Mysterious Britain: Ancient Secrets of the United Kingdom and Ireland by Janet Bord
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The phrase, the past is a foreign country is completely true when you venture way back into English history. There are strange standing stones and circles that are still visible in the landscape, ancient earthworks, churches with pagan marks and wells that still have ritual significance even today. Even though modern archaeological techniques and science can go some way to explaining the sites, there is still so much we do not know or can even comprehend.

When this was published way back in 1974 they knew even less then, but there was plenty of speculation as to the origins of the stones, burials and henges. Some of the suggestions in here as to the original purpose of the place would not even be entertained now, for example there is way too much nonsense on UFO’s and Ley Lines. Hence it is now quite outdated, but I have had it sitting on a shelf for a decade and a half and though I had better read it. Extracting it from there reminded me a little of Time Team! What I did like though were the photos of the places, they harked back to a time before visitor centres and information boards and were often quite atmospheric.

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Among the Summer Snows by Christopher Nicholson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Snow? In the summer? It sounds like climate change gone mad and given the weather recently it could be quite feasible. However, this is not the snow that Christopher Nicholson seeks. Most of the snow doesn’t last past the summer, clearing before the winter returns, but he is obsessed with the finding those patches of snow in the Scottish Highlands that are left over when the rest have gone and because of the size managed to survive all year.

Nicholson heads alone into the hills braving the elements, it is late summer after all, in search of these ghostly remains of winter. Not every year has them though, a warming climate is ensuring that, but the ones he finds vary in size from a few feet across to huge ones that you can get in underneath. Some of these patches of snow have been there for years, the layers building up to create some truly deep drifts. There are even some that you can crawl under bathing you in this eerie blue-white light as is passes through the ice; they have even been called snow cathedrals.

I have been high in the French Alps in July and see pockets of snow and where we were in Tignes there was a glacier where they were still skiing on. To read about snow pockets was something that I had never expected that we still had in Scotland. There is more to this book than that though, there are musings on the weather, other walkers and a touching tribute to his late wife too. All through the book are hauntingly beautiful photos of the snow caves that he finds on his walks and the fragments of snow set against the dramatic landscape of the Scottish mountains.

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A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Modern Marvels by Caspar Henderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

There was a time when humans had a natural curiosity and wonder for the world around themselves. Before Google, to find things out you actually had to go and learn them, experience them or find and read the book about it. Nowadays anyone with an interweb connection can quickly read up about anything about any subject. By having everything available at our fingertips has meant that information is transitory, read but never absorbed and more importantly as Henderson argues in this book, we have almost lost the ability to wonder.

People have wondered what is over that far hill and what lies just beyond the horizon for millennia now and the oldest form of this speculation was the map. These mappae mundi were the places where people’s imaginations could run riot, full of strange and magical creatures and of unknown lands, these were the internet of the day.

Should we want to look up from the blue LED glare of our screens though there is still a universe of wonder out there? Henderson takes us on a journey through what he considers to be some of the wonders still left in the world. Beginning with light where he explores from the photon to the black hole passing under the rainbow. He then moves within our body to discover more about the workings of the heart and brain. The chapter on the physical brain leads on to the concept of self as we currently understand it.

The final two chapters and my favourites were on how we see the world then and now and the wonderfully titled Adventures with Perhapsatron. Throughout the book, there are diagrams and illustrations to complement the text and I particularly liked the use of side notes to add a little extra depth, though the grey font wasn’t the easiest to read. Overall an enjoyable book.

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Eagle Country by Seán Lysaght
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

When you think of eagles, you imagine them perched on an eyrie high in the Scottish mountains on the West coast. They are majestic birds, soaring over the landscape with almost nothing to fear; except us. The sight of the magnificent sea eagles enthralled him when Lysaght first encountered them in Norway almost twenty years ago. They used to inhabit Ireland too, and as he walks the remote coast and hills and pours over the maps he starts to see the place names that they inspired such as Crag of the Eagle and Eagle Ridge. It was time to get outside.

The best way to get a feel for the country though is to walk through it, climb the ridges and wander the rugged coastline. His walks are often undertaken alone, sometimes with Jessica, his wife, and occasionally with others. His keen eyes see the wildlife as he walks, watching the aerobatics of the ravens, tracing the gulls following the boats out to sea, finches as they buzz over the moors. He is searching for sites that could be or may once have been eyries. Every now and again a raptor lifts into the air, often he sees them being mobbed, yet they are always masters of the air.

He passes houses that have carved stone eagles on the gate posts and as he walks in the rugged landscape scoured by Atlantic, it prompts him to look back to the past to the time when eagles were often seen, collecting the stories from locals and writers that last saw eagles in the Nineteenth century. Their absence today is the result of habitat destruction and persecution. Even today raptors are still poisoned and shot and those with vested interests ensure that the people responsible do not get the punishment they deserve.

On one side, the stream ran into the moss and then re-emerged from the tips of the moss as glistening green-tinted teardrops.

