Jim Crumley has a lifelong passion for the environment which he has parlayed into over 40 books including looking at Scotland through the changing seasons in a particularly popular quartet. He’s also, more recently, turned his attention to the Lake District.

About The Great Wood:

The Great Wood of Caledon – the historic native forest of Highland Scotland – has a reputation as potent and misleading as the wolves that ruled it. The popular image is of an impassable, sun-snuffing shroud, a Highlandswide jungle infested by wolf, lynx, bear, beaver, wild white cattle, wild boar, and wilder painted men.

Jim Crumley shines a light into the darker corners of the Great Wood, to re-evaluate some of the questionable elements of its reputation, and to assess the possibilities of its partial resurrection into something like a national forest. The book threads a path among relict strongholds of native woodland, beginning with a soliloquy by the Fortingall Yew, the one tree in Scotland that can say of the hey-day of the Great Wood 5,000 years ago: ‘I was there.’ The journey is enriched by vivid wildlife encounters, a passionate and poetic account that binds the slow dereliction of the past to an optimistic future.

Event chaired by author and broadcaster Sally Magnusson.

• Sun 27 Nov 14:00
• Cove Burgh Hall, Shore Road, Cove, G84 0LY
• Tickets £7