Ring of Bright Water. Gavin Maxwell

       Introduction

      ‘THAT WAS Camusfeàrna down there,’ said my hiking companion. 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. Then I realized that we were standing on the very 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 my companion 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.

      It was a marvelous bright day with tremendous scenery, and under the cloudless blue vault of sky, a calm shimmering sea below stretched out on the right to that vanishing point where the sea and the sky meet. We saw eagles and ptarmigan, and a single one-antlered stag, almost berserk with joy at finding himself alone with forty hinds, raced about thrusting his one antler at every female within reach. But it was the glimpse of Camusfeàrna that remained my most vivid recollection.

      Three years later in different company on a Highland moor, I chanced to mention something about the life of Gavin Maxwell, and one of the company 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 – I still had read only Ring of Bright Water – but strangely I did not seek further enlightenment, again only letting this sit somewhere in my mind.

      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.

      This is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ring of Bright Water, the first book of the present trilogy, which has achieved great and widespread fame as a modern classic in its time, and still retains some of that to the present day. Its overwhelming reception in the early 1960s, producing a readership of well over a million people 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.

      Today’s readers might well respond even more strongly to this story as an antidote to the dominance of a technological culture, and the broad detachment of humanity from the natural world. When Gavin wrote in 1959, ‘I am convinced that Man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world,’ he could not have imagined how extreme this separation would be in the early twenty-first century. The pervasive impersonal, electronic world that frames our personal, intellectual and social lives, along with an associated materialism, makes Camusfeàrna an even more compelling ideal than it was half a century ago.

      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 ninth and tenth centuries Celtic hermit monks lived in solitary dwellings on the coasts