Pair – Ring of Bright Water & The House of Elrig

In his childhood memoir The House of Elrig, Gavin Maxwell describes, with the same lyrical power that made Ring of Bright Water a classic, how it all began. This pair of Gavin Maxwell’s memoirs tells the extraordinary tale of his love of the natural world.

Ring of Bright Water

Hailed as a masterpiece when it was first published, the story of Gavin Maxwell’s life with otters on the west coast of Scotland remains one of the most lyrical, moving descriptions of a man’s relationship with the natural world. In 1957, after travelling in southern Iraq, Gavin Maxwell returned to the West Highlands of Scotland with an otter cub called Mijbil. Written in a remote cottage, this enduring story evokes the seascape and wildlife of the place where they set up home together.

The House of Elrig (Review copy)

Gavin Maxwell was an extraordinary man, born into an extraordinary family. His father, the son of an often notorious line of Scottish landowners, had married Lady Mary Percy, the beautiful daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, and had brought her back to his family’s estate at Monteith on the windswept shores of Galloway, where they built Elrig, the house of the title.

Gavin was only four months old when his father was killed in 1914, and thereafter the most important people in his life after his three older siblings were his mother and her sisters. All equally eccentric, they had grown up in regal splendour at Alnwick Castle, against which background they seemed perpetually in revolt – one entirely devoted to good works, another running a ‘high-pressure chicken farm’ and later ‘the largest fur rabbit farm in the world’, and a third becoming a serious research zoologist. She it was who fostered the children’s curiosity about the natural world and set Gavin on his life’s path.

But the most powerful influence on this complicated, sensitive small boy was the wild moorland country around his home and the creatures that inhabited it. He evokes it in loving detail, along with the suffocatingly grand and philistine upper-class society into which he would unsuccessfully attempt to fit. As was the custom, he was ripped away from this haven 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.