The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE RING OF BRIGHT WATER TRILOGY

  Gavin Maxwell was born in 1914. In 1945 he bought the small Hebridean island of Soay and tried to establish a shark fishery. This resulted in his first book, Harpoon at a Venture. His other books include Ring of Bright Water, which sold more than a million copies in English, The Rocks Remain, The House of Elrig and Raven Seek Thy Brother. Gavin Maxwell died in 1969.

  Austin Chinn studied Classics at Harvard before becoming editor of the Phoenix, a literary magazine. He then moved into the advertising and film business in New York, taught Latin and Greek and is now living and writing in Vermont. He is a frequent visitor to Scotland.

  THE RING OF BRIGHT WATER TRILOGY

  Gavin Maxwell

  Edited, with an introduction by Austin Chinn

  Foreword by Jimmy

  Watt Afterword by Virginia McKenna

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York. New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL. England

  www.penguin.com

  This trilogy edition first published by Viking 2000

  Published in Penguin Books 2001

  10

  Copyright © Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd 2000

  Introduction © Austin Chinn 2000

  Foreword © Jimmy Wart 2000

  Afterword © Virginia McKenna 2000

  All rights reserved

  Ring of Bright Water

  First published by Longmans Green & Co 1960

  Copyright © Gavin Maxwell 1960

  Tlie Rocks Remain

  First published by Longmans Green & Co 1963

  Copyright © Gavin Maxwell 1963

  Raven Seek Thy Brother

  First published by Longmans Green & Co 1968

  Copyright © Gavin Maxwell 1968

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192720-6

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Map of Scotland

  Foreword by Jimmy Watt

  Introduction by Austin Chinn

  RING OF BRIGHT WATER

  THE ROCKS REMAIN

  RAVEN SEEK THY BROTHER

  Afterword by Virginia McKenna

  List of Illustrations

  Section

  1

  Page

  1

  Above: Highland Landscape.

  Below: View of CamusfeĈrna.

  2

  Above: Gavin Maxwell in the doorway at CamusfeĈrna (Robin McEwen).

  Below: The kitchen fireside with the Latin inscription below the mantelpiece.

  3

  Above: The waterfall.

  Below: Mijbil in the bay.

  4&5

  Mijbil with Kathleen Raine and at play.

  6

  Above: The greylag geese flying.

  Below: Calum Murdo Mackinnon.

  7

  Above: CamusfeĈrna.

  Below: Gavin Maxwell with Edal in a chair (Jimmy Watt).

  8

  Above: Edal and Jimmy Watt.

  Below: Edal at the shoreline.

  Section

  2

  Page

  1

  Above: Jimmy Watt with Edal.

  Below: Jimmy Watt and Edal on the hillside above the bay.

  2&3

  Edal at play.

  4

  Edal at the waterfall

  5

  Above: The otter pool.

  Below: Edal in her new quarters.

  6

  Above: CamusfeĈrna.

  Below: Mossy and Monday.

  7

  The Ring of Bright Water (Jimmy Watt).

  8

  Above: The burn frozen over in the winter of 1661↣62.

  Below: CamusfeĈrna under snow.

  Section

  3

  Page

  1

  Above: Edal and Teko walking on the beach.

  Below: Dirk chasing Teko.

  2

  Above: Gavin with Edal (Jimmy Watt).

  Below: Gavin and Edal indoors (Jimmy Watt).

  3

  Above: The shoreline.

  Below: Jimmy with the greylag geese.

  4&5

  Terry with Teko (Jimmy Watt).

  6

  Above: The Polar Star (Jimmy Watt).

  Below: Isle Ornsay showing the lighthouse and the cottages.

  7

  Above: One of the beaches at CamusfeĈrna.

  Below: The shore.

  8

  Above: Kyleakin lighthouse on Eilean Ban.

  Below: Kyleakin lighthouse and cottages.

  Acknowledgements

  The editor and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce the following material: Miss Kathleen Raine and Messrs. Hamish Hamilton Ltd for ‘The Ring’ from Year One from which the title of Ring of Bright Water is taken; the literary agents of the late Mr Ernest Thompson Seton for an extract from Life Histories of Northern Animals, published by Constable; Laurence Pollinger Ltd, Jonathan Cape Ltd and Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., for permission to quote from Robert Frost’s poem ‘Fire and Ice’.

  The drawings in the text of Ring of Bright Water are all by Peter Scott with the following exceptions: pp. 10, 112 by Robin McEwan; p. 62 by Gavin Maxwell; p. 130 by Michael Ayrton.

  The drawings in the text of The Rocks Remain are: pp. 173, 178, 192, 199, 233, 250 by Peter Scott; p. 181 by Gavin Maxwell and pp. 187, 207, 223, 237, 256 by Robin McEwan.

