What is British nature-writing trying to tell us? The last few decades have given us biographies of birds and animals; journeys through wild places; histories of homes built on islands and beyond borders. Writers and readers (not to mention publishers) continue to pay attention to the flora, fauna and the rural human lives of our windy archipelago. But does the genre spin a wider tale? Annie Worsley’s Windswept, a year-long story of life in Wester Ross, a region in the north-western Highlands, suggests that it can.
Worsley was formerly an academic who specialised in air pollution and its legacies, inspired by her family background in a toxic suburb of Merseyside. Retiring with her husband to a dreamy, distant Scottish croft, she immersed herself in the seasons of an extraordinarily beautiful place. At one point, she lies down in a force 10 gale – you cannot stand up in winds this high – to observe the sea and the shore:
Every so often the waves organised themselves into long, lean ropes, like ships’ hawsers; they rolled over and over, finally thumping down as if dropped from a great height only to break apart in a foaming flurry of brilliant white. Froth and water sluiced up the shore slope dragging kelp and stones and rusty red sands back and forth. The rope-waves tore and collapsed and the sea’s edge exploded. Balls of coffee-coloured foam broke away, rolling and skipping inland.
The precision of the description, the mimetic balance of the sentences, and the ways punctuation, assonance and alliteration are used with and against the rhythms of the lines to capture the smash, surge and splurge of the sea – all are exquisite.
Beyond encounters with neighbours and domestic animals, and a gruelling trial by illness, there’s relatively little human narrative in Windswept. The wheeling moments and weathers are the story here; Worsley turns out to be a singular literary artist engaged on a quest to capture in prose the theatres of the elements. Windswept isn’t only enjoyable and enriching; it contains some of the most striking descriptions of nature I’ve ever read. Some passages detailing the colours, energies and events on this spectacular coast will doubtless be anthologised. The likes of Adam Nicolson, William Fiennes, Amy Liptrot and Philip Hoare will discover another of their gifted number here.
