Findings

Reading Kathleen Jamie’s prose is like taking a long, solitary walk in the country and slowly sinking into the rhythms of the world around you. You have no mobile, no music, no book. What you have are your eyes and your ears and your senses of taste and touch and smell.

As you walk, you begin to notice things. The shape of a column of rocks. The sound of the wind in the hills. The cry of a corn crake. You watch salmon leaping upriver against waterfalls. You peer at the Neolithic carvings in a Viking tomb. You explore the ruins of a cattle herder’s cottage in the high summer pastures. You take the time to experience the world around you.

This is most often the natural world, but there are also lovely descriptions of the wonders to be found in the skylines of Edinburgh, and the exhibits in the same city’s Surgeons’ Hall. But the common factor in all the pieces in the book – and in the other volume of hers I’ve read: Sightlines - is of slowing down.

Slowing right down.

And noticing.