Gavin Maxwell

 

THE RING OF BRIGHT WATER TRILOGY

Edited, with an introduction by Austin Chinn
Foreword by Jimmy Watt
Afterword by Virginia McKenna

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE RING OF BRIGHT WATER TRILOGY

Gavin Maxwell was born in 1914. In 1945 he bought the small Hebridean island of Soay and tried to establish a shark fishery. This resulted in his first book, Harpoon at a Venture. His other books include Ring of Bright Water, which sold more than a million copies in English, The Rocks Remain, The House of Elrig and Raven Seek Thy Brother. Gavin Maxwell died in 1969.

Austin Chinn studied Classics at Harvard before becoming editor of the Phoenix, a literary magazine. He then moved into the advertising and film business in New York, taught Latin and Greek and is now living and writing in Vermont. He is a frequent visitor to Scotland.

List of Illustrations

Highland Landscape.

View of Camusfeàrna.

Gavin Maxwell in the doorway at Camusfeàrna (Robin McEwen).

The kitchen fireside with the Latin inscription below the mantelpiece.

The waterfall.

Mijbil in the bay.

Mijbil with Kathleen Raine and at play.

The greylag geese flying.

Calum Murdo Mackinnon.

Camusfeàrna.

Gavin Maxwell with Edal in a chair (Jimmy Watt).

Edal and Jimmy Watt.

Edal at the shoreline.

Jimmy Watt with Edal.

Jimmy Watt and Edal on the hillside above the bay.

Edal at play.

Edal at the waterfall.

The otter pool.

Edal in her new quarters.

Camusfeàrna.

Mossy and Monday.

The Ring of Bright Water (Jimmy Watt).

The burn frozen over in the winter of 1661–62.

Camusfeàrna under snow.

Edal and Teko walking on the beach.

Dirk chasing Teko.

Gavin with Edal (Jimmy Watt).

Gavin and Edal indoors (Jimmy Watt).

The shoreline.

Jimmy with the greylag geese.

Terry with Teko (Jimmy Watt).

The Polar Star (Jimmy Watt).

Isle Ornsay showing the lighthouse and the cottages.

One of the beaches at Camusfeàrna.

The shore.

Kyleakin lighthouse on Eilean Ban.

Kyleakin lighthouse and cottages.

Foreword

Camusfeàrna is the name Gavin Maxwell gave to what is really called Sandaig. Sandaig is near the village of Glenelg and means ‘sand bay’. Gavin’s ashes are buried there; a large boulder marks the spot, with a bronze plaque fixed to it saying Gavin Maxwell b 15.7.14 d 7.9.69. A few yards away the memorial to Edal stands under the rowan tree, now dead; in a year or two there will be no trace of it. On Edal’s bronze plaque are the words Whatever joy she gave to you, give back to nature.

Many hundreds of people visit Sandaig every year; most of them feel it is a place of serenity and beauty with many echoes of the past. I lived there for seven years, and it wasn’t all serenity then, but there were many happy times. Perhaps the most joyous was when we were on the green island (at low tide one can walk there). We heard the call of geese high in the clear autumn air and called up ‘chck-chck-chck’ at the tops of our voices; and the geese we had reared, and who had flown away in the spring, circled and lost height by dipping a wing as geese do, and with a huge clamour of greeting landed on the sand at our feet. It was a moment of overflowing joy that these wild creatures had chosen to return.

Gavin Maxwell is remembered as someone who brought to many an awareness of the need to take care of our fellow inhabi­tants of this vulnerable earth.

I now live within sight of Sandaig and on stormy days when the ebb tide meets the south-west wind, I can look through the spray to the bright white sand where the geese landed that memorable day.

Jimmy Watt

Glenelg, September 1999

Introduction

‘That was Camusfeàrna down there,’ said John Pargeter. We were on the high backbone of Sleat, the southern peninsula of the Isle of Skye, looking down across the Sound of Sleat to a group of small islands and a little bay on the mainland shore of Scotland’s west coast directly opposite.

