by Gavin Maxwell
In Ring of Bright Water Gavin Maxwell tells of the lonely, roadless cottage on the West Highland seaboard which for ten years has been the background to his foreign travels, and which he looks upon as his real home.
When He first came to the cottage, Camusfeàrna, it was an empty shell, uninhabited for years. "A Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson instinct is latent in most of us, perhaps from our childhood games of housekeeping", he says; and since, "if one waits long enough practically every household object will sooner or later turn up on the beaches within a mile of the house", this cottage has been furnished in this way with little resource to shops.
Mr. Maxwell writes movingly about his remote home, about the unspoilt landscape and the wild life he has encountered there. But the hero of the book is perhaps his pet otter, Mijbil, who shared the cottage with him. After his dog had died, Gavin Maxwell brought this otter cub back from the Tigris marshes; it turned out to be a creature unknow to science, and was later christened by the scientific world with Maxwell's own name.
The otter, as intelligent and affectionate as any dog, ran free at the cottage, always returning at night to sleep in the author's bed. The part this charming pet played in the author's life ended abruptly and tragically; Mijbil, trusting and confiding as always, was arbitrarily killed by a road-mender with a pick-axe.
The only thing to do was to find another pet otter and in this the author was assisted by the weird coincidence of encountering a tame one in Scotland, the property of a doctor on leave from Nigeria. Gavin Maxwell acquired it and Edal, the new otter, became Mijbil's successor at Camusfeàrna, "playing in the burn and sleeping before the hearth".
For the first time Gavin Maxwell devotes a book entirely to the subject of his homeland; Ring of Bright Water marvellously evokes the world of Camusfeàrna and gives a glimpse of the affections and background of a very accomplished writer
The book is well illustrated with 69 photographs taken by the author himself and there is also a large number of drawings by Peter Scott, in the text, and as well as line drawings by Michael Ayrton and Robin McEwen.
Pages of this website are:
the indexpage
the text on the sleeve-jacket
Gavin Maxwell's foreword
the otterpictures
what the critics said
the 'thank you' poem
a lonely cottage
my own pictures
The Rocks Remain
Books & films by others
links to ot(t/h)ers