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Homeland
Hayden Lorimer
Cultural Geographies 2014 21: 583
DOI: 10.1177/1474474014547335
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CGJ0010.1177/1474474014547335cultural geographiesLorimer
Special Issue Article
cultural geographies
2014, Vol. 21(4) 583­–604
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1474474014547335
cgj.sagepub.com
Homeland
Hayden Lorimer
University of Glasgow, UK
Abstract
A geographical essay, styled as creative non-fiction, in which I present a suite of stories about one
family’s history and scientific endeavours, organised according to the geographies of a preserved
childhood home and its remembered hinterland. By entwining the lifelines of family members, the
essay is intended to illustrate the potentials – and ultimately the perils – of journeying a landscape
so intimately, according to memory and emotion, attachment and estrangement. As I discover,
the need to settle personal history sits in complex relation with efforts aimed at recovering local
memory.
Keywords
family, fieldwork, landscape, lifeworld, memory
A tale ready for telling
Although small, the scrap of land stands proud, catching the eye. Even by appearance on the map
it is islanded. Open country, set amid continuous waves of coniferous green. The cartographer’s
fine black markings delineate a patchwork of fields and hatch the areas cleared for common grazing. Beige-coloured boxes, the symbol used for individual buildings, are scattered here and there.
In the croft names recorded by the Ordnance Survey, there are hints of neighbourly solidarity.
Whitewell couples up with Black Park. Balvattan finds a fit with Casnafern. Tullochgrue clings to
the only road, which climbs steadily, then narrows into the dashed line used to signify a hill-track.
All told, the territory covers no more than two square miles. And when studied at this scale, it is
small enough for one fist to crumple under its tightening grip. Landscape does not come any more
pocketable. Pinewoods edge the margins, on all sides – among the most ancient in the country, it is
said. Over the centuries, trees have proved the most valuable natural resource in the area: for the
staging of hunts, for the sale of timber and most recently celebrated as natural heritage. During all
this time, through differing episodes of land-use and scenic taste, the girdle of forest has remained
firmly rooted. Rothiemurchus is prime property, the fiefdom passing down the ancestral line of the
Grant family, which has also held the Highland lairdship successively since before 1550. Grant is
Corresponding author:
Hayden Lorimer, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, East Quadrangle, Glasgow G12
8QQ, UK.
Email: [email protected]
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Figure 1. Whitewell (middle-left) with the Cairngorm mountains in the background, pictured c. 1910.
Source: Raphael Tuck and Sons Limited, London.
an inestimable surname, operating as both noun and verb: bestowing upon each new heir to the
estate a lucrative inheritance, comfortable sinecure, affirming title and, with it, direct influence in
the local politics of managing land and conserving nature.
What of Whitewell, and the kindling of my interest in its landscape history? What can be said by
way of introduction? My first sight of the place was an elevated one: a scout’s eye view, during a
traverse of the northernmost edge of the Cairngorm plateau, where the great mountain mass shatters,
its rim falling away sharply into a series of arcing, straight-backed corries. Even at such a distance,
the hay meadows and croft-house still sit up, topping an easy rise, as if in defiance of the thickly
blanketed lower strath, where long prospects are quickly swallowed up in the densities of forest bog
or obstructed by the ghostly jumble of glacial debris (see Figure 1).1 The chances are I would not
have given it a second glance, allowing my gaze to drift to more obvious kinds of prize. But I had
heard the unlikeliest of tales, stories irresistible to the inquisitive ear. And once you have heard talk
of Whitewell, it intrudes, as certain places will. It worked itself inside me, taking residence, giving
pattern and purpose to thoughts. For here, back in the day, a family reputation was forged, and a
formidable one at that. It was here that a household announced itself as rival stronghold. Here where
a particular counterculture emerged, which would brook no master, and raised a direct challenge to
the Grants of Rothiemurchus. The story of Whitewell is one bearing witness to a time when a family
could be known by their home and its hinterland. It finds traction in the emotional geographies of
topography, and has been coaxed from feelings of attachment and estrangement, intimacy and
remoteness, togetherness and individuality. It is a story enshrined in the memories of others, though
it is mine to tell. It speaks of an older walk of life, when culture, economy, politics and wisdom took
principal expression in local kinds of inscription, when associations between person and place were
forged in the doing of things, and the journeying necessary to make them happen.
At close quarters, all this can seem just a little unlikely. Whitewell is trim. A plain single-story
building, it sits tight in the sheil of a four-tree stand of Scots pine. Although more substantial than
a cabin, Whitewell shares the same basic architectural characteristics. Outwardly, the property
reflects scrupulous care, right down to the post and wire fence staking out the perimeter. Nothing
is ramshackle. No corner untended. The original exterior is holding up well. Corrugated iron sheets,
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Figure 2. Interior plan of Whitewell.
Source: Author.
overlapped and bolted fast, remain wind and watertight. The internal structure is timber-lined.
Each room affords a one-window view but is small enough that company of more than two seems
a little cramped. These dimensions were confirmed one day in wintertime, years ago now, when
occasion and polite invitation first permitted me to step inside (see Figure 2). The back door opened
into a simple scullery: shoe-rack, wood-stack, sink, draining board and wall-shelves. Through the
way, a front room, tightly packed with possessions: small kitchen range, cast-iron kettle, coal scuttle, pots and pans; easy chairs turned toward the open hearth; mantelpiece adorned with figurines,
tea-ware and memorabilia; dresser by the sidewall and small dining table at the lace-curtained
window, its panes warped and bubbly with age. In the opposite corner, a doorway allowed entry to
an adjoining sitting room of similar length and breadth, more sparsely furnished, and seemingly
less frequented. From here, a closed door shut away the back bedroom and marriage bed, another
opened into a narrow entrance hallway. Immediately ahead was the front door of the house, doublelocked from the inside. Three paces to the right gave entry to a second bedroom, the same distance
to the left, a small study. Feeble afternoon light fingered its way in from the external world. I could
see my own breath, indoors. The mixture of plain furnishings, things of use and decoration, objects
of inheritance and adoption, suggested earlier conditions of living, and that very little had been
altered since. A mothballed former world, without modern accoutrements, where the clock had
long since stopped, and images easily sprang to mind of what must have gone before. This was
once a homeland and an intensely inhabited one at that: by two parents (both deceased), and their
two children (one deceased, one surviving). What remains there of domestic arrangements and
household contents will never fully disclose the secret theatre of past relationships. But when
enlivened by personal recollection, it can reveal something of shared lives at closest quarters: not
quite a kitchen-sink drama, but something more than a thumbnail sketch.2
***********
Family history at Whitewell goes four generations deep. In 1945, bonds of kinship and basic need
had Carrie Mackenzie come back to the place, just a short walk from the croft where she had spent
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her childhood. She was daughter of John Mackenzie, estate ghillie and Cairngorm guide of local
renown.3 John’s own father had been the original occupant of Whitewell, presented as a gift by a
beneficent sporting client, grateful for years of loyal service given on the hill and at the hunt.
Accompanying Carrie on her return to Whitewell were husband Desmond Nethersole-Thompson
and the couples’ two young children, Brock, aged ten and Myrtle, aged eight. The family’s earliest
years had been spent on the Dorback Estate, ten miles distant along the Spey Valley, in an isolated
sheiling on a wide expanse of heather moor.4 In contrast to Carrie’s local roots, Desmond’s ancestry was distant and metropolitan. His upper middle-class family could afford the costs of a private
education at one of England’s historic cathedral schools – Colet Court Preparatory and then St
Paul’s, London – followed by a degree taken at the London School of Economics.5 After graduation, he took up a position as schoolmaster. The appeal of a career in education was not borne
solely by a mission to teach. The terms and conditions of employment were largely complementary
with birdwatching, first a childhood hobby of Desmond’s, then full-fledged into adult preoccupation. The calendar of school holidays meant a generous allowance of annual leave. This he dedicated entirely to birding tours of Britain. In 1933, plans were put in place for a first ever foray to
the forests of Strathspey and Cairngorm high country, habitats renowned for their abundant
birdlife.
