Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie

Jamie writes in a spare uncompromising style in this set of essays about landscape and her travels through some of the most remote parts of it. She shows us things most of us will not see, icebergs, the aurora from the Arctic circle, killer whales off the remote abandoned islands of St Kilda and Rona, cave drawings, and the estuary like view of human cells down a microscope in a pathology lab. What links the essays is a search for wilderness but Jamie is never cliched, never glorifying 'the wild' as something pure that we should attain to, but taking each experience as and of itself, never fearing to be crude or uncomplimentary. There are so many books about our experiences with nature that anything new to the canon needs to say something new, and Jamie does.

What I found curious was her urge to search for wildness, people do seem drawn to try and find the most remote 'untouched' landscapes, but that's to mistake what is before you.  I was at the Coop yesterday, just beside it the Dighty Burn flows out from a culvert, it's come from the Panbride Estate and past our house before getting there.  Beside the burn a tree leans over with grasses and bulbs at it's feet.  It's picturesque and a glimpse of wilderness in its own way, the small, as well as the epic, can be wild.