Distance and Memory

Peter Davidson was born in Scotland in 1957. He is currently Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, University of Oxford. Peter has edited theClarendon Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe (Vol I, 1998; II, 1999); the Clarendon anthology of seventeenth-century English poetry, Poetry and Revolution(1998), and (with Jane Stevenson)Early Modern Women's Poetry (2001). He has also published numerous articles and studies of the post-reformation culture of British Catholicism, most recently in the monographThe Universal Baroque (Manchester University Press, 2007). The Last of the Light: about twilight was published by Reaktion in 2015. Robert Macfarlane is an acclaimed nature and travel writer. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Magdalen College, Oxford and he is now a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His most recent book, The Old Ways, was shortlisted for the 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize.

'Peter Davidson has written a remarkable and unusual book - I have started the book but want to make it last the summer. It is a sustained prose poem, very moving in its effect... I am savouring it, reading it slowly, hoping to prolong the pleasure of these exquisite essays through the summer. It is, I think, one of the most beautiful books to be written in Scotland for many decades.'Alexander McCall Smith

• Foreword by Robert MacfarlanePrologueThe Green Evenings Secret Hills SPRINGOrkney Northern Waters Spar Boxes, Northern England SUMMERSummer in the North The Rich Boys of Bygdøy and other fragments of a summer A Northward Journey and a Summer Storm HARVESTBringing Home a Portrait by Cosmo Alexander Painting Northern Scotland The Food of the North (with Jane Stevenson) THE BACK END OF THE YEARVisits in Autumn A Letter from Copenhagen The Grim Consolations of the North The Aesthetics of Remoteness and the North WINTERWinter in the North Epilogue: The Snow over Madrid Acknowledgements