Galloway
Life In a Vanishing Landscape
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
On the land of his ancestors in Scotland, a young farmer struggles to find a balance between farming, the conservation of wild, and human culture as he establishes a herd of heritage cattle.
Galloway, an ancient region in an obscure corner of Scotland, has a proud and unique heritage based on hardy cattle and wide moors. But as the twentieth century progressed, the people of Galloway deserted the land and the moors are transforming into a vast commercial forest.
Desperate to connect with his native land, Patrick Laurie plunges into work on his family farm. Investing in the oldest and most traditional breeds of Galloway cattle, he begins to discover how cows—and the special care that this breed requires—once shaped people, places, and nature in this remote and half-hidden place. As the cattle begin to dictate the pattern of his life, Laurie stumbles upon another loss; the new forests have driven the catastrophic decline of the much-loved curlew, a bird that features strongly in Galloway's consciousness. The links between people, cattle, and wild birds become a central theme as Laurie begins to face the reality of life in a vanishing landscape. Exploring the delicate balance between farming and conservation while recounting an extraordinarily powerful personal story, Galloway delves into the relationship between people and places under pressure in the modern world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
