommend it. It's an irony that a book that argues to make the Cairngorms less accessible is likely to make anyone who reads it long to go.