Galloway: Life in a Vanishing Landscape
Patrick Laurie
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Galloway: Life in a Vanishing Landscape
Patrick Laurie
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
... what makes Laurie’s book so remarkable, and so profoundly enjoyable to read, is that for him, many of these decisions seem almost instinctive. He follows his heart, in choosing his patch of land, the breed of cattle he loves, and the presence of curlews as a measure of the health of the landscape; and often, it seems as though the Galloway land itself, on which his family has lived for centuries, is breathing and speaking through him, sometimes driving his prose to extraordinary heights and depths of rich, sweet lyricism. At some moments it’s hard not to think of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s heroine Chris Guthrie in Sunset Song; and his extraordinary power to conjure up in words her passionate love for the land of the Mearns, and its old farming ways.
This is a book about a place you will probably have never visited and never will: but you should read it nonetheless because what it says has a wider importance, about some of what we have got wrong in the way we respect nature and farming and what we might get right if we change our ways.
Whether handling his kye or repairing the farm’s one-gear tractor, Laurie has an authentic ability to balance the pains and joys of small farming.
Laurie has a descriptive talent, finding beauty and meaning in whatever he surveys.
His descriptions of these [farm] venerable contraptions are thrilling to read and include a stirring paean to a baler, the Hayliner.
[Laurie] 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..
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 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'.
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.