by Gavin Maxwell
Foreword
by Gavin Maxwell
In writing this book about my home I have not given to the house its true name. This is from no desire to create mystery - indeed it will be easy enough for the curious to discover where I live - but because identification in print would seem in some sense a sacrifice, a betrayal of its remoteness and isolation, as if by doing so I were to bring nearer its enemies of industry and urban life.
Camusfeàrna, I have called it, the Bay of Alders, from the trees that grow along the burn side; but the name is of little consequence, for such bays and houses, empty and long disused, are scattered troughout the wild sea lochs of the Western Highlands and the Hebrides, and in the description of one the reader might perhaps find the likeness of others of which he himself been fond, for these places are symbols. Symbols, for me and for many, of freedom, whether it be from the prison of over-dense communities and the close confines of human relationships, from the less complex incarceration of office walls and hours, or simply freedom from the prison of adult life and an escape into the forgotten world of childhood, of the individual or the race.
For I am convinced that man has suffered in his seperation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it.
This book, then, is about my life in a lonely cottage in the northwest coast of Scotland, about animals that I have shared it with me, and about others who are my only immediate neighbours in a landscape of rock and sea.
Camusfeàrna
October 1959
GAVIN MAXWELL
Pages of this website are:
the indexpage
the text on the sleeve-jacket
Gavin Maxwell's foreword
the otterpictures
what the critics said
the 'thank you' poem
a lonely cottage
my own pictures
The Rocks Remain
Books & films by others
links to ot(t/h)ers