Jim CrumleyCritiques

Regardless of what happens in the world, the seasons come and go without fail. The seasons may be stretched a little, especially with the effects of climate change at the moment as they seem to blend into each other more and more. With spring the main moment for me is when we reach the equinox, that day when the night and day are exactly the same length; 12 hours. This year that day was the 20th March and that seemed to me to be the best time to start this book by Crumley.

Spring in Scotland often begins with snow on the ground and in his first chapter of the book he is watching a kestrel over a landscape that is scattered with small patches of snow. She drops from the twig into the wind and begins to hunt. They keep pace with each other at a distance and just as he reached some newly planted native trees, she turns and rushes away downwind. Soon after he hears a mistle thrush singing as the urge to find a mate becomes all-consuming. These are what he considers the first syllables of spring.

Following the traces of spring around Scotland will take him up in the Highlands, and to the islands of Mull, Iona, Lismore and he even ventures out of Scotland to visit Lindisfarne on the Northumbrian coast. If feels like you are alongside him as he is watching the antics of Sea Eagles or spotting an unusual encounter between a fox and a pine marten or being a handful of yards away from a grey coated roebuck.

As with his other books in the series, this is another brilliant book from Crumley. He is passionate about his subjects too; his eye for the details of the way that the creatures behave, coupled with the descriptions of the landscape make this such a good book. He is not afraid to use the book as a soapbox either, putting forward solid arguments on a variety of subjects that he cares about. This is the third in the series so far, and there is just the final book, The Nature of Summer, to look forward to.

Some people describe themselves as summer people, loving the heat and balmy days. Others prefer the spring with its new life and vitality. Autumn brings migration and a change in greens to browns and yellows and then there is Winter. It is the time of year that the countryside reveals its structure though, vegetation dies back and the skeletal outlines of trees are visible through the mist.

I like all the seasons, but winter I can love a loathe with equal measure. It used to be a mix of storms and bright, cold crisp days, but now seems to be endless grey and rain as the storms sweep in off the Atlantic to batter the south coast where I live. In Scotland, where Jim Crumley lives, it is much colder than here in Dorset. Even though he lives in a countryside that is deep in stasis, he knows the places to visit to see those eking out an existence at this time of the year.

In this book he takes us with him as he walks the in the hills, seeing eagles soaring high above the escarpments, watching deer as they graze the precious little nutrients left on the hills and seeking out the snow buntings. One philosophy that he wants to teach is that of sitting and waiting in a place and letting the wildlife come to you. Most of the time he sits and he waits and nothing much happens, but there are times when he has encounters with animals that are not expecting a human to be there that make the waits well worth it.

Crumley has a way with words and this is another beautifully written book about his local patch. But there is another element to this, he is passionate about the environment and all the way through the book you sense just how furious he is about the way that the climate change is affecting the landscape that he loves so much. This is a worthy sequel to his book on Autumn, and I have a copy of his book on Spring that I am really looking forward to now.

The hare is a creature that has been part of our natural landscape for time immemorial and has entered our cultural folklore too, however, few people have seen them, including me. In this charming little book, Jim Crumley recounts three occasions where he has seen this elusive and slightly magical creature, including seeing both species, the brown hare and mountain hare, where the snowline started.

This beautifully produced book is very short. I didn’t so much read it rather, rather inhale it. Crumley has a lovely turn of phrase and a keen eye so reading his books is always a pleasure. This one came from the library, but these are a lovely (if expensive) series of books that I can see myself collecting as I have just bought the one on the fox.

Each season offers its own basket of delights, in winter we have the skeletal trees set against the grey skies, spring brings an outpouring of life and acid greens. Summer, such that it is, is a time of balmy days and abundant food. Before you know it, autumn is upon us once again and nature starts its most dramatic change of all. As the light ebbs, leaves start the process of leaching chlorophyll back into the tree and changing to a fantastic range of colours, the warm days are tempered by sharper mornings and the mists soften the countryside.