  The drawings in the text of Raven Seek Thy Brother are all by Robin McEwan with the following exceptions by Peter Scott: pp. 266, 295, 300, 306, 407.

  Most of the photographs are by Gavin Maxwell, with the following exceptions: Robin McEwen – Section 1, page 2, top; Jimmy Watt — Section 1, page 7, bottom; Section 2, page 7; Section 3, page 2, top and bottom; page 4, bottom; page 5, bottom; page 6, top.

  Foreword

  Camusfeàrna is the name Gavin Maxwell gave to what is really called Sandaig. Sandaig is near the village of Glenelg and means ‘sand bay’. Gavin’s ashes are buried there; a large boulder marks the spot, with a bronze plaque fixed to it saying Gavin Maxwell b 15.7.14 d 7.9.69. A few yards away the memorial to Edal stands under the rowan tree, now dead; in a year or two there will be no trace of it. On Edal’s bronze plaque are the words Whatever joy she gave to you, give back to nature.

  Many hundreds of people visit Sandaig every year; most of them feel it is a place of serenity and beauty with many echoes of the past. I lived there for seven years, and it wasn’t all serenity then, but there were many happy
times. Perhaps the most joyous was when we were on the green island (at low tide one can walk there). We heard the call of geese high in the clear autumn air and called up ‘chck-chck-chck’ at the tops of our voices; and the geese we had reared, and who had flown away in the spring, circled and lost height by dipping a wing as geese do, and with a huge clamour of greeting landed on the sand at our feet. It was a moment of overflowing joy that these wild creatures had chosen to return.

  Gavin Maxwell is remembered as someone who brought to many an awareness of the need to take care of our fellow inhabitants of this vulnerable earth.

  I now live within sight of Sandaig and on stormy days when the ebb tide meets the south-west wind, I can look through the spray to the bright white sand where the geese landed that memorable day.

  Jimmy Watt

  Glenelg, September 1999

  Introduction

  ‘That was Camusfeàrna down there,’ said John Pargeter. We were on the high backbone of Sleat, the southern peninsula of the Isle of Skye, looking down across the Sound of Sleat to a group of small islands and a little bay on the mainland shore of Scotland’s west coast directly opposite.

  I could see what appeared to be a miniature lighthouse on one of the islands and a low white house set back from the beach at the bottom of a steep coastal drop with a high mountain rising straight up behind it.

  It was a shock of recognition, for unexpectedly I had come across the famous setting of Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water, and what had been for me, up to that moment, a literary landscape whose real location was unknown suddenly revealed itself before my eyes as an actual, physical landscape. And almost immediately I realized that we were standing on the ground from which Maxwell used to hear the stags roaring in the early autumn – ‘I hear them first on the steep slopes of Skye across the Sound, a wild haunting primordial sound that belongs so utterly to the north…’

  As if reading what might be in my mind John said, ‘That croft you see is not the house – the house burned down.’ Unexpected, too, this information about the later history of the place; I had read only Ring of Bright Water, and knew nothing beyond it. For some reason I did not ask John Pargeter when or how the house had burned down, or anything else about the story, but the question and the thought remained in the back of my mind.

  And although we were on those steep slopes in pursuit of deer, and it was a marvellous bright day with tremendous scenery, a thrilling, if bloodless, stalk, and eagles and ptarmigan seen, it was the glimpse of Camusfeàrna from several miles away that remained my most vivid recollection.

  Three years later, on a Highland moor, I chanced to mention something about the life of Gavin Maxwell to Colin McKelvie, and he said, ‘Yes, there was the curse of the rowan tree, the house burned down, and the fire killed the otters.’ More enigmatic pieces of information, hints, or rumours (I still had read only Ring), but strangely I did not pursue further enlightenment, again only letting this sit somewhere in my mind.

  But not long after that I happened upon the two sequel books about Camusfeàrna, neither of which I had known existed, in a couple of second-hand bookstores, and I found them in the order of their publication – first The Rocks Remain, then Raven Seek Thy Brother. So I finally learned, through Maxwell’s own writings, about the remaining story right up to its end.

  The first book of this trilogy, Ring of Bright Water, has achieved the status of a classic. Its overwhelming reception in the early 1960s, which produced a readership of well over a million on both sides of the Atlantic, may owe something to the culture of that particular time which seized upon the compelling presentation of an attainable Eden in the world of the here and now.

  Maxwell’s notion of living in a paradise of nature in such a place has a precursor far back in time; the isolated location of Camusfeàrna on the edge of the sea, surrounded by rocks, trees and mountains, in a life of close proximity to wildlife hearkens back to an older tradition in the very same landscape. In the 9th and 10th centuries Celtic hermit monks lived in solitary dwellings on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland, especially on those coastal slopes facing (like Camusfeàrna) south and west, and they wrote Gaelic nature poetry of a very high order. Often they also described the wild creatures they lived near and wrote about as beloved friends.

