Mike Tomkies - A Last Wild Place: Seasons in the Wilderness

After a successful career in journalism, Mike Tomkies returned to his childhood love of nature and spent over thirty years living in remote places in the Scottish Highlands, Canada and Spain. During this time, he wrote a number of best-selling books, including Alone in the Wilderness, A Last Wild Place, Out of the Wild, On Wing and Wild Water, Wildcat Havenand Moobli. He died in 2016.

This edition published in Great Britain in 2021
under license from Whittles Publishing by
Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

ISBN: 978 1 78027 703 5
ePUB ISBN: 978 1 78885 449 8

Copyright The estate of Mike Tomkies
Introduction copyright Jim Crumley 2017
First published in 1984 by Jonathan Cape

Subsequently published by Whittles Publishing, Dunbeath in 2017

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

Papers used by Birlinn are from well-managed forests and other responsible sources

Typeset by Hewer Text UK, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

With the publication of the first edition of A Last Wild Placein 1984, Mike Tomkies had finally found his feet in the West Highlands of Scotland, and found his nature writers voice. His earlier Scottish books, Between Earth and Paradiseand Golden Eagle Years, seem in retrospect to have had the air of a work in progress, rather than the finished article.

At the heart of A Last Wild Placeare fifteen chapters centred on the loch, woodlands, and mountains that surrounded the isolated cottage he called Wildernesse, each landscape element portrayed and examined through all the seasons of the year.

Over the years, he wrote, I have learned it is upon these stages, through the pageantry of all four seasons, the interplay of day and night, that nature plays all the mysteries, dramas, comedies and tragedies of creation itself. Often I go, admission free, a humbled audience of one, to watch and wonder.

In A Last Wild Place, Mike Tomkies took the reader into his confidence in a way that no-one else had done before. Seton Gordon, for example, unarguably the most significant of his predecessors among what he called the high and lonely places, was a naturalist and writer of great gifts, but there was a quality of aloof restraint about his writing. In contrast, Mike Tomkies wanted his readers to engage with him, and they did, in their thousands. His way was to show them not just what this looks like and sounds like, but what it feelslike to be here on this mountain at this moment. He also ensured that they knew what it takes to produce such work, the sheer physical slog that underpinned a quite extraordinary dedication to fieldwork in such a landscape.

I had first met him in 1982 when I was a newspaper journalist on the Edinburgh Evening Newsand interviewed him when he was promoting Golden Eagle Years. I subsequently visited him at Wildernesse, and over the ensuing years we became good friends. But it was when I helped him on treks to eagle eyries that I gained a healthy respect for what he was trying to do there.

When A Last Wild Placeappeared, I reviewed it for the Edinburgh Evening News.If you were to take my original copy down from my bookshelves none too carefully, a piece of paper would fall out. Its a neat and flawlessly typed half-page letter from Mike, thanking me for the review and my understanding of his work, and wishing me well in my declared intentions to give up my staff job and become a nature writer.

Re-reading the book now, more than thirty years after I did just that, I remember the impact it made on me, and its authors generosity and encouragement in the face of my own early struggles.