Antlers of Water review – a walk on Scotland’s wild side
There is often a tendency to regard Scotland’s exceptional natural heritage as a playground where people can escape their rather less lovely habitats for a place of unrivalled beauty, Britain’s last wilderness.
That’s all very well if the voyeurs remember the land and its glorious coast also provide a living to some of Scotland’s inhabitants, who have a vested interest in its protection.
Everything I know about Scotland’s nature has come from the people who are a part of it, the fishermen, fish farmers, hill farmers, gamekeepers and anglers, plus a couple of academics who kindly offered enlightenment on seal populations.
I looked for these witnesses in a new anthology – Antlers of Water – but mostly in vain. Edited by Kathleen Jamie, poet and essayist, the collection captures nature through the eyes of writers, artists, activists, songwriters, poets, polemicists and photographers.
In celebrating the country’s enviable assets, the contributors consider nature from diverse perspectives, but with an overarching theme: “unfolding ecological crisis”. But, as Jamie says, they are not all prophets of doom. There are reflections on red deer, eagles, pigeons, wasps, Munro bagging, mountain biking and, naturally, wild swimming.
In her introduction, Jamie says Scotland’s “wild” is hard to find and “human intervention is everywhere”, but the thing about Scotland is that wild is on your doorstep almost wherever you live. There are plenty of “expansive peat moors” without wind farms and “rugged Atlantic shorelines” without litter.
I hoped Antlers of Water wasn’t going to be a reduction of Scotland’s wondrousness to a campaigner’s blinkered eye level, but nature the world over is politicised and as the writers here are styled “eco poets”, at least you know the territory from the onset.
Dougie Strang, camping out “At Diarmaid’s Grave” in Sutherland, doesn’t beat about the bush. During a month embracing nature, he notes “this is a contested landscape”.
“Some would see the moor rewilded, with deer numbers reduced and trees planted, their roots reaching down to the bones of woodland that was here before; others would put wind farms on the ridges, build power-lines to send the electricity south; others still would reverse the Clearances, bring people back to the land, place ownership in the hands of the communities who live here.” He comes down on the side of the last lot, envisaging a future where the proposed Sutherland spaceport is a rusting ruin around which people work the land and tell each other stories.
Some writers are distracted by causes even closer to their hearts than nature. Gavin Francis, for example, in “Bones of the Forth”, dispenses with musings on the “gash in the country’s eastern shoreline” to rage against nuclear Armageddon. And Sally Huband, in “Northern Raven”, begins with a bird but it is merely a symbol, woven into a (rightly) furious protest over the sexual discrimination of Shetland’s men-only Viking Up Helly Aa fire festival.
Among the solastalgia (defined as distress caused by climate change) and laments over land lost, there is optimism in this volume too. Chris Powici (“Getting the Hang of the Wind”) admits to finding wind turbines if not beautiful then weird, but not necessarily in a bad way. At least he tries to see beyond them to the deer and birds. And he pays tribute to mankind for the “glowing triumph of conservation”, which in this case is the successful restoration of red kites to the Braes of Doune. “An overlap between the wild and the human has to be negotiated and managed,” he says. “Let’s mess up the boundaries and get a new measure of ourselves as a species.”
Some chapters of Antlers of Water home in on their urban environment. When Chitra Ramaswamy (“Three Meditations on Absence in Nature and Life”) mentioned a pigeon alighting on the window sill of her flat, I was reminded of an encounter with a pigeon in a legendary Glasgow restaurant. It appeared, on the window sill, moments after I had ordered a pigeon starter. There it perched and when the plate arrived it caught my eye, putting me off pigeon as protein, forever.
Ramaswamy’s pigeon, “the most pigeony pigeon”, “seemed stunned” and I suppose mine did too, but that’s pigeons for you. She said she looked deep into its left eye and wondered if it looked back at her. As she was not preying on one of its relatives, probably not.
Some of the most memorable contributions emerge from those exploring nature with a purpose and a plan. In “I Da Welk Ebb”, Jen Hadfield wades into the waters off Shetland to forage for shellfish and says it’s so still she can hear an otter snoring.
And Linda Cracknell (“Lunar Cycling”) escapes an artists’ retreat on the Rosneath peninsula to walk the coastline and record what washes up with the ebb and flow of the tides. “Entanglements of the natural with the manufactured” become her focus, reflecting, as Antlers of Water does in the end, the realities of our times.