  Since the first publication of Ring forty years ago it has remained in print with a steadily growing number of later admirers (like myself), and its fame, while not as sensational and widespread as it was a generation and more ago, is remarkably undiminished. If it continues to be read in the future, as I believe it will, it may even be admired in quite a different way from the present, in a different time and by a different culture, for the permanent texts have a life of their own.

  Gavin Maxwell once described Ring of Bright Water, perhaps slightly disingenuously, as ‘no more than a kind of personal diary’, which it decidedly is not; it is a carefully designed narrative that in some ways may be called a fiction. That is, he tells true things, but so selected, arranged, and concentrated through literary art that the narrative becomes a kind of fiction. This is not unlike another famous ‘personal diary’, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. (There are some interesting similarities between the two books, and it is only speculation on my part, but I believe that Maxwell may have had Walden partly in his mind when he wrote Ring of Bright Water.) The narrative may be true, but the art gives it the kind of intensity that only fiction possesses.

  The present work contains the three books about Gavin Maxwell’s life at Camusfeàrna from 1948 to 1968. Although he first took possession of the house in the autumn of 1948 he did not maintain residence there until the spring of 1949, and he kept up that residence until January 1968. This trilogy presents to the reading public for the first time the entire story by Maxwell, in a single, unbroken narrative, of his tenure at the place he called ‘Camusfeàrna’, a fictional name he gave to a real place in order to emphasize its symbolic topography.

  Ring of Bright Water, which Maxwell finished writing in October 1959, chronicles roughly the first ten years of his life there (a little more than half the total), describing the simple, idyllic paradise existence that has enchanted a vast and uncountable number of readers throughout the world. The Rocks Remain (1963) and Raven Seek Thy Brother (1968), very different books from their predecessor, recount the last eight or nine years (slightly less than half the total).

  It has been possible to combine these three books into one volume largely due to the content of Rocks and Raven, both of which contain much narrative material extraneous to the story of Maxwell’s home, ‘The Bay of the Alders’, on the Scottish coast. Some of this writing set in Morocco, Majorca, Iceland, etc. is good in itself, but has no place in our story, and its inclusion in the published books is distracting to the tale set in Scotland. I suspect that it might have been slightly less painful to write a distressing account, the unravelling of the Camusfeàrna vision, in broken-up sections mixed in with other narratives than to give it all the undiluted form that it has in the present volume.

  Despite the obvious exclusion of the ‘outside’ material, space requirements demanded further cuts in both books, some of which were regrettable even if necessary. And Ring of Bright Water has not been spared either, cut by about thirty per cent. Though at first I was dismayed at the violence such cutting did to the careful balance of that book, Ring plays a different and almost subordinate role here, being only the first chapter of a larger, more extensive, more personal, and entirely different story.

  Ring is the first chapter, point of reference, and partly the cause of the failure of the single vision of simplicity and harmony told within its pages. Again and again in the dark chapters of Rocks and Raven Maxwell compares the before and after – with the changes brought about by the prosperity of the first book’s huge success a manifest decline began in almost every happiness that Camusfearna had represented.

  First, the telephone and electricity, then a second otter requiring extensive (and ugly) building
construction to house both otters; boats and boat accidents, accidents in and out of the house, a dangerous breakdown in the relationships with both otters, huge expenses, growing swings of fortune and misfortune, anxiety about the management of an increasingly complicated life, mistakes and misjudgements, serious illnesses; all of this recounted by Maxwell as a downward spiral of his existence.

  But despite the litany of disasters and the unrelenting march of calamitous adversity over a period of years, a moving redemption comes at the very end of this story with a restoration of the relationships with the otters and a momentary restoration of the feeling of the old life there.

  At the end of this essay a mention might be made about Maxwell’s effect upon an aspect of history, if that is not too grand a concept. Cyril Connolly (the previous owner of Maxwell’s terrible pet lemur, Kiko) writes in the opening sentence of The Unquiet Grave, ‘… the true function of any writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence’. We may grant Gavin Maxwell the accomplishment of a masterpiece with Ring of Bright Water, but there is even beyond this a significant consequence to his life and at least two other legacies that have been declared by two men who knew him:

  Douglas Botting, Maxwell’s biographer, has said, ‘Gavin made his greatest impact through Ring of Bright Water, which marked the beginning of a groundswell of worldwide support for otter conservation that has continued to the present day. Gavin’s contribution to saving the otter was immeasurable, and was probably the greatest achievement of his life.’ And in an interview for a film about Gavin Maxwell that was shown on BBC Scotland in early 1999, John Lister-Kaye said, ‘There is a legacy which relates to time and to place… and Gavin is very substantially responsible for interesting the wider public in the wild Highlands.’