Upon arrival at Aviemore, gateway to the region, Desmond sought the expertise of a local
informant. He was directed to Carrie Mackenzie. Following her kinfolk, Carrie worked as a hillwoman, guiding novice mountaineers over the summits and trafficking sightseers to the beauty
spots of Rothiemurchus. The outdoor life suited her. She was an avid observer of the natural
world, birds most ardently. On the promise of adventure, a match was made. They were two of a
kind with few cares beyond where next to gallivant. Their trail was set according to the breeding
habits of greenshank, snow bunting, golden plover, pine crossbill and dotterel. She referred
affectionately to him as ‘The Tramp’, and he to her as ‘The Highlander’. They were seen to wear
each other’s clothes. Desmond was twenty-five years old and Carrie seventeen years his senior,
a difference in age that did not go unnoticed. Gossip spread in the village, about them carrying
on up in the hills.6 They paid it no mind. Desmond made a return visit the following year. This
time, the move north proved to be permanent. Love birds. They saw in each other a passion
doubled, and with it a settling of purpose. Marriage followed. Carrie had a first child by him,
Brock, and then a second, Myrtle.
Once settled at Whitewell, the family setup was given specific shape and structure. The place
served them well, as a pivot point enabling patient studies into the behaviour of breeding birds,
organised around a pioneering model of species specialism. Through sustained observation,
stretching over seasons into years, parents and children came to recognise birds as individuals,
investing time and effort better to know their habits and haunts. Humans became consorts – cuckolds at times – in avian comings and goings, phases of courtship and mating, habits of nesting and
nurturing. This level of attention required a quiet command post, out of the way from village life,
avoiding unnecessary disturbance. The croft-house was well suited to a formulation of science
where domestic activities and field seasons were inseparable. By their unusual application to fieldwork, the Nethersole-Thompsons gained local notice and reputation; and through the publication
of books giving rich description to this fusion of family lives, Desmond gained wider public attention, during a period unparalleled for the popularisation of natural history in Britain.7
*********
That science is a cultural formation taking diverse spatial expression is a conceptual argument now
mainstreamed in the humanities and social sciences. Yet in many expository accounts of
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science-in-action, a preparedness to downscale to the domestic realm – to the very underlay of life,
if you will – is noteworthy only by its absence. Historian of science Janet Browne introduces her
biography of Charles Darwin by asking readers to consider ‘what it is like to make and live with
science’.8 Her question matters, especially as it pertains to the working and playing out of family
relations as a most effective means to ‘get behind the scenes’ of the workings of science. Recent
scholarship in the historical geography of science has argued for the same approach, recalling versions of domesticity emergent in the conducting of one specific field expedition.9 Put bluntly,
studying associations between close relatives can reveal how conditions of social reproduction
enable, or constrain, the processes and the products of scientific inquiry. In this essay, these same
concerns are extended, by further inquiring into family, and the family home, as meaningful
arrangements for the twinning of collective living and scientific researching. More expanded
worlds of social distinction and exchange do, of course, determine something of domestic life.
Accordingly, close attention is paid to the ways in which social class and political conviction –
understood both as historical formations and cultural opportunities – gave shape to processes of
knowledge production in science. Channelling these concerns through biographical inquiry, this
essay asks; how influential was ornithological research, and in particular field method, in determining the structure of family life for the Nethersole-Thompson household? And by association:
how did family needs shape the direction and scope of scientific inquiries? In addition, the essay
considers the relative positioning of differing, potentially contrasting, forms of belief in the family’s version of natural history. The beliefs under examination are epistemic, ideological and spiritual. If these indicate sharply contrasting visions, in practical application they proved to be
complementary. This complex interplay of status in biological science, social class and spiritual
belief features as a subplot in the story of Carrie, Desmond, Myrtle and Brock, a family both ordinary and extraordinary in operation.10
Information so involved and invested had to be gathered and carefully arranged. I did so by
travelling a storied landscape with Myrtle, the remaining family member alive today. Whitewell
was the gravitational centre for these outings, the place where memories are housed and the point
where our walks began and ended. Myrtle’s former family home came to serve as an emotional
centre, both depository and outlet, a strange attractor inseparable from the surrounding landscape,
understood and felt by intense connection. My knowledge of this homeland grew gradually, according to what was volunteered through a conversational form of telling; supplemented by corresponding archival inquiries. The label ‘method’ unhelpfully formalises the iterative quality of this
process. Companionable journeying is more in keeping with its original spirit. We made excursions
on foot, venturing out with no set route in mind, but an agreed purpose: for Myrtle to transport
herself in the direction of earlier episodes of life. Our imagined place of destination was the topography of childhood. Along the way, private emotions were quietly shared. We established our own
forms of empathy. But my desire to keep delving (a manifestation of the writer’s acquisitive
impulse) meant that our encounters could never be entirely free of compromise or contingency.
Memory work is, by its nature, fragmented, friable, sometimes arbitrary, allusive or isolating.11
Occasionally it is bruising. Naturally enough, some stuff gets withheld. Or it comes out in the
wash, much later in the day.
If these are risks attendant on memory work (and following in its wake, life-writing the likes of
this essay), what special promise does it hold? The approach is attuned to domestic folklore, with
its peculiar rhythms, idioms and modulations. It allows past generations, places and practices to be
recalled and appreciated alongside other kinds of source material (surviving photographs, archival
records, personal keepsakes and published accounts).12 The exercise of creative incorporation
resulting is one that academic literature has begun to experiment with, principally in work concerned with (auto)biography,13 regional landscapes14 and the placing of emotion.15 But the returns
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can be greater than this alone. Tales passed by word of mouth draw our attention to the generative
capacity of storytelling as a social art and a moral act.16 In the intense localness of the story of
Whitewell, there is nested a clutch of awkward questions, posed here to seek out larger truths. How
do researcher–writers go about inviting ‘throwback journeys’ to the past lives of landscape? How
can we better understand the complex kinds of meaning that memory (or memories of memory) is
in the habit of making? And ultimately, for whose ends are such projects of recovery undertaken
and then eventually written? In an effort to interrogate the storytelling impulse, I revisit these questions of proportion and propriety at the essay’s close. Only there, it is possible to find satisfactory
answers to what have – for a very long time – seemed to me like insurmountable problems.
***********
Whitewell was several different sorts of home compressed into one small house. Amid the clutter
of twenty-seven cats, one dog and two children, Desmond fashioned a cultured life, buttressed by
books, scientific papers and letters. The study room was his sanctuary. Facing the window, he
positioned a small leather-topped desk. The view was choice, facing a clearing of forest bog, high
ground in the distance, within earshot of his beloved greenshanks’s cry. Seated, concentrated,
Desmond wrote the standard work of reference on the species. The title appeared in New Naturalist
Monographs, a widely recognised series published by Collins.17 For a subject so tightly circumscribed, The Greenshank carried what reviewers and critics came to recognise as his literary signature. Penned with wit, verve and range, reporting incident, anecdote and encounter, the prose
successfully ushers the logic of principled empiricism towards a confessional voice, mixing hard
reasoning with characteristic warmth of comment. In prefatory remarks, Desmond generously
acknowledged the sacrifices made to free up time for composition:
Although I have written the book, Carrie’s share in it is really far greater than mine. She taught me her skill
and craft as well as giving me some of her love of her Highlands. She has also had to cook, sew, make and
mend, cut wood and draw water in the rough cottage life we have lived here.18
In point of fact, domestic chores were never Desmond’s forte. For Carrie, bent-backed toil was as
often menial as it was ornithological.
Companionably complex, the couple’s literary division of labour was regulated by the need for
a popular semi-autobiographical narrative to explain the practice of ornithological research, and to
a still greater extent, it was consumed within the very demands of fieldwork. They were committed
to a painstakingly, self-sacrificial research approach, one that they did much to pioneer. Hitherto,
the convention in ornithology was to complete comprehensive surveys of species for a given area.
Results were arranged eco-geographically, appearing as guides to county, parish or regional avifauna.19 For Desmond and Carrie, what held greatest appeal and possibility was sustained behavioural study fixed in place: ‘the most careful field-work is done by the “man on the spot”, who may
not secure most specimens, but who discovers the nests and the breeding grounds of the species
which he desires to study’.20 The shift in method was embodied, according to Desmond’s typology
for ornithologists, in the opposing approaches taken by either “legger” or “arser”. As a field technique, he explained how arsing demanded a different level of attention. A gift for sedentary observation was founded on the principled belief that only in stillness could one get to know individual
birds, breeding pairs, the exact addresses of families, their nest life and in time an understanding of
species biology, psychology and behaviour.21
On these terms, families hovered and hunkered over one another. Life’s privacies and privations
were shared. Long-term relationships with individual birds disclosed tenderness and depth of
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Figure 3. Desmond and Old Glory re-acquainted.