Autumn is one of Jim Crumley’s favourite seasons, an emotion triggered after seeing geese flying overhead when he was young. He takes us on a journey around his home country of Scotland travelling from the lowlands up into the Highlands and across to the islands to see the Autumn unfold. His travels take him to see the vast whooper swan flocks that have headed down from the Arctic, the ancient brocks that only exist in this part of the world and he seeks out the Redwoods that grow there. His keen eyes see the golden eagles that float over the mountains, the traces of otters and beavers that live in the rivers, the fleeting glimpses of deer in the woods the blur of a stoat and watching an owl float silently over a field.

There is nothing particularly profound in here, just the stories of a man who takes the time to head out as often as he can to sit and watch the world inexorably grind through the first flush of autumn to the arrival of the snows. He is great at finding the words that fill in the picture of the place that he is visiting; so much so that you feel that you are sitting alongside him at certain points as he takes in the views. As well as being a eulogy to autumn, it is a reflective book too, he takes a moment to celebrate his late father and grandfather and their achievements. It did take a little away from the main point of the book though, but it is still worth reading for his gentle, lyrical language.

Crumley is a nature writer that i have never heard of until recently. He has written a number of books, and has also done some things for the BBC from what i have found out.

This book is looking at the remnants of the forests that used to cover the landscape of Scotland, that are now very much reduced compared to ancient times. Each chapter is written from a different aspect or perspective or a recollection of a walk taken in a forest, or wild animals seen. He writes with a passion for his subject, be it the trees of the forests and woods, or the red deer, eagles or pine martens that he sees in his explorations. He is scathing of the Forestry Commissions 'management' of the woods and forests, and asks some pretty serious questions as to their future in managing these unique environments. Unlike most nature books, he takes the long view. He considers what these places could become with the reintroduction of wolves, and with a measured approach to the planting of these areas, and looking to re-introduce a proper mix of native species to the forest, and to join the four main ares up.

I found the writing did not flow as well as someone like Mabey, but it was a worthwhile read, and i really like the fact that he is wanting to think of the long term opportunities of these environments for wildlife and man alike.

A beautiful book, just 61 pages, can be read in an hour. You feel as though you are a badger and can join them in their sett. They are great creatures. Crumley's flowing style gets a strong message across against culling too.

A short sweet episodic book full of florid prose about encounters with foxes. Recommended for people who like florid nature writing and/or foxes.

Beautifully written, based on hours of patient observation, and brings hares to life as one sits and reads it.

This must be one of the best books I have read in a long time. It is short, sweet and thought provoking. It is all about a love match between mute swans followed by a love affair and an unusual break up. It is all about the beauty of the Scottish landscape and the behaviour of swans. It is all about human frailty and unintended consequences of do gooding. Beware egg-eating otters. The illustrations complement the text perfectly. It is a sad and moving story but it is just a way of life and we shouldn’t feel sad.

An excellent journal, inspiring in words and images

This is a lovely book to hold and to read. It doesn't take long to read. Crowley has the definition of the sudden sighting of a kingfisher down to a T:

‘Blue flames, searing shades of blue, the most startling, the most strident, the most breathlessly beautiful BLUE’ (page 4).

I have experienced these emotions and adjectives once or twice while walking round a nearby lake and river. The electric blue has to be seen to be believed.

Crumley’s analysis of frustration also resonates with me and can be applied to butterflies as well as kingfishers. Many books and articles I have read about sightings of butterflies have happy endings. The hunter finds the quarry - say, a Lady Granville fritillary - just at the last minute under mist and cloud cover. That doesn’t happen to me, in particular when it comes to purple emperors or the Duke of Burgundy. I am not sure how much time I have spent over the last few years trying to find the latter. Some of the websites seem quite secretive about the precise locations of colonies or is it just that I am useless at interpreting grid references? I have seen plenty of cows, cowslips and small whites. I may have seen some of the Dukes but could not swear that on the Bible. For that reason I am very sympathetic to Crumley’s statement, page 29:

‘An undercurrent of frustration attends these fast fly-pasts, and somehow the level twitches up a step or two if it involves the off-on-off sorcery of a flight from shadow to sunlight and back to shadow’.

