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Maxwell, Gavin

Ariane Bankes on Douglas Botting, The Saga of Ring of Bright Water [3] 7; The House of Elrig, [47] 12; Ring of Bright Water, [70] 80

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20220812170403 Gavin Maxwell, The House of Elrig | Slightly Foxed Edition No. 31

‘This book is for The House’ | Gavin Maxwell, The House of Elrig

The writer and naturalist Gavin Maxwell is best known for Ring of Bright Water, his moving account of raising otters on the remote west coast of Scotland. In his childhood memoir The House of Elrig he describes, with the same lyrical power that made that earlier book a classic, how it all began. In loving detail he evokes the wild moors around his Scottish home and the creatures that inhabited them. As was then the custom, he was ripped away from this paradise to go to a series of brutalizing schools. But always in his imagination he was at Elrig. It was his refuge and his escape, and the power of his longing and the ecstasy of each return fuel this haunting book.
20220810111652 Gavin Maxwell, The House of Elrig | Slightly Foxed Edition No. 31

The House of Elrig | Chapter I: The House

Gavin Maxwell, The House of Elrig

You can see the house from a long way off, a gaunt, grey stone building on a hillside of heather and bracken. The road, very narrow, has climbed two or three hundred feet from the sea; slanting at first from the grey boulder beach up near-cliffs of coarse grass, bracken and thorn scrub, the few trees stunted and deformed by incessant westerly winds, so that their limbs and their heads seem to be forever bowed and straining towards the land; on and up, winding through poor agricultural land, where the fields with their rough dry stone walls alternate with patches of scrubland, thorn bushes and briar thickets with the bare rock showing between them; through the tiny village of Elrig, with a smithy and a ruined mill but no shop; then, a mile on at the corner of a ragged fir wood sheltering a loch, is the turning to the house.
20210709171048 Ring of Bright Water and The House of Elrig | Jim Crumley on Gavin Maxwell

‘Ring of Bright Water caught me off guard’ | Jim Crumley on Gavin Maxwell

Greetings from Hoxton Square where, this summer, we’re travelling to far-flung destinations through the pages of Slightly Foxed. The latest issue of the magazine takes us far and wide, from language-hunting in the Karakorum and climbing Mount Kenya to Anthony Burgess’s Malaya and Robert Graves’s Ancient Rome . . . However, today we’re heading to the West Highlands of Scotland with Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water, with the Scottish nature writer Jim Crumley as our guide.
20040901110801 Ariane Bankes, Douglas Botting, Slightly Foxed Issue 3, Gavin Maxwell

Sharks, Otters and Fast Cars

Ariane Bankes on Douglas Botting, The Saga of Ring of Bright Water

Some books arrive out of the blue and virtually save one’s life, and Douglas Botting’s biography of Gavin Maxwell was one such book for me. I was lying in my hospital bed after an unscheduled operation, and had implored my sister-in-law to bring me a novel by Trollope, as nothing had cheered me so much during a previous illness as The Small House at Allington. I had rarely felt more in need of cheering up.
20191112102926 Gavin Maxwell, The House of Elrig: From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

The House of Elrig | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

‘This is a beautiful, sparkling book, a brief glimpse of a wild childhood that is recognizable even in its strangeness – he has captured the essence of youth, that delicate balance of happiness and misery.’ Before we become tangled in ribbon and swaddled in wrapping paper, we thought it timely to browse our bookshelves and head to the windswept shores of Galloway for some bracing fresh air. This article by Galen O’Hanlon appeared as the preface to our limited hardback edition of Gavin Maxwell’s The House of Elrig.
20150901173006 Gavin Maxwell, The House of Elrig - Slightly Foxed Edition No. 31

Mowgli with a Gun

Galen O’Hanlon on Gavin Maxwell, The House of Elrig

A few months before his thirteenth birthday, the young and miserable Gavin Maxwell crept out of St Wulfric’s prep school to send a ‘thoroughly hysterical’ letter to his mother. At the end of it he wrote, ‘For God’s sake take me away from this awful place.’ She answered his plea, and he was whisked away in the middle of the Spring term, ‘a quaking jelly of misery and self-pity’. He went straight home, to the House of Elrig – the house he grew up in on the edge of the vast Monreith estate in Galloway, surrounded by woods and peat bogs and heather.

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