Source: D. Nethersole-Thompson, The Greenshank.
feeling. One portrait photograph (see Figure 3) captures that social universe, where a significant
human event (Desmond’s wartime demobilisation) and avian personality (his re-acquaintance with
Old Glory, a favourite greenshank) are combined. Readers came to know the character of breeding
hen greenshanks (Green Bands, Myrtle, Fanny, Elizabeth and Otter) and the complex arrangements
negotiated between snow bunting pairs (Baldy and Romeo, Fishface and Annie, Patrick and Parva).
As a naturalist–writer, Desmond married the romantic language of ‘love-making’ and ‘song dances’
with analytical insight, asserted in text and compressed in table. The published structure of these
studies, organised into chapters on enemies and food, territory, courtship, living-space, nest choice
and nest building, egg-laying, parenting, brooding, reads as accurately of human beings brought to
self awareness among birds as it does to the contours of new ornithological field science.22
To document behaviour across the entire life-course demanded obsessive interest, impressive
reserves of patience and uncompromising rigour in getting to knowing landscape first-hand, on the
bird’s terms. For Desmond, a most committed bird biologist, the Cairngorms were an unparalleled
proving ground. The landscape’s appeal rested with its uniqueness, the massif figured as an ‘iceage relic, with its own sub-arctic ecosystems, climatic conditions and, many would say, a personality of its own’.23 The trip from base camp at Whitewell was demanding enough that passage
to-and-fro in one day left relatively little time for concentrated field study. In spring and summer,
the solution was to camp out for prolonged periods in the northern corries or on the high plateau
itself. Early in their relationship, Desmond and Carrie took expeditionary hardship and discomfort
to extraordinary lengths, camping for sixty-six days consecutively on the Cairngorm tops in search
of snow bunting nests. The arrival of children brought relatively few concessions to method. As a
baby, Brock was swaddled in a gamekeeper’s bag strung across Carrie’s back or laid out on beds
of lichen and moss during periods of observation. Once old enough to clamber surefootedly, the
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young children hiked to the heights laden with tents, equipment, blankets and simple provisions.
For weeks at a time, family life took its shape out of doors as much as in and, for Desmond, had an
idyllic rhythm:
We led full, uninhibited, superbly free and scientifically rewarding lives. Like Eskimos in the spring,
living in the moment, we were happy in fulfilment . . . Our children have grown sturdy, tough and selfreliant in an unorganised world that knows no cinema.24
Quietly self-absorbed, Brock was a committed nest hunter and watcher; Myrtle a gleaner of Cairngorm
gemstones, more prone to loneliness and boredom. But the credo of field adventure and free will was
not always easily resolved with parental responsibility. Plimsolls, anorak and cardigan were a makedo sort of mountain-wear. Under canvas, the family diet was sometimes meagre. Storms had to be
weathered. When breaking camp, the retreat for shelter went only as far as the remote bothy at Glen
Einich. The threat of missing out on special events like the school sports day caused Myrtle to walk
off the hill, heading homewards alone. However, it was not simply science for science’s sake that kept
the family out adventuring, up all hours. There was additional incentive.
Poking my way around the study room at Whitewell, I lifted the lid on other aspects of the
Nethersole-Thompson’s lifeworld. In the internal compartment of the hinged-top writing desk I
found a few discarded odds and ends: a chipped vanity mirror, a zip-fastener (still awaiting use)
and an unstruck blue-tipped matchstick. But it was a fourth item which brought me up short: a
black-and-white photographic portrait, creased at the corners and curling with age. The male figure
staring back intensely from the image was immediately familiar, familiar that is, to scholars whose
interests encompass early 20th-century British natural history and, to me, because I knew him to
be a specialist among specialists (see Figure 4). Reverend Francis Jourdain, the subject of the photograph, was a distinguished ornithologist and once the foremost collector of wild birds’ eggs in
Britain. He is notable for being founder member of the British Oological Association (BOA), so
unifying his two principal interests.25 With Jourdain as its patron, the BOA advanced a case for the
consideration of oology as a reputable form of scientific inquiry, not antithetical to nature conservation. Jourdain was also a friend and confidante of Desmond and Carrie. He was in good company. The roll call of egg collectors given a welcome at Whitewell as guests of the
Nethersole-Thompsons included other BOA notables, such as Cecil Stoney, Edgar Chance and
Arthur Whitaker.26 Carrie’s dealings with egg collectors pre-dated Desmond. She had led Jourdain
to nesting sites during his earliest raiding tours of northern Scotland.
For Desmond, collecting began in the 1920s, during early teenage years. In the less likely locale
of Hyde Park, London, he plundered a heronry for eggs. Diary entries report how he kept the nest
under observation for several weeks.27 At the time, the pastime of gathering wild birds’ eggs (commonly referred to as ‘egging’ or ‘birds’-nesting’) was regarded as a healthy expression of an interest in nature, perhaps boyish, but harmless enough.28 In the grip of it, longing for possession,
Desmond spent weekends shadowing gentlemen-collectors, the likes of Jock Walpole-Bond, who
he feted as heroes.29 Field notes boast of developing skills in rope work and escapades climbing to
treetops.30 The real secret of success was having a head for heights, enabling the collector to experiment with climbing techniques, some specific to tree species (characterised by differing bark type,
bole width and bough spread), seasonality and hours of daylight or darkness.31 The conquest of
cliff-tops and crag sides followed for the most committed student of eggs. Finally, for those progressing to the sale of rare specimens, the wheeling and dealing necessary for private trade had to
be learned. This was a very particular adult world – enclosed, fanatical, covetous and sometimes
conspiratorial – to which Desmond was admitted entry.32 Connoisseur–collectors arranged eggs by
species type, clutch size and type, variability of surface markings (‘spotting’) or gradations of
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Figure 4. Reverend Francis Jourdain.
Source: A.C. Cole and W.M. Trobe, The Egg Collectors of Britain and Ireland.
colour. Display specimens were annotated with clutch cards and judged especially noteworthy by
unusualness of form, tint or distinguishing marks. Cabinets were designed for safe storage and
occasional display. For the collector, birds’ eggs were perfection, nature’s own objets d’art: a fragile prize, kept under glass, cocooned in cotton wool or gently cupped in the palm of a hand.
The membership of the BOA was all male. The Association held meetings and an annual dinner
in London. Gatherings were an occasion when private obsession and self-indulgence could be
discreetly shared. Not all agreed with the practice. During the 1930s, the activities of the Association
were frowned upon, chiefly by campaigners for animal welfare and nature conservation. The Royal
Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) led criticism, shifting the public discourse about egg
collecting, presenting it as a lowly, cowardly act, more properly labelled ‘nest theft’.33 Discontent
also surfaced among practising ornithologists, with concern voiced about uncontrolled or uneducated collecting as a threat to the survival of the most rare species. That some of this complaint
stayed low-key during the interwar years reflects the crossover in communities of watchers and
collectors; the membership lists of the BOA and the British Ornithological Association sometimes
dovetailed all too neatly. Some oologists were prepared to concede that the appeal of amassing a
collection of birds’ eggs was as much aesthetic as it was scientific and could, when taken to
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Figure 5. Egg drill and blowpipe.
Source: Kate Foster.
extremes, have a fetishistic dimension. When public opinion hardened against egg collecting during the 1940s, the operations of the BOA grew increasingly secretive. The respectability of individuals known to trophy-hunt was compromised. Widespread public condemnation of organised
collecting drove the culture underground.34 The 1954 Protection of Birds Act proved pivotal. New
laws, rehearsed in popular pocketbooks for children, banned all forms of ‘looting’ by ‘egg
thieves’.35 The crime was emotively presented, amounting to a morally reprehensible act: the theft
of life emergent. Wrongdoing could lead to a custodial sentence. In spite of this, stories circulated
about individuals who failed to shake the habit of years, apparently unafraid of prosecution.
Desmond’s name was one among them. To him, the law was an ass. Quite simply, birds could never
be divorced from eggs: ‘To study breeding birds’, be reasoned, ‘one has to have a predatory hunger
for the nest.’36
Given the Nethersole-Thompsons’ appetite for knowledge, it was natural that their objects of
study would remain the most obvious means to a livelihood. Desmond distilled domestic science
to home economics and a basic imperative of subsistence: ‘To eat we had to find . . . we usually
ate.’37 The specifics of the family’s trafficking in eggs remain, as yet, untold. General practice in
the trade is indicative.38 Handled with care, an egg had to be emptied of content, using the miniature toolkit of awl or drill, blowpipe and, if necessary, embryo hook (see Figure 5). The blown egg
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was coddled in cotton wool for transport as a fragile cargo, ultimately to reappear in the private
cabinets of wealthy clients.39 Testimony to the family’s resourcefulness and opportunism is that
their own egg predation became a means to shape scientific experiments on instinctive drives and
the economies of nature. Acclaimed research on the frequency and likelihood of birds producing
replacement clutches revealed much about the impacts of food availability and non-human predation but it made no mention of the hand repeatedly reaching into the nest to initiate the field experiment. This was a precarious, seasonal and marginal way to make a living. Whitewell science was
institutionally funded (Desmond was granted a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 1940–1942),
endorsed by leading lights in British natural history and yet never entirely freed from suspicion.