I could see what appeared to be a miniature lighthouse on one of the islands and a low white house set back from the beach at the bottom of a steep coastal drop with a high mountain rising straight up behind it.

It was a shock of recognition, for unexpectedly I had come across the famous setting of Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water, and what had been for me, up to that moment, a literary landscape whose real location was unknown suddenly revealed itself before my eyes as an actual, physical landscape. And almost immediately I realized that we were standing on the ground from which Maxwell used to hear the stags roaring in the early autumn – ‘I hear them first on the steep slopes of Skye across the Sound, a wild haunting primordial sound that belongs so utterly to the north …’

As if reading what might be in my mind John said, ‘That croft you see is not the house – the house burned down.’ Unexpected, too, this information about the later history of the place; I had read only Ring of Bright Water, and knew nothing beyond it. For some reason I did not ask John Pargeter when or how the house had burned down, or anything else about the story, but the question and the thought remained in the back of my mind.

And although we were on those steep slopes in pursuit of deer, and it was a marvellous bright day with tremendous scenery, a thrilling, if bloodless, stalk, and eagles and ptarmigan seen, it was the glimpse of Camusfeàrna from several miles away that remained my most vivid recollection.

Three years later, on a Highland moor, I chanced to mention something about the life of Gavin Maxwell to Colin McKelvie, and he said, ‘Yes, there was the curse of the rowan tree, the house burned down, and the fire killed the otters.’ More enigmatic pieces of information, hints, or rumours (I still had read only Ring), but strangely I did not pursue further enlightenment, again only letting this sit somewhere in my mind.

But not long after that I happened upon the two sequel books about Camusfeàrna, neither of which I had known existed, in a couple of second-hand bookstores, and I found them in the order of their publication – first The Rocks Remain, then Raven Seek Thy Brother. So I finally learned, through Maxwell’s own writings, about the remaining story right up to its end.

The first book of this trilogy, Ring of Bright Water, has achieved the status of a classic. Its overwhelming reception in the early 1960s, which produced a readership of well over a million on both sides of the Atlantic, may owe something to the culture of that particular time which seized upon the compelling presentation of an attainable Eden in the world of the here and now.

Maxwell’s notion of living in a paradise of nature in such a place has a precursor far back in time; the isolated location of Camusfeàrna on the edge of the sea, surrounded by rocks, trees and mountains, in a life of close proximity to wildlife hearkens back to an older tradition in the very same landscape. In the 9th and 10th centuries Celtic hermit monks lived in solitary dwellings on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland, especially on those coastal slopes facing (like Camusfeàrna) south and west, and they wrote Gaelic nature poetry of a very high order. Often they also described the wild creatures they lived near and wrote about as beloved friends.

Since the first publication of Ring forty years ago it has remained in print with a steadily growing number of later admirers (like myself), and its fame, while not as sensational and widespread as it was a generation and more ago, is remarkably undiminished. If it continues to be read in the future, as I believe it will, it may even be admired in quite a different way from the present, in a different time and by a different culture, for the permanent texts have a life of their own.

Gavin Maxwell once described Ring of Bright Water, perhaps slightly disingenuously, as ‘no more than a kind of personal diary’, which it decidedly is not; it is a carefully designed narrative that in some ways may be called a fiction. That is, he tells true things, but so selected, arranged, and concentrated through literary art that the narrative becomes a kind of fiction. This is not unlike another famous ‘personal diary’, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. (There are some interesting similarities between the two books, and it is only speculation on my part, but I believe that Maxwell may have had Walden partly in his mind when he wrote Ring of Bright Water.) The narrative may be true, but the art gives it the kind of intensity that only fiction possesses.

The present work contains the three books about Gavin Maxwell’s life at Camusfeàrna from 1948 to 1968. Although he first took possession of the house in the autumn of 1948 he did not maintain residence there until the spring of 1949, and he kept up that residence until January 1968. This trilogy presents to the reading public for the first time the entire story by Maxwell, in a single, unbroken narrative, of his tenure at the place he called ‘Camusfeàrna’, a fictional name he gave to a real place in order to emphasize its symbolic topography.

