Inhoud
The Highland Edge is that indefinable landscape where Highland and Lowland coincide, where the last of the high fields and wooded hills buttress on to the first of the mountains.
Jim Crumley has wandered and worked a patch of the Highland Edge for more than twenty years and it colours much of his nature writing. For some while badgers did not feature in his work because for much of that time they were absent; driven out and kept out. His determination to find badgers and write about them from the starting point of 'the bliss of ignorance' leads him first through a bizarre conspiracy of circumstances to a troubled foray among Lowland setts near Edinburgh. But that perpetual quest for a wilder, closer bonding of man and animal and landscape which is at the heart of his work spurred the conspiracy to one more twist. By the merest chance, he discovered on a weird and fractured mountainside that badgers had indeed returned to the old haunts from which they had been driven out. His encounters with the mountain badger family and the eagles and ospreys that flew over their sett are described with brilliant precicion and loving care.
'Badgers on the Highland Edge' celebrates a sense of wonderment at the everyday lives of one of our least seen mammals. Crumley shares with his readers the highest prize of the thoughtful nature watcher - the joy of discovery.