Persuaded that a chapter had closed on his egging days, in 1950, Julian Huxley publicly championed Desmond’s appointment as a local RSPB monitor. Collective memory in the parish tells
things rather differently: the reason that the poacher and the gamekeeper understand each other so
well is because at some basic level, they are the same people.
***********
Remembered as cocksure, ebullient, witty and quick-tempered, Desmond Nethersole-Thompson
was no stranger to controversy. Love for Carrie offers a romantic explanation for his northerly
migration to the Highlands. But push factors were as pressing as was her pull. Historians of the
British egging scene, Andrew Cole and Bill Trobe, recount Desmond’s part in the ‘red kite controversy’ of 1932, and the subsequent events that put him to flight.40 During a sortie in mid-Wales,
Desmond risked his neck raiding the nest of, what what was at the time, one of Britain’s most
endangered species. By managing to evade the watch-party on post and then boastfully leaking
news of his boldest theft yet, he confirmed a growing notoriety but also threatened to tarnish the
name of the BOA. Such was the furore that arose that Lord Rothschild felt it necessary to resign
his Presidency of the BOA.41 As counsel and elder, Francis Jourdain suggested Desmond put some
distance between himself and the incident. A change of scenery was the answer. Talk of a ‘gleam
in the north’ inspired Desmond’s plans to launch a new ‘attack on the subarctic birds of Scotland’.42
Jourdain was canny. Zealous looting by his protégé had unsettled established pacts among veteran
collectors, long used to the cosy allocation of nesting grounds as a means to share the spoils.
Desmond departed England under a cloud, with the red kite theft topping a lengthy charge sheet.
Within weeks of his arrival in Strathspey, the list had lengthened:
Tall and thin, the laird in a green kilt glared at me. ‘You’re an Irishman’, he snorted. ‘You are collecting
eggs and don’t care for the law. I mean to put a stop to it’. He then graciously gave me forty-eight hours to
quit his estate and was kind enough to state that if I did not go by then he would ‘muster’ the police and
gamekeepers against me. He was not boasting. All through May they hounded me from camp to camp, but
Carrie met me in trysts in the forest; and we did well with the greenshanks.43
Storytelling and legend were social features of the egging scene, just as rebellion and contrariness
were motifs that surfaced in most every aspect of Desmond’s life.
If youthful revolt against the boredom and complacency of middle-class family life in London
was, in its own way, quite conventional, more meaningful expressions of militancy were inspired
in Desmond by the feudal economy of the Highland sporting estate and its rigid social hierarchies.
Politically, his Irish ancestry was an important personal touchstone. Among distant kin, he claimed
Roger Casemount, renowned nationalist, activist, patriot and poet. Sympathies with the Irish Free
State and Republican movement resulted. The Irish branch of Nethersole-Thompson family history
took pride of place in the living room at Whitewell. A propaganda poster celebrating the radical
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nationalist rising is still prominently pinned to a wall. Pan-Celtic campaigns of rural protest waged
as anti-landlordism gave added bite to Desmond’s understanding of local traditions of resistance
and land agitation in Strathspey. Poaching game in the Highlands has, for a long time, symbolised
the people’s claim of inheritance to the land or, at very least, to continuing customary rights of
use.44 As children, Brock and Myrtle were raised to understand anti-authoritarian values as part of
the joy of living, whistling away the long walk home with the traditional Piobaireachd ‘The Glen
is Mine’.45 Armed with a 0.22 rifle the youngsters were sent to poach deer, first having mastered
how to gralloch a carcass, carry it off the hill yoked across the shoulders and evade the watchful
estate ghillies. Carrie showed her children the best pools from which to take trout and salmon and
how to use a fishing gaff. In the front hall at Whitewell, the wood grain around the brass coat hooks
still carries bloodstains from where the venison was left to hang. Nothing now remains of the illicit
still, and its steady stream of spirits, that raised a toast to each new act of sedition. For Colonel
Grant, laird of Rothiemurchus, Whitewell must have seemed not so much an island republic as an
outpost of lawlessness.46 Self-styled mavericks, courting trouble, it is tempting to personify Carrie
and Desmond as true forest outlaws, the Cairngorms’ very own Lord and Lady of misrule.
While poaching helped fill the pot, agitation at Whitewell was also a studious affair, for all the
family. Books from the study library show an appetite for political theory, including titles from
the renowned leftist publishing house run by Victor Gollancz and the children’s fable of Reynard
the Fox, trickster prince of the animal kingdom.47 Desmond’s ideological convictions branched out
into organised politics. Newly returned from wartime service as an Irish Volunteer in the British
armed forces and inspired by a socialist manifesto, he stood (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) as
Labour candidate for Inverness-shire in the General Elections of 1945 and 1950. However, striking
electoral victories were won when he snatched seemingly ‘safe’ seats on the County and Parish
Councils from, of all people, Lady Grant of Rothiemurchus.48 In office, Desmond held to the ideal
of community service and took civic responsibility seriously, revelling in the opportunity to speak
truth to power and championing the case for a new post-war social settlement. The politics of local
government suited and frustrated him in equal measure. Known as ‘The Captain’, he brought a
swashbuckling and confrontational political style to a marginal community where people, by most
economic indicators, were the rural poor. The sacrifices his family made for the sake of science
heightened his awareness of the need for better welfare support, social reform, municipal amenities
and a solution to the region’s chronic housing problem:
Only those of us who lived before the war in the remote Highlands know what it is like to be really poor
– little fuel, no water, light, or sanitation, no books or libraries, and absolute immobility . . . The many
tough problems of the Highland ‘outback’ are unlikely to be solved by highly-paid government ‘dogooders’
with their return tickets to Inverness and those brief leisurely motorcades to peddle economic and
psychological bromides to the natives.49
‘Militant public work’, to adopt Desmond’s own description, spanned ‘nineteen glorious years of
flaming rebellion’ and was most often about backing the losing side.50 Expressions of resistance
were diverse, often with a keen sense for the theatrical gesture that makes politics a public performance. There is community memory of truly formidable rhetoric at public meetings and determined advocacy in defence of sacked railway workers. It was he who is remembered to have kept
a mounted ‘picture of Lenin, or some Communist, on the living room wall’, and he whose flat
refusal to raise a toast to the Queen during a Royal visit made for headline news.51 His two-decade
stint as Councillor was not without material or lasting impact,52 most notably the local authority
housing schemes constructed in Aviemore and neighbouring villages.53 In practical terms, political
‘feather-ruffling’ and ornithological observation could be combined during regular rounds of the
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parish made on a motorbike and sidecar. In an essay first appearing in The Oological Record, and
mischievously titled ‘Some Aspects of the Territory Theory’, space is made in scientific reasoning
for some rhetorical throat clearing, sending the introductory argument ricocheting off a favourite
political target:
The ornithologist, secure within the boundaries of his own little world, is sometimes inclined to ignore the
debt that he owes to those who have unconsciously helped in its creation. He forgets, for instance, that
the French Revolution not only swept away the lumber of a decadent feudalism, but that it was also largely
the cause of the re-birth of scientific inquiry which aimed at a closer communion with nature . . . While the
mob of Paris was storming the Bastille, Gilbert White [of Selbourne] sublimely unconscious that it was a
day of destiny, was quietly examining a pair of nightjar’s eggs, which had been found by one of the
villagers.54
The message was clear. Desmond and his family might find sanctuary in the high country, keeping
vigil over nests among the snowfields and scree beds, but he could not in good conscience ignore
class struggle in the Spey valley below.55 For Peter Marren, historian of nature conservation, the
disjuncture between socialism and science was fundamental, each commitment inadmissible to the
other. Once embroiled in local politics, Desmond’s literary ambitions may temporarily have stalled
and, for spells, his ornithology reduced ‘to the level of a mere hobby’, but by a counter-reading the
same interrelation of interests was essential and quite irresistible.56
***********
For Carrie, what mattered about Whitewell was continuity of family presence, an association
between person and place endowing all that was local with worldly meaning. Landscape, kinship
and community were phenomena drawn together by particular patterns of movement, life and
spiritual belief. This felt world encompassed the supernatural, meaning that ancestral haunts
were exactly as described. Carrie did not see any need to define this region of spectral belief.