Ring of Bright Water, which Maxwell finished writing in October 1959, chronicles roughly the first ten years of his life there (a little more than half the total), describing the simple, idyllic paradise existence that has enchanted a vast and uncountable number of readers throughout the world. The Rocks Remain (1963) and Raven Seek Thy Brother (1968), very different books from their predecessor, recount the last eight or nine years (slightly less than half the total).

It has been possible to combine these three books into one volume largely due to the content of Rocks and Raven, both of which contain much narrative material extraneous to the story of Maxwell’s home, ‘The Bay of the Alders’, on the Scottish coast. Some of this writing set in Morocco, Majorca, Iceland, etc. is good in itself, but has no place in our story, and its inclusion in the published books is distracting to the tale set in Scotland. I suspect that it might have been slightly less painful to write a distressing account, the unravelling of the Camusfeàrna vision, in broken-up sections mixed in with other narratives than to give it all the undiluted form that it has in the present volume.

Despite the obvious exclusion of the ‘outside’ material, space requirements demanded further cuts in both books, some of which were regrettable even if necessary. And Ring of Bright Water has not been spared either, cut by about thirty per cent. Though at first I was dismayed at the violence such cutting did to the careful balance of that book, Ring plays a different and almost subordinate role here, being only the first chapter of a larger, more extensive, more personal, and entirely different story.

Ring is the first chapter, point of reference, and partly the cause of the failure of the single vision of simplicity and harmony told within its pages. Again and again in the dark chapters of Rocks and Raven Maxwell compares the before and after – with the changes brought about by the prosperity of the first book’s huge success a manifest decline began in almost every happiness that Camusfeàrna had represented.

First, the telephone and electricity, then a second otter requiring extensive (and ugly) building construction to house both otters; boats and boat accidents, accidents in and out of the house, a dangerous breakdown in the relationships with both otters, huge expenses, growing swings of fortune and misfortune, anxiety about the management of an increasingly complicated life, mis­takes and misjudgements, serious illnesses; all of this recounted by Maxwell as a downward spiral of his existence.

But despite the litany of disasters and the unrelenting march of calamitous adversity over a period of years, a moving redemption comes at the very end of this story with a restoration of the relationships with the otters and a momentary restoration of the feeling of the old life there.

At the end of this essay a mention might be made about Maxwell’s effect upon an aspect of history, if that is not too grand a concept. Cyril Connolly (the previous owner of Maxwell’s terrible pet lemur, Kiko) writes in the opening sentence of The Unquiet Grave, ‘… the true function of any writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence’. We may grant Gavin Maxwell the accomplishment of a masterpiece with Ring of Bright Water, but there is even beyond this a significant consequence to his life and at least two other legacies that have been declared by two men who knew him:

Douglas Botting, Maxwell’s biographer, has said, ‘Gavin made his greatest impact through Ring of Bright Water, which marked the beginning of a groundswell of worldwide support for otter conservation that has continued to the present day. Gavin’s contribution to saving the otter was immeasurable, and was probably the greatest achievement of his life.’ And in an interview for a film about Gavin Maxwell that was shown on BBC Scotland in early 1999, John Lister-Kaye said, ‘There is a legacy which relates to time and to place … and Gavin is very substantially responsible for interesting the wider public in the wild Highlands.’

The second of these tributes recalls the example of Sir Walter Scott, who through his writings in the first half of the 19th century brought Scotland, at that time neglected and dispirited, to the admiring attention of the whole world. Gavin Maxwell, on a smaller scale, through his writings in the second half of the 20th century, has brought the west coast of Scotland – ‘sky, shore, and silver sea’ – to the admiring attention of the people of today.

Austin Chinn

October 1999

RING OF BRIGHT WATER

 

He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water

Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea,

He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter

Broadcast on the swift river.

He has married me with the sun’s circle

Too dazzling to see, traced in summer sky.

He has crowned me with the wreath of white cloud

That gathers on the snowy summit of the mountain,

Ringed me round with the world-circling wind,

Bound me to the whirlwind’s centre.

