The sights, sounds and extraordinary colours of a year in the life of the Mayo coast are triumphantly captured in this magical book, from the first snow of the new year to the visiting otters of autumn.
Michael Viney's prose style takes a generous helping of self-deprecating humour, large quantities of meticulous observation and some carefully-weighed quotations from both scientists and poets, and spices the whole lot with real-life anecdotes and odds and ends of folklore. It's not a diary, but each passing month is used as a springboard for meditations on various topics, which means we get - for example - a vivid recreation of a trip to Greenland to study Arctic geese - and although it looks casual, there's nothing casual about it; this is craftsmanship of a high order, and the beauty of the writing is breath-taking. Open the book at random and you'll find sentences like this one: "The lake is a peaceful place at any time, sheltered by ivy-hung cliffs and rocky pastures, but to approach it in a still September sunset, past flocks of curlews, lapwings and starlings becalmed on the grass, past shining rings of mushrooms and puffballs, is to know the intoxicating solitude that sweeps in upon this place at the end of summer." Or this: "The house breathes gently, all doors and windows open to whatever breeze there is. Raised up on the hillside, we seem besieged by light." Or: "Any sudden approach to the pond produces a convulsion of alarm, a quicksilver boiling as the frogs dive for cover beneath bog-bean leaves and lilypads . . ." Read it slowly, then read it again, then treasure it always.