Rather, it was exhibited as an intuitive gift of attention, and an openness to what lay at the edges
of perception, issuing from the spaces between memory, consciousness and the outer world.57
Accordingly, she knew better than to treat spirit presences as fearful phenomena because they
were somehow unknown or unknowable. Instead, she figured the supernatural world as intrinsic
to the everyday, co-existing and integrated parts of the lived natural environment. When personified, the spectral certainly had the power to unsettle, but it could also be entertained. Old ghosts
offered company that might conceivably be enjoyed. One story is illustrative. The most notorious of local apparitions is the Grey Man of Ben Macdui, said to roam the mountain plateau,
startling near to death those unlucky enough to encounter it. The folklorist Affleck Gray penned
an account of his ghost hunt in which is cited the first-hand testimonial of Carrie Mackenzie as
one of ‘unshakable conviction’.58 She knew the Grey Man well. He was William Ryniue, nature
lover, philosopher and poet, of the Mackenzie family. Long dead. Not yet at peace. The forest of
Rothiemurchus below was as alive with whispered stories, born of elements and atmospheres.
Carrie populated Whitewell and its hinterland with lore and legend.59 For daughter Myrtle, these
were impressionable years, and so the croft and its woodland backdrop are remembered as cradling a strangeness of sorts, a place out-of-kilter with its wider surrounds. Water kelpies were in
the ditches and streams, manifestations of the spirit world to be found among crags and the tree
canopy. Overnight visits to the outside toilet at the bottom of the garden were, quite understandably, twitchy affairs.
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Adult folk, as well as wide-eyed children, had every reason to trust in Carrie’s tales. In the valley, her words carried great weight. She was recognised as a ‘Spey Wife’, a local variant of the
tradition of the Highland Seer, generally attributed to the seventh child of a seventh child. She was
credited with powers of ‘second sight’, the ability to foretell people’s fortunes and fates.60 The
medium’s gift of being psychic could, at times, be a social burden. Carrie had to be hospitable to
casual visits, sometimes turning Whitewell into an open house, and the fireside a space for informal consultations, reading the future in tea leaves or the fall of the cards. Members of the community might turn in the direction of Whitewell when a hold on life seemed precarious or family
circumstances most straightened. Desmond might help put a roof over your head, and Carrie put to
rest any turmoil inside it. Timothy Neat, an oral historian of rural lives, suggests that belief in a
foreshadowed existence has served a practical, explanatory function:
Isolation and danger have always nurtured superstition in peoples vulnerable to events and power beyond
their control. Such vulnerability is a fact of Highland life and the common lot of soldiers, sailors, fishermen,
small farmers, lovers and gamblers. Heroism, fateful stoicism – codified as superstitious belief – is one
way of dealing with exposed circumstances and, like memory, superstition can be seen as an attempt by
the mind, and whole communities, to deal with the uncontrollable and catastrophic by creative, divergent
thinking. Superstition, like surrealism, can give order, drama, meaning, variety and fantastic release to
lives lived at the edge of experience.61
Knowledge of life forces and life forms could take expression as natural history too. For his
understanding of the habits of Highland birds, Desmond was dependent on Carrie’s instruction.
Her version of fieldcraft rendered the actually existing world into something else. Reality was
differently inhabited, and a truer country was revealed, where weather became something to be
watched as vigilantly as the birds. She was willing to trust in the kind of auguries ordinarily
excluded from serious scholarship.62 At Whitewell, bird lore was critical in shaping the direction
of field ornithology. Theory building and testing were based around sustained programmes of
empirical observation. But empiricism was not narrowly defined, in principle or practice. Thus,
precision in predicting birds’ movements was dependent on understanding wider environmental,
climatic and seasonal arrangements as a differentiated unity: where agents, attributes, matter and
phenomena are in uneven, shifting sorts of relation. According to this system of belief, it might be
possible to know favoured lines of flight, traditional geographies of abundance, flocking, nesting
and breeding. Held in amiable relation, science and supernaturalism were each transfigured: elements of belief appeared in “opposite” guises, never cohering cleanly around one half of the
parental partnership.
For the Nethersole-Thompson household, family belief was not clear-cut, resulting in fringe
science and ideas with a frayed edge. Their insights were the product of a domestic doubleness
where family existed as the meeting point for field science and mysticism, and no clear lines could
be drawn between the empirical and the supernatural. Rather than holding systems of belief apart,
this is to pay close attention to powers of observation influential in shaping a scientific attitude but
conventionally placed outside the domain of science. Whitewell was the hearth for unconventional
views (political and “birds-eye”) and strange visions (of the paranormal and transpersonal). If on
occasion their accommodation under one roof was not always comfortable, Desmond still revelled
in such ecumenical fusions, choosing to conduct field studies as an open dialogue:
. . . I left Jimmy Cauldfield, the BBC engineer with Carrie in the hiding place. Ludwig Koch and I sat
beside a fallen tree and talked about birds in general, Hitler, Karl Marx, Lord’s Day Observance, and
indeed almost everything except greenshanks.63
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However unconventional, the approach was not off-putting. Whitewell was held in the highest
regard by key figures in Britain’s expert scientific community and ornithological establishment;
Eric Hosking, Julian Huxley, Frank Fraser-Darling, James Fisher and John Markham paid a visit
whenever in the area, trading ideas, observations and theories.
As an imaginative discourse, myth was also of considerable utility to the family, in part because
it scrambled matters of fact. The reputation of the Nethersole-Thompsons as outriders for respectable ornithological research was subsumed within, and to considerable degree sustained by, popular myth and whispered belief. They knew the idiom all too well, never suppressed it, and instead
encouraged some of the more outlandish tales told. Desmond was unashamedly sentimental about
the practice of egg collecting, helping to chronicle the disappearing scene of which he had been
part. A lover of comical tales and anecdotes, absurd and scurrilous details, he penned evocative,
sometimes merciless, biographical portraits of fellow collectors. He cannot then have been either
surprised or displeased, at a published account of the infamous 1959 raid made on the nesting
ospreys at nearby Loch Garten. Philip Brown, secretary of the RSPB, offered a version of events
that seems judicious, to the point of being purposefully elliptical, though still offering the informed
reader good grounds for some educated guesswork as to the thief’s identity.64 Under cover of darkness “he” had drifted towards the nest site like a wraith, only forced into making a hurried, less than
spectral, departure through deep undergrowth when the osprey’s distress call alerted watchers stationed nearby. Executed as a highly orchestrated set-piece, a theft so audacious may have been
possible for the lithe wartime serviceman remembered to have completed the most demanding of
army night training exercises on time and undetected.65 But that nimble and agile figure had long
since taken on a more ponderous bulk. Already larger than life, Desmond was the man who was not
there. It must only have been his close resemblance.
***********
These days Whitwell is a shuttered place – hushed up and protective of small privacies. Little happens in the way of loose talk, save for the occasional spat in small print over Desmond’s posthumous reputation and local legacy.66 Things are more peaceable because even if events are still in
living memory, progressively there are fewer people around to do the remembering. And it is a
landscape much changed. Where once was trackless forest and bog is now a habitat protected and
interpreted for the visiting public, closely monitored by a Cairngorm National Park Authority.
And unsurprisingly, a life of subterfuge and scandal took its toll. Years passed before the needle
and acrimony with the Grants died down. And, painful truth to tell, family life at Whitewell became
estranged with the passing years. Togetherness withered. Increasingly, Desmond was the husband
and the father who was not there. By 1964, he had gone for good.
If the quietness at Whitewell presently enjoyed by Myrtle represents a respectful retreat from
more turbulent times, it should not be mistaken as an effort to put family history to rest, somehow
relegating the past to the past. There is great value in keeping things alive. As resident historian,
chronicler and curator, Myrtle has digitised a family archive of photographs and carefully preserved her childhood home, maintaining the material means of remembering. The old place has
become an undesignated, invitation-only, ‘site of special scientific interest’. And the making of a
house never really ends. Maintenance and repair are necessary, demanding emotional and economic investment. Whitewell endured some dark days. Action was necessary to counter corroding
roof shingles, prevent leaks and resist the creep of decay, culturing in book stacks, mildewing
curtains and carpets. A settled outcome was by no means guaranteed. The demands of inheritance
and property management can exhaust physical reserves and savings salted away, even to the point
of family ruin.67 And so later in life, good housekeeping becomes the most practical expression of
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memory work. Treated with tender loving care, home is where returns are made to earliest times,
by turns haunting, revealing and comforting. Family is manifest: in birding haunts, in the vegetable
patch, in preserved rooms, in cupboards full of yesterdays. Staying house-proud also requires regular rounds of sweeping and dusting. There are category decisions to be made: about order, storage,
access and what needs safeguarding for the future. Anxieties about the burden of accumulation, of
losing touch or of control being wrested away can – in some settings – result in creative kinds of
curation.68 The same anxieties can also result in executive acts of censure or destruction, intended
to shape times yet to come, and channel public or scholarly interest in a literary estate. After long
deliberation, Myrtle turned the sole surviving manuscript of Desmond’s unpublished memoir onto
the bonfire. A Rebel in the Cairngorms was too controversial, she reckoned. Tales of life, father and
son, mother and daughter, told too close to the bone.
