Wild in the water

In 1950, Gavin Maxwell moved to a cottage on the West Coast of Scotland, into a small house standing isolated near the sea. His memoir, Ring of Bright Water, about the place and the animals he shared it with, became a classic, and in the book he called the lonely house “Camusfearna” — Scottish Gaelic for ‘Bay of the Alders’.

His isolation at Camusfearna was shared only by Jonnie, his springer spaniel and devoted companion. After Jonnie’s death due to old age, Maxwell began to feel the need for an animal companion to share his life with. Given the water on 3 sides of the house, he thought of an otter, and a few months later, traveling the marshes of Iraq, he obtained the young Mijbil.

The book is quite lovely to read until this point, but it leaps into the dazzling once Mij enters his life. He is keenly observant and his descriptions of Mij are fascinating.

I turned to see his tail disappearing around the bend of the corridor that led to the bathroom. By the time I had caught up with him he was up on the end of the bath and fumbling at the chromium taps with his paws. I watched, amazed by this early exhibition of an intelligence I had not yet guessed; in less than a minute he had turned the tap far enough [..]

In early summer, Maxwell brought Mij to Camusfearna.

In the sea, Mij discovered his true, breath-taking aquabatic powers; until he came to Scotland he had never swum in deep waters, for the lakes and lagoons of his native marshes are rarely more than a fathom or two deep. He would swim beside me as I rowed in the little dinghy, and in the glass-clear waters of Camusfearna bay [..]

This apparently idyllic isolation was made possible by a life of privilege: Maxwell was the younger son of a ducal family, grew up in castles and estates, had enough inherited wealth to be able to buy an island after WWII and attempt to develop a shark fishing business there, give up after five abortive years, and then move to the cottage:

One autumn I was staying with an Oxford contemporary who had bought an estate in the West Highlands, and in an idle moment after breakfast on a Sunday morning he said to me: “If you’re not too proud to live in a cottage, we’ve got an empty one, miles from anywhere. It’s right on the sea and there’s no road to it. [..] If you’ll keep it up, you’re welcome to it.”

My memories of the book are of Mij leaping and porpoising in the sea, catching eels in the burn, and drying himself on the sofa, but upon this re-read, I was startled to discover just how bloody the novel was. Maxwell doesn’t shy away from the ‘Nature’s red in tooth and claw’ side of the cycle of life.

As I write there lies a few hundred yards down the shore the newly-dead body of a brown seal. The forepart of the head has gone, where something has crunched through the skull in front of the eyes, and from one flank there has been ripped away a foot length of flesh and blubber, exposing the entrails. [..] The typical work of a Killer [whale] in killing mood.

He also refers a few times to his bloodthirsty past with bird-hunting (probably normal for any landowning family of the time) and shark-fishing (quite horrific, as as described in this article in the Guardian). The day after he got Mij, there was “A day’s duck shooting in the [then Shah of Iraq’s] fabulous marshes”, where he and his companion shot 150 ducks. This is notable because it seems so different from the love of wildlife displayed in the rest of the book, including the birds of Camusfearna, but Maxwell himself seems to have seen no conflict.

The hardships of life at Camusfearna are not to be glossed over. The house had no furniture of any kind, and Maxwell was only able to buy (at significant expense) 2 kitchen tables and a bed, with the rest of the furniture being created from washed-up fish boxes over the years. Water was hauled from the nearby stream in buckets until 8 years after he moved in, when he arranged for water to be piped from the stream. There was no electricity or heating, and the methylated spirits used for the stoves and lamps had to be hauled in by boat and then carried in rucksacks. When the area was eventually electrified, it actually made things worse, as the electric lines did not come to this isolated house but methylated spirits vanished from the stores.

Maxwell was of the nobility but was not, at this point, wealthy, because of the money he had sunk into his fruitless shark-fishing venture. Ring of Bright Water was written out of a desperate need for money, and so was each subsequent book.

Money aside, there is an easy assumption of privilege extending beyond his family ties to an earlier view of the world, one where Britain was accepted to be paramount. A few months after Mijbil comes into his life, he invites a British Museum researcher to identify him, and it is discovered that Mij is a ‘new’ subspecies of otter, which is thence named Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli — “Maxwell’s otter”.

So here we have a creature that evolved in the marshes of Iraq, that has been known and presumably named in Arabic for centuries, now named after Maxwell, who has known Mij and his species for barely a few months, but achieves this feat for having ‘found’ the species.

But much can be forgiven Maxwell for the sheer beauty and elegance of his writing. Open any page of this slim book and you will see sentences that beg to be reread, pondered, and admired.

Even the waterfall, to me perhaps the most enduring symbol of Camusfearna, has changed and goes on changing. [..] Its voice is in one’s ears day and night; one falls asleep to it, dreams with it and wakens to it; the note changes with the season, from the dull menacing roar of winter nights to the low crooning of the summer, and if I hold a shell to my ears it is not the sea’s murmur that comes to me but the Camusfearna waterfall.

Maxwell’s personal life is only hinted at, in a reticent way that made me smile in these days of brutally honest tell-all memoirs, but the title of the book comes from a poem written by Kathleen Raine, with whom he was in a relationship at one time. The book is more than just luscious paragraphs about nature; there are both personal and physical tragedies, which are described with a haunting vulnerability, there are the myths and legends of the local Scots, and there are very funny descriptions of traveling with an otter.

Still an exquisite read after all these years.

p.s. People who love this book may want to approach the sequels, The Rocks Remain and Raven Seek Thy Brother, with a little caution, as the Camusfearna idyll gets distinctly more complicated and sadder.

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Ring of Bright Water

Gavin Maxwell

First published by Longmans Green, 1960. Republished many times.