Galloway Life in a vanishing landscape

Conservationist, author, and farmer Laurie affectionately introduces his corner of Scotland, the open, windswept, southwest region of Galloway, completely unlike the highlands associated with that country. After leaving the land of his ancestors for college, Laurie returns with his wife, purchases a small farm, and embarks on a journey raising Galloway cattle, hay, and oats while observing the changing habits of curlews, native shorebirds. Throughout, Laurie examines the struggle of tradition and nostalgia versus progress and innovation, and how modernization is damaging both the terrain and the beloved wildlife inhabiting it. He writes lyrically about his small herd of Riggit cattle and his crops, their successful growth contrasted with his and his wife's fertility struggles. Organized around a calendar year, the account brims with beautiful details of farm life, complemented perfectly by Sharon Tingey's penciled illustrations. Narrated in Laurie's Scottish voice, this paean to simpler times is reminiscent of James Herriot's writings about Yorkshire and well worth a read.

Journalist Laurie shines in his debut, a heartstring-tugging and beautifully written account of farming in his ancestral home of Galloway, an obscure region in Scotland that had once been an independent kingdom. Blending arch humor ("Tourism operators say we are 'Scotland's best-kept secret,' and tourists support that claim by ignoring us") with evocative prose, Laurie shares stories of his experience raising a rare breed of cattle native to the region on his family's farm, in an attempt to commune with the land his forefathers worked, a place that's "been overlooked so long that we have fallen off the map." To give a better, if disheartening, sense of the ways in which the region's rich history has changed, he looks at the fate of Galloway's curlews: birds that belong to the sandpiper family that nest in the local fields. The curlews had been an integral part of Laurie's childhood, their call, a "grasping, bellyroll of belonging in the space between rough grass and tall skies." Though they had once been ubiquitous, he writes, their population has declined dramatically, due to the recent destruction of their habitat by policymakers' push for commercial forests in the area. Like the bittersweet cry of the curlew, Laurie's lyrical tribute will be hard to forget. Agent: Jenny Brown, Jenny Brown Assoc. (Nov.)

A Scottish farmer paints an intimate portrait of his home turf. "I'm too late to know the old world, and too early to forget it," writes Laurie. "I'm stuck in the middle and I'm scarred by the loss of wide places and lonely, calling birds." Galloway, a small region of southwestern Scotland that ends in the Solway Firth, was once a region of grass and rock, lately covered up with commercial tree farms. That forestation has had material effects on two of Laurie's prime subjects: It has ruined the grassy habitat of the curlew, a migratory shorebird, and it has deprived the ancient Riggits breed of cattle, "prized for their ability to graze on rough forage and then transform those thistles into high-quality meat." Readers will learn just about all there is to know about both animals in the course of this appealing chronicle, organized to follow a farmer's year, with month-by-month chapters and a lagniappe to honor the summer solstice. The education parallels Laurie's own: He learns by doing and by talking to the fast-disappearing old-timers, their crofts turned into retirement cottages for wealthy people from south of the border. Some of what he learns turns out to be invaluable, some not quite so much, as when an old gamekeeper swears by the presence of a phantom: "Craigie herons aren't magical or special beyond the realm of other birds; they just don't exist." Laurie's narrative is a celebration of farming and the rural life, hard as it may be. "Owning and working land is no automatic joy," he writes. "There's no escape from undone chores and the smell of shit on your boots." More than anything else, the book is also a requiem, as when Laurie laments that "things collapse at such a rate that soon we'll look back on all the names we had for birds and wonder why we ever needed them." A lyrical, keenly observed addition to the top shelf of British nature writing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.