In other respects, greater freedoms have prevailed, permitting entry to a living landscape,
cloaked in recall, conjured out of time-slips. Most comfortably positioned on the outside of things,
Myrtle is capable of finding company by folding the past into the present, and inviting exchanges
between external and internal realities. A ‘late child’, born when her mother was aged forty-seven,
she considers herself destined to carry an old soul, the heir to a way of life and system of beliefs
that never seem matched to those of her own generation. The psychic tension resulting gives to
landscape a soulful, melancholic quality, echoing with older patterns of habitation and movement.
It is attuned to the finer senses, tinged with fatalism, animated by intensities of feeling in familiar
locales. It is wakeful, and knowing, entertaining the profound possibility of making a return, by
way of kith and kin. While keeping her company, I found myself asking what it means to label
forms of recollection, movement and description as ‘deeply childlike’. Recent geographical dialogue encourages further consideration of the question, suggesting that greater allowance be made
for a world of intuition, innocence and possibility. A world that is not alien, but rather is universal
since it once possessed us all.69 Calling up past geographies from childhood – wanderings, dreams,
postures and casts of mind with their own small circumference – is to walk in memory’s shadow
and open out spaces for reverie.
The family tale told here at length represents an emotional mapping of home, spiralling around
the most local of truths: love, loss and loyalty; joy, pain and regret. The possible reach of a story so
intimate, deploying the lifeworld as an instrument of analysis, need not be prescribed.70 When
sensitivity to geographical relations and associations is recast conceptually, then scale – in addition
to being a measure of nearness or separation – can be a property that registers topographically,
according to its pitch and intensity. Some version of family is an inescapable feature of life, and
any portraiture or recordkeeping that results is seldom picture-perfect. What slips out of the fragility of the very particular domestic past retold in this essay is – after that most self-affirming of
truisms – a little bit of all of us.
A tale in need of a different telling
People’s lives were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum . . .
What I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls,
every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together – radiant, everlasting.71 (Alice
Munro)
December 2005. Between the doormat and the top of the stairs, there was time enough for me to
read the short letter and to be thrown completely off-balance. Terse, direct, honest, her words
delivered the choicest of cuts. Enough. No more. All done. My desperate reply elicited only the
briefest note by return post, closing down the offer of further conversation, and with it the
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possibility of reconciliation. As partings go, this one hurt. In the weeks and months that followed,
it was impossible for me not to dwell on all that had gone before, and to squint between the lines
– searching out whys and wherefores, when none were apparent. Break-ups can leave you feeling
wretched and forlorn, in research, as in life. I even persisted with the seasonal custom of a
Christmas card, but to no avail.
Right from the start, it had been clear that the stakes were high. This much was evident in the
delicacies of relating, the deepening understanding of generational values and habits of mind, the
pouring of heart and soul into this quiet enterprise. Memory, lest anyone be mistaken, is a fissile
material. Child’s eye visions are not containable or controllable phenomena, and remain part of a
living past. Every home is a house of fiction. Having a grown-up self and remembered child
encounter one another so intensely was only ever going to create a charge. I felt the losses accumulate, with a burden of responsibility for having rendered us both – Myrtle and me – as the walking
wounded. There really was only one thing for it. Just stop. So I did.
I let the editor of cultural geographies know of my decision to withdraw the paper, by then
accepted for publication. Removed from circulation, it went up on a high shelf in the office.
Occasionally, I pulled it down for a re-read, invariably finishing up feeling regretful. Sometimes I
used an abridged version of the events described here as a narrative aid when teaching graduate
students about what happens ‘When Research Falls Apart’.
July 2014. Almost a decade later, my original decision to pull the plug on publication seems the
right one, and so too the more recent choice to compose this coda as the point of closure in an essay
that has undergone substantial revision. For a start, we have learned to fend for ourselves again.
But also, because this entire essay represents a new and different settlement, acknowledging the
ways in which literary compromise can be reached,72 and the time it can take to reach that point.73
The storyteller must be accountable for narrative, as well as having confidence in authorship as
ownership. When writing is offered as the personal expression of a moral centre, then this standard
applies all the more so. Decisions concerned with accumulation, order, access and future-proofing
are Myrtle’s to take. And they are mine also. Respectively, these careful judgements should be
understood as the proprieties of research. To stake a writer’s claim in these terms is to seek renewal
in a system of values, decency and respect that is faithful to the subjects and lifeworlds in a story.
It is a system qualitatively different from those that contemporary academic codes for ethical procedure have been designed to know or to measure.74 At Whitewell, it is the nature of the story, and
the manner of its telling, that has always mattered.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Myrtle: who knows this story, one way, and another. And to the many others (reviewers
included) who, in conversation and in confidence, have helped me find a way to write the story down.
Such as it is.
Funding
This research was supported by a research fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (UK), as
was; now the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Notes
1. A croft-house has the proportions of a cottage, and is a rural form of dwelling in northern Scotland.
2. Geographies of home are introduced in A.Blunt, Home (London: Routledge, 2006).
3. John Mackenzie was guide to British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald during annual walking trips
taken in the Scottish mountains.
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4. Traditionally, a sheiling is a summering place, where shepherds lived when tending to herds and flocks
at the upland grazings.
5. A.Watson, ‘Desmond Nethersole-Thompson (1908–1989)’, Scottish Birds, 15, 1991, pp. 138–41.
6. Incidentally, ‘May–September’ couplings were far from unusual in the social demography of the Scottish
Highlands.
7. D.Nethersole-Thompson, The Greenshank (London: Collins, 1951); D.Nethersole-Thompson, The Snow
Bunting (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1966); D.Nethersole-Thompson, Pine Crossbills (Berkhamsted:
Poyser, 1975); D.Nethersole-Thompson, The Dotterel (London: Collins, 1972).
8. J.Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (London: Pimlico, 2002), p. 9.
9. H.Lorimer and N.Spedding, ‘Locating Field Science: A Geographical Family Expedition to Glen Roy,
Scotland’, British Journal for the History of Science, 38, 2005, pp. 13–33. See also the editorial essay
and articles in the same special issue dedicated to ‘Historical Geographies of Science’.
10. The place of narrative, story and plotting has recently been subject to critical review: S.Daniels and
H.Lorimer, ‘Until the End of Days: Narrating Landscape and Environment’, cultural geographies, 19(1),
2012, pp. 3–9 (Special Issue: Narrating Landscape and Environment).
11. M.Riley and D.Harvey, ‘Talking Geography: On Oral History and the Practice of Geography’, Social &
Cultural Geography, 8, 2007, pp. 345–51.
12. The creative re-composition of archival source materials and fieldwork findings has been variously considered in: T.Cresswell, ‘Value, Gleaning and the Archive at Maxwell Street, Chicago’, Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers, 37, 2012, pp. 164–76; C.DeSilvey, ‘Observed Decay: Telling
Stories with Mutable Things’, Journal of Material Culture, 11, 2006, pp. 318–38; C.DeSilvey, ‘Art and
Archive: Memory-work on a Montana Homestead’, Journal of Historical Geography, 33, 2007, pp. 878–
900; C.DeSilvey, ‘Salvage Memory: Constellating Material Histories on a Hardscrabble Homestead’,
cultural geographies, 14, 2007, pp. 401–24; D.P.McCormack, ‘Remotely Sensing Affective Afterlives:
The Spectral Geographies of Material Remains’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
100, 2010, pp. 640–54; H.Lorimer, ‘Telling Small Stories: Spaces of Knowledge and the Practice of
Geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26, 2003, pp. 197–217; H.Lorimer,
‘The Geographical Fieldcourse as Active Archive’, cultural geographies, 10, 2003, pp. 278–308; Lorimer
and Spedding, ‘Locating Field Science’; H.Lorimer, ‘Herding Memories of Humans and Animals’,
Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 24, 2006, pp. 497–518; H.Lorimer, ‘Caught in the Nick
of Time: Archives and Fieldwork’, in D.DeLyser, S.Herbert, S.Aitken, M.Crang and L.McDowell (eds),
SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (London: SAGE, 2010), pp. 248–73; F.MacDonald, ‘The
Ruins of Erskine Beveridge’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Epub ahead of print
21 October 2013. DOI: 10.1111/tran.12042.
13. S.Daniels and C.Nash, ‘Lifepaths: Biography and Geography’, Journal of Historical Geography, 30,
2003, pp. 449–58.
