Song of the Rolling Earth: A Highland Odyssey

"Again, it’s another book that gives us the story of the Highlands through a small sliver of it. John has an estate that he bought from the Highland Council. He’s written many books, but Song of the Rolling Earth tells the story of how he bought Aigas, set up a field studies centre, and what it taught him about Scottish history, natural history, geography, archaeology. He tackles aspects of Scottish history like the Highland Clearances, the Jacobite Uprisings, and so forth. But he doesn’t get wrapped up in it. He has careful and beautifully observed descriptions of nature and wildlife and his daily routine—how, as he walked through the estate, he learned more about nature, wildlife, and the more enriching these walks became. It’s a lesson to us all about walking in the same places over and over. This happened to me when I was ill. I could only manage short walks, but they became more intense. One of the interesting things is that he was talking about rewilding long before ‘rewilding’ ever became a term. This is a word bandied around a lot now, and is controversial in some areas. Lister Kaye talks about the ‘retreeing’ of the riverbanks and the ‘re-treeing’ of a little island that appears after a storm flood in the river. After a few years, it starts to grow birch saplings. In actual fact it’s rewilding, and it shows he’s astute enough and wise enough to present this as something we should all be thinking about. It’s another book that shows how we are all interconnected: wildlife, people, landscape, climate. There are threads and entanglements between the elemental and the human. He’s one of the few writers who can articulate this, and he expresses his love for the Highlands from start to finish."