Until I picked this book up, it had never crossed my mind that there were or had been eagles in Ireland too. Sadly there are still not many, there have been a few introduced and the odd one or two have drifted across the sea from Scotland. There are just about hanging on in a landscape devoid of their prey and habitat. Lysaght is also a poet and this book reinforces my own hypothesis that poets write fantastic non-fiction (Kathleen Jamie and Paul Farley to name but two) so his mastery of the language and the descriptions of the coast and hills that he walked looking for eyries is quite special. This is the tenth book in the superb Little Toller Monograph series and is another beautifully made book. It has wonderful atmospheric photos that frame the beginning of each month of walks showing the stark beauty of the land and seascape of this coastline. Loved the hand-drawn maps too, they have a certain charm. Can highly recommend this.

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Hope In The Dark by Rebecca Solnit
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For centuries people have revolted over the control that the state or other powerful individuals have tried to exert over the people. People can only be told what to do so much. I Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit concentrates on the past five decades of activism against the state about all manner of issues. Sonit acknowledges the huge political thinkers who have shaped some of the politics that happen today.

It is an interesting polemic against the vested interests and the present economic system and is written with a clarity that I have come to expect from Solnit. It is a bit dated now, but sadly almost all of the salient points that Solnit makes are still valid. The message though is still clear; never, never give up hope. The smallest actions being carried out by you can be multiplied up into the tens of hundreds of people doing the same thing does have an effect. The rise of website and action groups like 38 Degrees and Avaaz are the testimony to this; exerting pressure on corporations and governments does get through, it is an irritant that they ignore at their peril. I particularly liked the way that think global, act local, can be turned on its head; by thinking local acting global is the replication of the same protest all around our planet. I would love to see a re-write of this to know exactly what she thinks about Trump, can’t imagine it will be complimentary…

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Rule 34 by Charles Stross
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

To call it a dead end job would be an understatement, policing the weird and sordid life of internet porn was like being in the U bend of her career as all the unpleasantness of life flowed past. This was DI Liz Kavanaugh’s life now, but when a fetish nut dies on her watch, the Rule 34 squad goes from an irrelevance to high profile. This first death is just the tip of the fatberg as more start dying in the most bizarre ways possible and the more Kavanaugh finds out about the case and the links to organised crime, the less she wants to know…

This is loosely a sequel to Halting State with Kavanaugh being the only character who has made it from that book. There are all sorts going on in this future police thriller; in it, he crams all sorts about the possibilities of pervasive state monitoring, a psychopath loose and the way that the criminals work across states. The writing point of view doesn’t always make it the easiest book to read, however, it is highly entertaining with some typical surreal moments and the pace varies from sluggish to fairly brisk. I liked it but didn’t love it.

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Amzing bookpost this week. Thanks to Olivia at Jo Fletcher Books, Jamsin at Bloomsbury, Bethan, Josh at Faber  fot this small pile of books

The Dun Cow Rib: A Very Natural Childhood by John Lister-Kaye
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

For the last 40 years, John Lister-Kaye has run the Aigas Field Centre, an old Georgian manor house just to the west of Inverness and set in the beautiful highland landscape. Lister-Kaye discovered the place in the mid-1970’s and since then has made this a world leading and award-winning centre for environmental education. This latest book, The Dun Cow Rib tells the story of the long and winding route that he took to get there.

Born in 1959 to John and Helen, he was the latest member of an ancient family were landowners in Yorkshire with active financial interests in mining and quarries. He had a fairly happy childhood playing in the local countryside and keeping pigeons until he was sent to boarding school. He really could not get along with the head there. After a couple of incidents, one of which was a prank, the other of which was nothing to do with him, he was asked to leave, much to his father’s fury at the school and the head in particular. This meant that he had to go to another school and fortunately he ended up at Allhallows School on the Devon and Dorset border. For Lister-Kaye this was a lucky break as he was right on the doorstep of Lyme Regis and the wilderness that was the undercliff. He joined the natural history society and by the time he finished at the school, he was totally and utterly in love with the natural world.

He longed to do something in the natural world, but his father lent on him heavily to accept a post at a steelworks as a management trainee. He did go and hated it, turning more against working in unsustainable industries after the massive oil spill in the Isles of Scilly in 1967. Shortly after that, an opportunity arose to work with the now famous author Gavin Maxwell on a book on mammals and opening a zoo on Skye; he quit and moved to Scotland. Both projects were abandoned after Maxwell was diagnosed with cancer and died after a short illness. The thought of going by to a desk job was too much to bear, so he stayed in Scotland and wrote The White Island, a book about the short but intense time spent with Maxwell. From the book came another opportunity and Highland Wildlife Enterprise was formed with the help of Richard Frere and this was what was to become the Aigas Field Centre.

I quite liked this book, he writes in an interesting and entertaining way about all the events in his early life and it is full of amusing anecdotes and snippets. He had a privileged upbringing, he is a baronet after all, and he loved growing up with his grandparents at the manor house where the Dun Cow Rib was always hanging from a chain. He had a distant relationship with his father but was much closer to his mother. She suffered from severe health problems with her heart, caused by an illness when she was a child and exacerbated when she gave birth to John and managed to live much longer because of the efforts of Paul Wood and Russel Brock, two cardiologists who worked at the cutting edge of heart surgery, this book is a tribute to her from him. Having read the Douglas Botting book in the last month, it was useful to find out his side of the story of his brief work with Gavin Maxwell too. I have only read one other of his, The Gods of the Morning, and will be adding some of his others to my reading list.

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