14. F.MacDonald, ‘Doomsday Fieldwork, or, How to Rescue Gaelic Culture? The Salvage Paradigm in
Geography, Archaeology and Folklore, 1955–1962’, Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 29,
2011, pp. 309–35; D.Matless, In the Nature of Landscape: Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads
(London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014); D.Matless, ‘Describing Landscape: Regional Sites’, Performance
Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 15, 2010, pp. 72–82; M.Pearson, In Comes I: Performance,
Memory and Landscape (Exeter: University of Exeter, 2007).
15. M.Smith, J.Davidson, L.Cameron and L.Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2009); O.Jones, ‘An Emotional Ecology of Memory, Self and Landscape’, in J.Davidson, L.Bondi and
M.Smith (eds), Emotional Geographies (Oxford: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 205–18.
16. This case is tellingly put in MacDonald, ‘The Ruins of Erskine Beveridge’. Beyond academic geography, different sorts of inspiration for domestic narrative and inquiry have been found in literary fiction,
non-fiction and memoir: M.Robinson, Housekeeping (New York: Picador, 1980); J.Myerson, Home:
The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House (London: HarperCollins, 2004); J.Berger, Here Is
Where We Meet (London: Bloomsbury, 2005); J.Burnside, A Lie about My Father (London: Jonathan
Cape, 2006); H.Hamilton, The Sailor in the Wardrobe (London: Fourth Estate, 2006); J.Harding, Mother
Country (London: Faber and Faber, 2006); H.Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost (London: Harper Perennial,
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2004); R.Wollheim, Germs: A Memoir of Childhood (London: Black Swan, 2004); J.MacGahern,
Memoir (London: Faber and Faber, 2005); J.MacNeillie, My Childhood (Galloway: Clutag Press, 2005);
D.Thomson, Woodbrook (London: Vintage Books, 1991).
17. For a short critical discussion of the publishing imprimatur and literary culture of Collins’ New Naturalist
enterprise, see R.Mabey, ‘News of Birds and Blossoming’, The Guardian, 14 March 2009, <http://www.
theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/14/new-naturalist-books-richard-mabey>. For a much longer internal
and contextual history, see P.Marren, The New Naturalists (London: Collins, 1995).
18.Nethersole-Thompson, Greenshank, p. xi.
19. For examples, see the Vertebrate fauna regional series for Scotland produced by J.A.Harvie-Brown and
T.E.Buckley; also E.V.Baxter and L.J.Rintoul, The Geographical Distribution and Status of Birds in
Scotland (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1928).
20. D.Nethersole-Thompson, ‘A Short British Nesting Trip’, in Nethersole-Thompson, In Search of Breeding
Birds (Leeds: Peregrine Books, 1992), p. 85. The essay first appeared in the Oologists Record.
21. For recent work in historical geography and history of science on the development of ornithological fieldwork techniques, see K.Greer and L.Cameron, ‘“Swee-ee-et Cán-a-da, Cán-a-da, Cán-a-da”:
Sensuous Landscapes of Bird-watching in the Eastern Provinces, 1900–39’, Material History Review,
62, 2006, pp. 35–43; K.Greer, ‘Ornithology on “The Rock”: Territory, Fieldwork, and the Body in
the Straits of Gibraltar in the Mid-nineteenth Century’, Historical Geographies, 37, 2009, pp. 1–27;
K.Greer, ‘Geopolitics and the Avian Imperial Archive: The Zoogeography of Region-making in the Late
19th-century British Mediterranean’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103, 2013,
pp. 1317–31; H.Macdonald, ‘“What Makes You a Scientist Is the Way You Look at Things”: Ornithology
and the Observer 1930–1955’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History
and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 33, 2002, pp. 53–77.
22. For a more detailed examination of the rise to prominence of ethological science in British natural history, and the scientific lives involved, see H.Lorimer, ‘Forces of Nature, Forms of Life: Recalibrating
Ethology and Phenomenology’, in B.Anderson and P.Harrison (eds), Taking-place: Non-representational
Theories and Geography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 55–78.
23.Nethersole-Thompson, Snow Bunting, p. 6.
24.Nethersole-Thompson, Snow Bunting, p. vii; Nethersole-Thompson, Greenshank, p. xi.
25. Oology is derived from the Greek word ‘oion’ for egg.
26. Desmond well remembered the visits of Cecil Stoney:
He stayed twice with us in Strathspey. I can see him in his shirtsleeves, sweating with the heat, as he
strode over the peat hags marking down Golden Plovers’ nests near our sheiling. Then I remember how
on a day of April blizzards we stormed an inaccessible Golden Eagle’s eyrie. I was in difficulties as I
tried to swing in to the ledge and called for more rope. The full harvest moon of Stoney’s face beamed
down at me: ‘More rope is it, Boy?’, he roared ‘I will that. Just wait till I spit on my hands’.
Cited in A.C.Cole and W.M.Trobe, The Egg Collectors of Britain and Ireland: A Compilation of Profiles
of Some Twentieth-century Egg Collectors (Leeds: Peregrine Books, 2000), pp. 246–7.
27.D.Nethersole-Thompson, Herons and a Heronry (unpublished diary/field notebook, dated 1923).
28. Published guidebooks were common. See, for example, F.Finn, Eggs and Nests of British Birds (London:
Hutchinson, 1910).
29. Andrew Cole and Bill Trobe describe how ‘Jock Walpole-Bond taught Desmond the value of watching
birds to their nests rather than cold searching for them, how to recognise their calls and song’ (Cole and
Trobe, The Egg Collectors of Britain and Ireland, p. 190).
30.Nethersole-Thompson, Herons and a Heronry.
31. Adam Watson, long-time friend and co-author with Desmond, offers a fine description of skills learned
in boyhood:
We climbed many trees to nests. At first we climbed easy short trees with many short branches, but when
aged 13 and over we advanced to taller trees with few side branches . . . gnarled old Scots pines carried
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the biggest and often the most nests per given tree, but usually you had to swarm up by putting your legs
round a side bole and then pull with your hands, so you had to rely on friction from your clothes holding
you temporarily. A monkey is far better than this. Often you can get an easier start by getting a shoulder
from a pal. I found I could easily climb short conifers with few side branches because with my long arms
and legs I could reach branches high above.
A.Watson, It’s a Fine Day for the Hill: Hills, Folk and Wildlife, 1935–62 (Northants: Paragon Publishing,
2012), p. 30.
32. For details of the overlapping communities of, and societies for, ornithologists and oologists, see Cole
and Trobe, The Egg Collectors of Britain and Ireland; A.C.Cole and W.M.Trobe, The Egg Collectors of
Britain and Ireland – An Update (Leeds: Peregrine Press, 2011); S.Moss, A Bird in the Bush: A Social
History of Birdwatching (London: Aurum Press, 2004); D.A.Allen, The Naturalist in Britain (London:
Penguin Books, 1976).
33.E.Parker, The Ethics of Egg Collecting (London: The Field House, 1935).
34. In 1946, the organisation changed its name to The Jourdain Society. Its disbandment was first reported
in 1969. The existence of the Jourdain Society is still the subject of rumour today. More generally, egg
collecting is now reported in the media as a perverse pursuit and callous act; see M.Wainwright, ‘The
Day Britain’s Most Notorious Egg Collector Climbed His Last Tree’, The Guardian, 27 May 2006,
p. 3; P.Barkham, ‘The Egg Snatchers’, The Guardian, 11 December 2006, <http://www.theguardian.
com/environment/2006/dec/11/g2.ruralaffairs>; R.George, ‘Egg Poachers at Large’, The Guardian, 7
April 2003, <http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/apr/07/animalwelfare.environment>; J.Rubinstein,
‘Opera-tion Easter: The Hunt for Illegal Egg Collectors’, The New Yorker, 22 July 2013, <http://www.
newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/22/operation-easter>
35. Philip Brown, Secretary of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), laid down the ‘cardinal rule’ of ‘look but don’t touch’ for the budding ‘birder’ in a foreword to G.Evans (compiler), The
Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs (London: Warne, 1954). A similar message was included as a frontispiece
in the Ladybird Senior guide, B.Vesey-Fitzgerald, British Birds and Their Nests (Loughborough: Wills &
Hepworth, 1954). See also P.Perry (ed.), British Birds, Nests and Eggs – A ‘Do You Know’ Book (London:
Perry Colour Books, n.d.).
