Wild Knowing

A heart-warming memoir of leaving the city behind to build a new life among the wild beauty of the Hebrides.

When Fiona is given an old family ledger, she has no idea it will redirect the course of her life. With her husband, children, dogs and elderly father in tow, she exchanges the pressures of city living for sea air, open skies and a remote croft on a wave-washed island off the coast of Argyll.

Here, life is shaped by the land and the needs of 48 magnificent Highland cows. From the intensity of calving season to the long, vigilance of winter, the rhythms of the herd dictate each day. As Fiona learns to care for them, she begins to see the world differently, guided less by certainty than by instinct, patience and a deepening awareness to the living world around her.

Over the turning seasons, what begins as a leap into the unknown becomes something steadier and more profound. In raising her cattle, Fiona finds herself drawn into a deeper kind of knowing, one that binds her to the landscape and draws her towards a sense of belonging she had never expected to find.

Warm, richly evocative and uplifting, Wild Knowing is a story of starting again, of what animals can teach us, and of finding home in the most unexpected of places.