He has married me with the orbit of the moon

And with the boundless circle of the stars,

With the orbits that measure years, months, days, and nights,

Set the tides flowing,

Command the winds to travel or be at rest.

At the ring’s centre,

Spirit, or angel troubling the still pool,

Causality not in nature,

Finger’s touch that summons at a point, a moment

Stars and planets, life and light

Or gathers cloud about an apex of cold,

Transcendent touch of love summons my world to being.

Foreword

In writing this book about my home I have not given to the house its true name. This is from no desire to create mystery – indeed it will be easy enough for the curious to discover where I live – but because identification in print would seem in some sense a sacrifice, a betrayal of its remoteness and isolation, as if by doing so I were to bring nearer its enemies of industry and urban life. Camusfeàrna, I have called it, the Bay of the Alders, from the trees that grow along the burn side; but the name is of little consequence, for such bays and houses, empty and long disused, are scattered throughout the wild sea lochs of the Western Highlands and the Hebrides, and in the description of one the reader may perhaps find the likeness of others of which he has himself been fond, for these places are symbols. Symbols, for me and for many, of freedom, whether it be from the prison of over-dense communities and the close confines of human relationships, from the less complex incarceration of office walls and hours, or simply freedom from the prison of adult life and an escape into the forgotten world of childhood, of the individual or the race. For I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it.

This book, then, is about my life in a lonely cottage on the north-west coast of Scotland, about animals that have shared it with me, and about others who are my only immediate neighbours in a landscape of rock and sea.

Gavin Maxwell

Camusfeàrna, October 1959

1

I sit in a pitch-pine panelled kitchen-living room, with an otter asleep upon its back among the cushions on the sofa, forepaws in the air, and with the expression of tightly shut concentration that very small babies wear in sleep. On the stone slab beneath the chimney-piece are inscribed the words Non fatuum huc persecutus ignem – ‘It is no will-o’-the-wisp that I have followed here.’ Beyond the door is the sea, whose waves break on the beach no more than a stone’s throw distant, and encircling, mist-hung mountains. A little group of greylag geese sweep past the window and alight upon the small carpet of green turf; but for the soft, contented murmur of their voices and the sounds of the sea and the waterfall there is utter silence. This place has been my home now for ten years and more, and wherever the changes of my life may lead me in the future it will remain my spiritual home until I die, a house to which one returns not with the certainty of welcoming fellow human beings, nor with the expectation of comfort and ease, but to a long familiarity in which every lichen-covered rock and rowan tree show known and reassuring faces.

I had not thought that I should ever come back to live in the West Highlands; when my earlier sojourn in the Hebrides had come to an end it had in retrospect seemed episodic, and its finish uncompromisingly final. The thought of return had savoured of a jilted lover pleading with an indifferent mistress upon whom he had no further claim; it seemed to me then that it was indeed a will-o’-the-wisp that I had followed, for I had yet to learn that happiness can neither be achieved nor held by endeavour.

Immediately after the war’s end I bought the Island of Soay, some four thousand acres of relatively low-lying ‘black’ land cowering below the bare pinnacles and glacial corries of the Cuillin of Skye. There, seventeen miles by sea from the railway, I tried to found a new industry for the tiny and discontented population of the island, by catching and processing for oil the great basking sharks that appear in Hebridean waters during the summer months. I built a factory, bought boats and equipped them with harpoon guns, and became a harpoon gunner myself. For five years I worked in that landscape that before had been, for me, of a nebulous and cobwebby romance, and by the time it was all over and I was beaten I had in some way come to terms with the Highlands – or with myself, for perhaps in my own eyes I had earned the right to live among them.

When the Soay venture was finished, the island and the boats sold, the factory demolished, and the population evacuated, I went to London and tried to earn my living as a portrait painter. One autumn I was staying with an Oxford contemporary who had bought an estate in the West Highlands, and in an idle moment after breakfast on a Sunday morning he said to me:

‘Do you want a foothold on the west coast, now that you have lost Soay? If you’re not too proud to live in a cottage, we’ve got an empty one, miles from anywhere. It’s right on the sea and there’s no road to it – Camusfeàrna, it’s called. There’s some islands, and an automatic lighthouse. There’s been no one there for a long time, and I’d never get any of the estate people to live in it now. If you’ll keep it up you’re welcome to it.’