36.Nethersole-Thompson, Breeding Birds, p. 88.
37.Nethersole-Thompson, Snow Bunting, p. 24.
38.A.C.Cole, The Egg Dealers of Great Britain: Profiles of Some Catalogue Dealers in the 19th and 20th
Centuries (Leeds: Peregrine Press, 2006).
39. For a detailed explanation of implement use and technique, see C.Bendire, Directions for Collecting,
Preparing and Preserving Birds’ Eggs and Nests (Bulletin of the United States National Museum, Part
D, No. 39; Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891).
40. Cole and Trobe, The Egg Collectors of Britain and Ireland, pp. 188–93.
41. Cole and Trobe, The Egg Collectors of Britain and Ireland, pp. 188–93.
42.Nethersole-Thompson, Greenshank, p. 5.
43.Nethersole-Thompson, Greenshank, p. 13.
44. What might be figured as stealing from the rich can as easily be depicted in terms of utilising a common
wealth. E.P.Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991).
45.The Piobaireachd (pibroch) or Ceol Mor (great music) is a bagpiping tradition of the Highlands.
46.R.Lambert, Contested Mountains: Nature, Development and Environment in the Cairngorms Region of
Scotland, 1880–1980 (London: White Horse Press, 2001).
47. Other political titles in the family book chest include Emmanuel Shinwell’s (London: Gollancz, 1944)
When the Men Come Home (1944); Ramsay’s MacDonald’s (London: Williams & Norgate, 1923) The
Socialist Movement; G.D.H.Cole’s (London: Gollancz, 1944) Great Britain in the Post-war World (presented to the Nethy Bridge Labour Group in 1942); George Bernard Shaw’s (London: Constable, 1944)
Everybody’s Political What’s What; H.J. Laski’s (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1936) Communism and
Where Stand’s Socialism Today; and Victor Gollancz’s (London: Gollancz, 1941) Russia and Ourselves.
48. Desmond was chairman of the Badenoch District Joint Committee of the County Council of Inverness,
1952–55. DCI/B/1-3 Badenoch DC HAC/C 242, Highland Council Archive, Inverness, (hereafter HCA).
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Lorimer
49.Nethersole-Thompson, Snow Bunting, p. viii. The extent to which a comfortable financial position on
Desmond’s side of the family served as the safety net for having elected a non-conformist lifestyle is
an interesting, and unresolved, point of inquiry. It is known for poverty to be deployed strategically as
cultural style or means of social distinction or that it can become the product of a certain ethic of living.
50.Nethersole-Thompson, Snow Bunting, p. viii.
51. ‘Royal visit: Aviemore councillor’s tilt at “ballyhoo”’, Aberdeen Press and Journal, 24 March 1961. ‘No
complaint’, letters page, Aberdeen Press and Journal, 4 April 1961. See also Kingussie Area Records,
Ref. D427, 1-38 (HCA).
52. Desmond served terms of office on the Town and Country Planning Committee, Health and Welfare
Committee, County Valuation Committee and Committee of Public Health of the Inverness-shire County
Council. Minute books of the Inverness County Council, vols 40–44 (HCA).
53. ‘Myrtlefield’ was the name given to one street in Aviemore’s post-war local authority housing scheme.
54. D.Nethersole-Thompson, ‘Some Aspects of the Territory Theory’, in Nethersole-Thompson, Breeding
Birds (early essays reprinted from the Oologists Record), p. 91.
55. The shaping of a ‘new left’ amid the austerity culture of post-war rural Britain is recalled in J.Berger and
J.Mohr, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (London: Penguin Books, 1967). Productive
comparisons can be drawn between the worlds of John Sassall, real-life subject of this ethnographic
portrait configured as an extended photo-essay, and Desmond Nethersole-Thompson.
56.Marren. The New Naturalists, p. 195.
57. The geographical and spectral are considered in combination in a special issue of cultural geographies,
15, 2008.
58.A.Gray, The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui (Aberdeen: Impulse Books, 1970). See also A.Gray, Legends
of the Cairngorms (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1987).
59. Carrie’s social position as a tradition-bearer and culture-keeper was more widely acknowledged. Nan
Shepherd, poet, writer and champion of the Cairngorms, paid visits to Whitewell during her long walking
tours in the mountains.
60. For an introduction to literature on second sight, see A.Mackenzie, The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer
(Coinneach Odhar Fiosaiche) (Stirling: Eneas Mackay, 1946); J.L.Campbell and T.Hall, Strange Things:
The Story of Fr. Allan McDonald, Ada Goodrich Freer, and the Society for Psychical Research’s Enquiry
into Highland Second Sight (London: Routledge, 1968); S.A.Cohn, ‘A Historical Review of Second
Sight: The Collectors, Their Accounts and Ideas’, Scottish Studies, 33, 1999, 146–85.
61.T.Neat, When I Was Young: Voices from Lost Communities in Scotland (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000).
62. Bird behaviour has for centuries been a source of interest in rural communities, emerging from commonplace ways of getting to know animal life, and a trust placed in skills of reading environmental phenomena. A multitude of examples arranged by species appear in M.Cocker and R.Mabey, Birds Britannica
(London: Chatto & Windus, 2005).
63.Nethersole-Thompson, Greenshank, p. 87.
64. P.Brown and G.Waterston, The Return of the Osprey (London: Collins, 1962). See also P.Brown, The
Scottish Osprey: From Extinction to Survival (London: Heinemann, 1979); G.Waterston, Ospreys in
Speyside (Sandy, Beds: RSPB, 1971).
65.Watson, Scottish Birds, p. 139.
66. In 2005, the memory of Desmond was the subject of a bad-tempered exchange of letters to the editor in
the Badenoch and Strathspey Herald.
67.MacDonald, The Socialist Movement.
68. DeSilvey, ‘Salvage Memory’.
69. C.Philo, ‘“To Go Back up the Side Hill”: Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood’, Children’s
Geographies, 1, 2003, pp. 7–23; O.Jones, ‘Endlessly Revisited and Forever Gone’: On Memory
and Emotional Imaginations in Doing Children’s Geographies’, Children’s Geographies, 1, 2003, pp.
25–36.
70. Two recent compendium volumes affording the particulars of landscape renewed political, ecological and cultural currency: J.Westwood and J.Simpson, The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s
Legends from Spring-heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys (London: Penguin Books, 2005); S.Clifford
and A.King, England in Particular: A Celebration of the Commonplace, the Local, the Vernacular
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71.
72.
73.
74.
cultural geographies 21(4)
and the Distinctive (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006). In academic geography, see D.Matless and
L.Cameron, ‘Geographies of Local Life: Marietta Pallis and Friends, Long Gores, Hickling, Norfolk’,
Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 25(1), 2007, pp. 75–103.
Cited in A.Edemariam, ‘Alice Munro: Riches of a Double Life’, The Guardian, 4 October 2003, <http://
www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview8>
Works of literary fiction and non-fiction have proved influential in this regard: J.Malcolm, The Silent
Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); J.Malcolm, In the Freud
Archives (New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2002); J.Malcolm, Forty-one False Starts:
Essays on Artists and Writers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013); A.Bennett, ‘The Lady in the
Van’, in A.Bennett (ed.), Writing Home (London: Picador, 2003), pp. 83–121; R.Solnit, The Faraway
Nearby (New York: Viking, 2013).
This essay is available to view from the University of Glasgow’s open access repository and free to
download by members of the public.
This is not to dispute the fact that standard-bearing benchmarks for professionally reputable research are
required. For an early disciplinary statement on the place of research ethics, see B.Mitchell and D.Draper,
‘Ethics in Geographical Research’, Professional Geographer, 35, 1983, pp. 9–17 Considerations of
ethics have percolated into all disciplinary fields, including inquiries where the subjects are no longer
living: L.Cameron, ‘Oral History in the Freud Archives: Incidents, Ethics and Relations’, Historical
Geography, 29, 2001, pp. 38–44; F.P.L.Moore, ‘Tales from the Archive: Methodological and Ethical
Issues in Historical Geography Research’, Area, 42, 2010, pp. 262–70.
Author biography
Hayden Lorimer is Professor of Cultural Geography at University of Glasgow. His teaching, research and
writings examine landscape, memory and the life of the senses.
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