About

I AM a Scottish nature writer. Nature is at the heart of almost everything I write.

I was born and grew up in Dundee, and although I have lived much of my adult life in and around Stirling, the Firth of Tay and its surrounding lands and coasts still constitute my idea of home; the land to which I belong.

I am a restless traveller in my own country, but I have occasionally slipped my moorings and voyaged furth of Scotland to a small clutch of other northern lands in response to some new summons from nature. 

Mostly, I write non-fiction, but the lures of both poetry and story are never far below the surface. There are as many ways to be a nature writer as there are ways to write.

I was a newspaper journalist before I took the plunge to write about nature for living in 1988 with St Kilda, the first of several collaborations with photographer/publisher Colin Baxter. My first solo venture came two years later, a book set in the Cairngorms, A High and Lonely Place. I have been a fortunate writer, which is to say I have always been published. The Nature of Summer (2020), the final volume of my seasons quartet, was my fortieth book. If that body of work, sustained over thirty-five years, has taught me anything, it is this: there is one thing and only one thing we have to do to begin the process of healing our broken, beautiful Earth and it is very simple. We have to learn to think beyond self. 

In the litany of evidence of the climate chaos our species has inflicted – and continues to inflict – on the planet, the moment when Ok Glacier in Iceland was declared dead ice is the one whose symbolism moved me most. An Icelandic writer, Andri Snaer Magnason, was asked by scientists to write the text for a plaque to commemorate “the first dead glacier in Iceland”. He recounted the story in a newspaper article which concluded:

“So on the copper plate to commemorate Ok Glacier, we have written to these loved ones of the future: ‘We know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.’”

I advocate listening to the land. At this moment, a nadir in the evolution of humankind’s relationship with nature, there is nothing more fundamental to the wellbeing of the Earth than listening to what the land is telling us. The land knows what to do.