Natural Environment Outer Hebrides Edited (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. Binder's cloth. Edge of lower cover very slightly marked. With the pencilled note of John Collins, bookseller/auctioneer, on the rear pastedown. Contributions from E.D. Allen, I. Stewart Angus, R.S. Bailey, R.J. Berry, W.R.P. Bourne, John Morton Boyd, J.B. Caird, R.N. Campbell, P. Coxon, W.A.J. Cunningham, A. Currie, G. Dickinson, D.J. Ellett, D.J. Fettes, J. Fraser, R.J. Fuller, J.D. George, R. Glentworth, D.A. Goode, R. Goodier, J.W. Grant, Cyril A. Halstead, M.P. Harris, J. Harwood, J.R.G. Hislop, A.V. Holden, P.G. Hopkins, J.N.R. Jeffers, R.A. Lindsay, I.H.J. Lyster, P.S. Maitland, Gordon Manley, J. Mason, T.A. Norton, H.T. Powell, R.E. Randall, Harald Riedl, W. Ritchie, D.I. Smith, Shelagh M. Smith, D.H.N. Spence, C.F. Summers, A.R. Waterston, R.C. Welch, R.B. Williamson, J.R. Wilson and J.A. von Wymarn. "When I was a little boy the Garden of the Hesperides, Hy Brasil and the Hebrides had a curious oneness in my mind. Two of these places are mythical; the Hebrides are real but they reach into a legendary past and the limbo of my own mind and so, the western isles, the Outer Hebrides, however romantic they may have been in their beginnings in me, became a country which had to be trodden. The people were an entity to me as well, an extraordinary amalgam of hard-bitten practicality and high spiritual indifference to commercial prosperity and I knew their folklore. There was also a regard for the creatures of land and sea, completely unsentimental, and yet accepting an identity with the whole environment which reminded me of the early Columban Christian association of people with those other denizens of land and sea. The Outer Hebridean gathered a store of young gannets for winter food and killed seals for sea boots and oil and he did not kill for fun" (Frank Fraser Darling, foreword).