Ring of Bright Water. Gavin Maxwell
facing 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.
Camusfeàrna
Camusfeàrna was a real place, but even more it was a world of the imagination. It failed spectacularly as a reality, but it will last forever as an imagined creation. The passages of rich scenic description in the early pages of Ring of Bright Water could hardly be bettered, but one sentence later in the book seems to capture the idyllic dream completely, ‘That summer at Camusfeàrna seemed to go on and on through timeless hours of sunshine and stillness and the dapple of changing cloud shadow upon the shoulder of the hills.’ The tiny world of the actual place has been expanded by art to become a timeless and all-encompassing universe, and it offers the promise of happiness of a golden age. This is what still brings pilgrims to place sea shells on the boulder marking Gavin’s grave, much like those other readers and pilgrims who place stones on the cairn marking the site of Thoreau’s house at Walden Pond.
Perhaps the element in this narrative that is most fascinating and gives the story its fame, is Gavin’s intense engagement with the three foreign otters (one from Iraq and two from West Africa) against the backdrop of the natural landscape with its waterfall, encircling ‘ring of bright water’, sea coast and lonely house. They were not native wildlife, but alien, controlled, exotic fauna that introduced a new personality into the Scottish landscape. Gavin slept with them in the house, played with them in the sea, exchanged saliva with them, and in some sense tragically mismanaged them.
Maxwell once described Ring of Bright Water, as ‘no more than a kind of personal diary’, much as Thoreau pretended that Walden was just the chronicle of one year’s life in the woods – ‘and the second year was similar to it.’ But both are carefully designed narratives that in some ways may be called fiction: the actual events and observations may be true, but so selected, arranged, and concentrated through literary art that the narrative becomes a kind of fiction and has 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; he first took possession of the house in the autumn of 1948, and he kept up that residence until January 1968. This trilogy presents in edited form 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, describing the simple, idyllic paradise that has enchanted readers throughout the world. The Rocks Remain (1963) and Raven Seek Thy Brother (1968), very different books from their predecessor, recount the last decade.
It has been possible to combine these three books into one volume largely due to the content of the two later books both of which contain much narrative material extraneous to the story of Maxwell’s Scottish home. Some of this writing set in Morocco, Majorca, Iceland, etc. is wonderful, but has no place in our story, and it is distracting to the tale set in Scotland.
Although the first book, Ring of Bright Water, is Maxwell’s masterpiece, the book everybody knows, it plays a different and almost subordinate role here, only the first section of a more extensive, personal, dramatic and entirely different story. It 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 portions of The Rocks Remain and Raven Seek Thy Brother, Maxwell compares the before and after: with the changes brought about by the prosperity that came with the first book’s huge success a manifest decline began in almost every happiness that Camusfeàrna had represented.
First, the telephone and electricity, an intrusion of the outside world into the paradise that was ‘almost an island’; an attempt to keep two African otters at the same time (they turned out to be ferociously hostile to each other), requiring extensive and ugly building construction and a salaried keeper for each animal; boat accidents, accidents in and out of the house, a dangerous breakdown in the relationships with both otters; vast expenses, growing swings of fortune and misfortune; anxiety about the management of an increasingly complicated life; mistakes and misjudgments, serious illnesses; all of this recounted by Maxwell as a downward spiral of his existence.
But in spite of the litany of disasters and the unrelenting march of calamitous adversity over a period of years, a moving redemption comes towards the end with a restoration of love and trust in the relationship with the otters, and a momentary restoration of the feeling of the old life there.
Gavin Maxwell’s legacy may well include his undoubted influence in shaping public opinion to put an end to the tradition and practice of otter hunting, a cruel sport with no purpose to it. 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 support for otter conservation that has continued to the present day. Gavin’s contribution to saving the otters was immeasurable.’
But his greatest legacy has to be the creation of that place he called Camusfeàrna, an imperishable small spot on the map of Scotland, ‘sky, shore, and silver sea,’ where the imagination can go in a dream and which he marked down on the world map of literature.
AUSTIN CHINN
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,