My latest book, Wild Winter, released on the 1st April 2021.
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WILD WINTER IS ABOUT A JOURNEY my journey through this the greatest of seasons in the Highlands. When I set out to write the book in the Autumn of 2019 I wanted to write a diary of my winter in the Highlands of Scotland and my quest to see the iconic creatures who live here.
It seemed simple enough, I would begin in October, with the rutting of the Red Deer, and follow the course of the Winter through to May when the season ends on the high tops and the fawns, conceived in the rut of the previous year, lay hidden in the heather.
I realise now I was wildly ambitious. I wanted to watch whales in the seas of the Isle of Mull and to encounter wild cat in remote Morven. I wanted to watch beaver and to find elusive pine marten. I discovered that wild life doesn’t like to be organised. If you go looking for an animal you’ll never find it but if you forget you are looking for it you’ll probably trip over it on the way to a bothy.
What I couldn’t have known was that this winter would be a winter like no other. That Covid-19 would rob most of us of the chance to roam in wild places. By the end of the winter I had become a prisoner in my home. The danger was out beyond the windows I found myself staring through. The outdoors, my life long friend, had become not only a stranger but an enemy. Like all journeys it is not the landscape that changes but the traveller.
Join me as I travel into the heart of the icy Cairngorms and explore its frozen bothies. Come along on my sojourns in the empty vastness of Sutherland to see seal pups. Shiver with me in the woods of the Black Isle as I wait for a pine marten to emerge from the dark forest.
It is a journey worth the taking