It was thus casually, ten years ago, that I was handed the keys of my home, and nowhere in all the West Highlands and islands have I seen any place of so intense or varied a beauty in so small a compass.

The road, single-tracked for the past forty miles, and reaching in the high passes a gradient of one in three, runs southwards a mile or so inland of Camusfeàrna and some four hundred feet above it. At the point on the road which is directly above the house there is a single cottage at the roadside, Druimfiaclach, the home of my friends and nearest neighbours, the MacKinnons. Inland from Druimfiaclach the hills rise steeply but in rolling masses to a dominating peak of more than three thousand feet, snow-covered or snow-dusted for the greater part of the year. On the other side, to the westward, the Isle of Skye towers across a three-mile-wide sound, and farther to the south the stark bastions of Rhum and the couchant lion of Eigg block the sea horizon. The descent to Camusfeàrna is so steep that neither the house nor its islands and lighthouses are visible from the road above, and that paradise within a paradise remains, to the casual road-user, unguessed. Beyond Druimfiaclach the road seems, as it were, to become dispirited, as though already conscious of its dead end at sea-level six miles farther on, caught between the terrifying massif of mountain scree overhanging it and the dark gulf of sea loch below.

Druimfiaclach is a tiny oasis in a wilderness of mountain and peat-bog, and it is a full four miles from the nearest roadside dwelling. An oasis, an eyrie; the windows of the house look westward over the Hebrides and over the Tyrian sunsets that flare and fade behind their peaks, and when the sun has gone and the stars are bright the many lighthouses of the reefs and islands gleam and wink above the surf. In the westerly gales of winter the walls of Druimfiaclach rock and shudder, and heavy stones are roped to the corrugated iron roof to prevent it blowing away as other roofs here have gone before. The winds rage in from the Atlantic and the hail roars and batters on the windows and the iron roof, all hell let loose, but the house stands and the MacKinnons remain here as, nearby, the forefathers of them both remained for many generations.

It seems strange to me now that there was a time when I did not know the MacKinnons, strange that the first time I came to live at Camusfeàrna I should have passed their house by a hundred yards and left my car by the roadside without greeting or acknowledgement of a dependence now long established. I remember seeing some small children staring from the house door; I cannot now recall my first meeting with their parents.

I left my car at a fank, a dry-stone enclosure for dipping sheep, close to the burn side, and because I was unfamiliar with the ill-defined footpath that is the more usual route from the road to Camusfeàrna, I began to follow the course of the burn downward. The burn has its source far back in the hills, near to the very summit of the dominant peak; it has worn a fissure in the scarcely sloping mountain wall, and for the first thousand feet of its course it part flows, part falls, chill as snow-water even in summer, between tumbled boulders and small multi-coloured lichens. Up there, where it seems the only moving thing besides the eagles, the deer and the ptarmigan, it is called the Blue Burn, but at the foot of the outcrop, where it passes through a reedy lochan and enters a wide glacial glen it takes the name of its destination – Allt na Feàrna, the Alder Burn. Here in the glen the clear topaz-coloured water rushes and twitters between low oaks, birches and alders, at whose feet the deep-cushioned green moss is stippled with bright toadstools of scarlet and purple and yellow, and in summer swarms of electric-blue dragonflies flicker and hover in the glades.

After some four miles the burn passes under the road at Druimfiaclach, a stone’s throw from the fank where I had left my car. It was early spring when I came to live at Camusfeàrna for the first time, and the grass at the burn side was gay with thick-clustering primroses and violets, though the snow was still heavy on the high peaks and lay like lace over the lower hills of Skye across the Sound. The air was fresh and sharp, and from east to west and north to south there was not a single cloud upon the cold clear blue; against it, the still-bare birch branches were purple in the sun and the dark-banded stems were as white as the distant snows. On the sunny slopes grazing Highland cattle made a foreground to a landscape whose vivid colours had found no place on Landseer’s palette. A rucksack bounced and jingled on my shoulders; I was coming to my new home.

