The Company of Swans

This beautiful record, on fine paper, is Crumley's homage to these noble creatures, but it is also an elegy, a love song to one swan whose silent tragedy he watched from one season to the next.

Rosamund Young, author of The Secret Life of Cows

It's lovely. So gentle and understated, and yet so poignant and connected.

Chris Packham, author of Fingers in the Sparkle Jar

This is only a short tale, but it is delicately told, and the fate of the abandoned mate is movingly described

With exquisite engravings by Harry Brockway [this] is a perfect miniature... [Crumley's] prose style remains as elegant as his white-plumed subjects

You will want to read it again and again... a lovely book

Jim Crumley is the pre-eminent Scottish nature writer

Extremely well written and beautifully illustrated

The best nature writer working in Britain today

Crumley conveys the wonder of the natural world with honesty and passion and, yes, poetry

Virtuoso writing... Jim Crumley's books come from an intelligence drawn from place

This beautiful record, on fine paper, is Crumley's homage to these noble creatures, but it is also an elegy, a love song to one swan whose silent tragedy he watched from one season to the next. 
 
‘A small mound of white feathers lies on a tussock of grass made grey by a Highland winter. It is all the monument there will ever be to the life of a swan.’ 
 
With these words, and those that follow, Jim Crumley has ensured that there will be a more enduring witness to the life of this swan, and of all swans, than that pyre of white feathers. 
 
Crumley watches, year in year out, as a pair of mute swans struggles, against the odds, to raise young on a wild patch of lock. But the pen starts to lose her eggs to predators; and the cob begins to disappear for longer and longer periods. Until comes the day when a third swan, stronger and younger than the first pen, appears at the other end of the loch. 
 
This journal of a swan-watcher, as he calls himself, is an elegy to these noble creatures; and most poignantly it is a memorial to one swan, whose silent drama he has recorded.

Jim Crumley (Author) 
Jim Crumley was born in Dundee in 1947. His love of nature was born and nurtured among the fields, hills and shores of Angus where he spent his childhood. After 25 years as a journalist, he turned to writing books in 1988. His thirty titles, many about the nature and landscape of Scotland, include The Last Wolf and The Eagle’s Way, which was shortlisted for a Saltire Society award. His new Encounters in the Wild series, published by Saraband, sees Jim get up close and personal with Britain’s favourite animals. The Nature of Autumn (2016) was longlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Bookshop Literary Prize. His latest book is The Nature of Winter (2017). 
 
Harry Brockway (Illustrator) 
Harry Brockway was born in 1958 and studied sculpture at Kingston Art School and at the Royal Academy, where he learned engraving. He makes a living as a stonemason as well as a wood engraver.

This beautiful record, on fine paper, is Crumley's homage to these noble creatures, but it is also an elegy, a love song to one swan whose silent tragedy he watched from one season to the next. 
 
‘A small mound on white feathers lies on a tussock of grass made grey by a Highland winter. It is all the monument there will ever be to the life of a swan.’ 
 
With these words, and those that follow, Jim Crumley has ensured that there will be a more enduring witness to the life of this swan, and of all swans, than that pyre of white feathers. 
 
Crumley watches, year in year out, as a pair of mute swans struggles, against the odds, to raise young on a wild patch of lock. But the pen starts to lose her eggs to predators; and the cob begins to disappear for longer and longer periods. Until comes the day when a third swan, stronger and younger than the first pen, appears at the other end of the loch. 
 
This journal of a swan-watcher, as he calls himself, is an elegy to these noble creatures; and most poignantly it is a memorial to one swan, whose silent drama he has recorded.

Jean Giono

Harry Brockway

Barbara Bray

Richard Mabey

A novel from the Vintage Earth collection

'And so, with great care, he planted his hundred acorns' 
 
While hiking through the wild lavender in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence, a man comes across a solitary shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzéard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness. 
 
Ten years later, after surviving the First World War, he visits the shepherd again. A young forest is slowly spreading over the valley - Elzéard has continued his work. Year after year the narrator returns to see the miracle being created: a verdant, green landscape that is testament to one man's creative instinct. miracle he is gradually creating: a verdant, green landscape that is a testament to one man's creative instinct. 
 
'I love the humanity of this story and how one man's efforts can change the future for so many' Michael Morpurgo, Independent 
 
VINTAGE EARTH is a series of books that reveals our ever-changing relationship with the environment. These are stories old and young, set in worlds real or imagined, that allow us to explore our connection to the natural world. Transformative, wild, surprising and essential, these novels take on the most urgent story of our times.

Harry Brockway

Books by Harry Brockway

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