Fresh Woods Pastures New

by Ian Niall, Andrew McNeillie (Introduction)

During an outbreak of meningitis in Glasgow in the 1920s Ian Niall was sent to live with his grandparents, then tenants of North Clutag Farm, Galloway, in south-west Scotland. It was another world compared to the industrial suburbs of Clydeside where he was born. The neighbours and farmhands he befriended seemed more at home in a Robert Burns poem than in the twentieth century, and throughout his childhood he had the freedom of the woods, the open fields and the moors. It is this personal Eden which he returns to in Fresh Woods and Pastures New, reminding us how rare this sort of childhood has become, and how wonderful it must have been to roam so freely, absorbing the rhythms of the countryside as naturally as drawing breath.

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2012

About the author

Ian Niall, born John Kincaid McNeillie, was a writer from Galloway in Scotland. He wrote his works under both names. He was born in Old Kilpatrick, to parents from the Machars in South West Scotland. He moved back to Galloway at eighteen months old, and the area formed a basis for his early fiction.

McNeillie wrote over forty books. These include No Resting Place (1948), a tale of Machars traveller folk, filmed in Co. Wicklow by Paul Rotha. His classic The Poacher’s Handbook (1950) also derives much from the Machars where McNeillie spent part of his early childhood, with his grandparents at North Clutag farm, as told in his memoir A Galloway Childhood (1967).

Reviews

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s not that I didn’t like this book, it is, as ever with Niall, so beautifully written that you can’t help but fall into his world, but it made me sad and frustrated. That a world full of so much wildlife no longer exists; that most of what he observes he shoots. It’s hard to love a book where he finds a beautiful female hare and can kill it for blood soup. He struggles with this himself, in the case of the hare at least, but the relentless animal killing and egg stealing doesn’t end. It’s of its time, and I don’t think his nature writing has ever been bettered, but I’m done.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I pounced on this beautiful book on the New Books display at the library. The Little Toller imprint is recognisable at several paces yet brings back rural classics.

Sadly, despite the beautiful cover and superb Barbara Greg woodcut illustrations, it was merely an OK read. The introduction by the author's son reveals that "the sentences spilled from his head word-for-word as you read them. He rarely rewrote and barely revised" Had he done so, or had an editor had at it, this could have been a more enjoyable and readable book. I am reminded of "all the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order". Just because it is a 'stream of consciousness' doesn't make this the James Joyce of nature writing.

What was most surprising and disappointing was that there was little real sense of place. I felt the book gave me no feel for its Scottish and Welsh settings and I could have been anywhere. I was uncomfortable with how much of the book is about hunting and trapping for all that it is evident that Niall himself came to be less interested in this way of interacting with nature and clear that a good deal was for the pot, with the killing of creatures with little meat on them considered rather shameful.

It's a real pity because it could work so well... there are so many interesting images and ideas (albeit that some of them lose by repetition)... the invariable use of mushrooms to make a ketchup with his aunts having no notion that they could be fried and eaten as is, the description of abandoned farm machinery being taken over by couch grass.