Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands

’Windswept is a wonderful work, prose painted in bold, bright strokes like a Scottish Colourist’s canvas’ ROBERT MACFARLANE

’An instant classic of British nature-writing’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

A few years ago, Annie Worsley traded a busy life in academia to take on a small-holding or croft on the west coast of Scotland. It is a land ruled by great elemental forces - light, wind and water - that hold sway over how land forms, where the sea sits and what grows. Windswept explores what it means to live in this rugged, awe-inspiring place of unquenchable spirit and wild weather.

Walk with Annie as she lays quartz stones in the river to reflect the moonlight and attract salmon, as she watches otters play tag across the beach, as she is awoken by the feral bellowing of stags. Travel back in time to the epic story of how Scotland’s valleys were carved by glaciers, rivers scythed paths through mountains, how the earliest people found a way of life in the Highlands - and how she then found a home there millennia later.

With stunning imagery and lyrical prose, Windswept evokes a place where nature reigns supreme and humans must learn to adapt. It is her paean to a beloved place, one richer with colour, sound and life than perhaps anywhere else in the UK.

Annie O’Garra Worsley is a writer and blogger living in North West Scotland on a small-holding known as a croft. She is also a physical geographer with particular interests in spatial and temporal relationships between people and the natural world. Her doctoral research examined human impacts in the montane rainforests of New Guinea and her more recent work investigated long-term environmental change in the peat bogs, hills and coasts of North West England and the spatial and temporal history of pollution in urban environments. After a career break raising her four children, she returned to full-time academic life in 1999 and was awarded a Personal Chair in Environmental Change in 2009 by Edge Hill University.