It is all in the flight.

In this slim book, Crumley reflects upon the beauties and harsh realities of nature. His façade of pragmatism and objective detachment for the subjects of his interest is belied by his efforts to aid a pair of mute swans successfully hatch a clutch of eggs.

He accepts his and their failures as unsentimentally as Nature itself, but his feeling of loyalty to the old pen, more sustained and faithful than that of her mate, his realisation of his love for her as a fellow-being, and, ultimately, his sense of loss at her death, tempered as it is by his acknowledgement that in death her body sustains the life of other creatures, are testiments to the deep, personal connection he experiences to this wild creature, which occupies a privileged place in the heart of the not-so-dispassionate swan-watcher.

Brockway's engravings of the swans, including a couple featuring Crumley himself, are a fitting complement to the text.½

This appears to be a very thorough book, and I want to read it in depth before I go back to Edinburgh. Beautiful photography and black-and-white sketches make it enjoyable for armchair tourists as well.

Update: upon thorough reading, for armchair tourists it needed more photographs to expand upon the text. Or less text.

An enjoyable book if your gravity pulls you north. Like the author I was born a Scot, and an exact contemporary sharing from the early days of childhood an addiction to the hills of our native land and no more able to resist the attraction of their northward pull than the needle of my compass or of tides responding to the moon.

Among Mountains is a personal miscellany ranging wide over the Scottish landscape; and tells us of the mountains their aesthetic beauty and their role in the lives of men. Crumley pays tribute to the landscape and it’s peopled past and describes a mountain credo formed in the lifted and uplifting stones of the earth. This is a book rich in poetic sentiment, supported by some rather good poems and photographs.

There is much to enjoy. The sheer grandeur of the hill, compelling wildlife, the kaleidoscopic mesmerising weather, and the photographic potentialities of slanting light spilling over an angular landscape these are portrayed and recorded well. Though, I must confess by the end of the book I wasn’t quite sure whether its reach was too ambitious or the book was simply too short. Regretting finishing a book is in itself a goodly recommendation. Descriptions of mountain wildlife are first class and vivid. Crumley’s keen eye and telling prose bring these experiences to life. The mountain photography is very good; and while it’s rather difficult to bring originality to hill photography Jim Crumley achieves something special with his thoughtful explorations for new perspectives to old favourite and much loved hills.

Less successful are the occasional forays into the realms of ‘mountain philosophy’, for sure mountains encourage introspection and not much harm is likely to come from a thoughtful consideration of the relationship between the natural environment and the place of human beings in the great scheme things. Perfidious man confronting the boundless beauty of fragile nature has from classic times been the working stuff of thinkers, poets, and many more besides. Accordingly, you need to be rather good at it if you wish to say something new and worth listening to. Unfortunately the author doesn’t quite hit it off, for instance:

‘I trod the path of equipoise as narrow and treacherous as the A’Chir but you cannot balance the needs of man against the needs of a mountain, when man turns a piece of the mountain to his own uses, thereby belittling the mountain. He cannot then offer the mountain a piece of himself’.- Well quite, and if you say so, is about as much as I can muster to that, my own thoughts trodding that way were quite different...

Better by far is the poetry and I thoroughly enjoyed ‘The Empty Glen’ on which the book ends:-

this high, this mighty. Here
hope springs and sings
eternal meltwater-pure
- I drink - and sure
of the destiny of this
cold and empty glen, I urge
some slumbering God-of-the-wild
to one newborn mountain child.

The book is dedicated to the doyen of all Scottish nature writer/wildlife photographers Mike Tomkies and Crumley’s chapter describing how Tomkies pursues his craft illustrates the commitment of the man. The book is worth it's price for this chapter alone.½

Cadeau Angélique