Distance and Memory

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Following in the successful nature-writing style of Robert MacFarlane and Gillian Clarke, Distance and Memory is a book about remoteness: a memoir of places observed in solitude, of the texture of life through the quiet course of the seasons in the far north of Scotland. It is a book grounded in the singularity of one place--a house in northern Aberdeenshire--and threaded through with an unshowy commitment to the lost and the forgotten. In these painterly essays Peter Davidson provides his testament to the cold, clear beauty of the north and reflects on art, place, history, and landscape.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Foreword (p. ix)
• Prologue: The Green Evenings (p. 3)
• Secret Hills (p. 8)
• Spring: Orkney (p. 27)
• Northern Waters (p. 35)
• Spar Boxes, Northern England (p. 42)
• Summer: Summer in the North (p. 59)
• The Rich Boys of Bygdøy and other fragments of a summer (p. 70)
• A Northward Journey and a Summer Storm (p. 79)
• Harvest: Bringing Home a Portrait by Cosmo Alexander (p. 91)
• Painting Northern Scotland (p. 97)
• The Food of the North (with Jane Stevenson) (p. 107)
• The Back End of the Year: Visits in Autumn (p. 115)
• A Letter from Copenhagen (p. 125)
• The Grim Consolations of the North (p. 131)
• The Aesthetics of Remoteness and the North (p. 141)
• Winter: Winter in the North (p. 157)
• Epilogue: The Snow over Madrid (p. 171)
• Acknowledgements (p. 177)