Beyond pretty

For the last 30 years John Lister-Kaye has lived at Aigas, in the valley of the River Beauly, seven or eight miles from the sea and half an hour west of Inverness.

For the last 30 years John Lister-Kaye has lived at Aigas, in the valley of the River Beauly, seven or eight miles from the sea and half an hour west of Inverness. This is not Mongolia or Greenland and the personal quest for wildness which this book records is no tale of courage in the distant wastes. It is written at home, the gleanings from a daily stroll around his own heart-shaped loch, eight acres of water caught in the glen just above his house (and the nature centre he runs there).

There is a model for this, which Lister-Kaye invokes: Thoreau’s shed in the woods at Walden Pond, where, a five-minute drive from the centre of Concord, and with his mother’s cooking and laundry facilities to hand, the great Transcendentalist confronted the sublime realities of American nature.