I was not quite alone, for in front of me trotted my dog Jonnie, a huge black-and-white springer spaniel whose father and grandfather before him had been my constant companions during an adolescence devoted largely to sport. We were brought up to shoot, and by the curious paradox that those who are fondest of animals become, in such an environment, most bloodthirsty at a certain stage of their development, shooting occupied much of my time and thoughts during my school and university years. Many people find an especial attachment for a dog whose companionship has bridged widely different phases in their lives, and so it was with Jonnie; he and his forebears had spanned my boyhood, maturity, and the war years, and though since then I had found little leisure nor much inclination for shooting, Jonnie adapted himself placidly to a new role, and I remember how during the shark fishery years he would, unprotesting, arrange himself to form a pillow for my head in the well of an open boat as it tossed and pitched in the waves.

Now Jonnie’s plump white rump bounced and perked through the heather and bracken in front of me, as times without number at night I was in the future to follow its pale just-discernible beacon through the darkness from Druimfiaclach to Camusfeàrna.

Presently the burn became narrower, and afforded no foothold at its steep banks, then it tilted sharply seaward between rock walls, and below me I could hear the roar of a high waterfall. I climbed out from the ravine and found myself on a bluff of heather and red bracken, looking down upon the sea and upon Camusfeàrna.

The landscape and seascape that lay spread below me was of such beauty that I had no room for it all at once; my eye flickered from the house to the islands, from the white sands to the flat green pasture round the croft, from the wheeling gulls to the pale satin sea and on to the snow-topped Cuillins of Skye in the distance.

Immediately below me the steep hillside of heather and ochre mountain grasses fell to a broad green field, almost an island, for the burn flanked it at the right and then curved round seaward in a glittering horseshoe. The sea took up where the burn left off and its foreshore formed the whole frontage of the field, running up nearest to me into a bay of rocks and sand. At the edge of this bay, a stone’s throw from the sea on one side and the burn on the other, the house of Camusfeàrna stood unfenced in green grass among grazing black-faced sheep. The field, except immediately opposite to the house, sloped gently upwards from the sea, and was divided from it by a ridge of sand dunes grown over with pale marram grass and tussocky sea-bents. There were rabbits scampering on the short turf round the house, and out over the dunes the bullet heads of two seals were black in the tide.

Beyond the green field and the wide shingly outflow of the burn were the islands, the nearer ones no more than a couple of acres each, rough and rocky, with here and there a few stunted rowan trees and the sun red on patches of dead bracken. The islands formed a chain of perhaps half a mile in length, and ended in one as big as the rest put together, on whose seaward shore showed the turret of a lighthouse. Splashed among the chain of islands were small beaches of sand so white as to dazzle the eye. Beyond the islands was the shining enamelled sea, and beyond it again the rearing bulk of Skye, plum-coloured distances embroidered with threads and scrolls of snow.

Even at a distance Camusfeàrna house wore that strange look that comes to dwellings after long disuse. It is indefinable, and it is not produced by obvious signs of neglect; Camusfeàrna had few slates missing from the roof and the windows were all intact, but the house wore that secretive expression that is in some way akin to a young girl’s face during her first pregnancy.

As I went on down the steep slope two other buildings came into view tucked close under the skirt of the hill, a byre facing Camusfeàrna across the green turf, and an older, windowless, croft at the very sea’s edge, so close to the waves that I wondered how the house had survived. Later, I learned that the last occupants had been driven from it by a great storm which had brought the sea right into the house, so that they had been forced to make their escape by a window at the back.

At the foot of the hill the burn flowed calmly between an avenue of single alders, though the sound of unseen waterfalls was loud in the rock ravine behind me. I crossed a solid wooden bridge with stone piers, and a moment later I turned the key in Camusfeàrna door for the first time.