Wintering

Author/Guide: Stephen Rutt

Why a Booktrail?

The new season begins. The geese return…

ISBN: 978-1783964543
Genre: Nature/Landscape

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What you need to know before your trail

The arrival of huge flocks of geese in the UK is one of the most evocative and powerful harbingers of winter; a vast natural phenomenon to capture the imagination. So Stephen Rutt found when he moved to Dumfries one autumn, coinciding with the migration of thousands of pink-footed geese who spend their winter in the Firth. Thus began an extraordinary odyssey.

From his new surroundings in the north to the wide open spaces of his childhood home in the south, Stephen traces the lives and habits of the most common species of goose in the UK and explores the place they have in our culture, our history and, occasionally, on our festive table.

Wintering takes you on a vivid tour of the inbetween landscapes the geese inhabit, celebrating the short days, varied weathers and long nights of the season during which we share our home with these large, startling, garrulous and cooperative birds.

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Travel Guide

Discover the Geese of Dumfries

‘’October by calendar; deep into winter by spirit. I can only faintly see the first line of hills. The trees reduced to pale grey shadows, their shapes indistinct in the weather: I see a flock of geese again, swirling like static around the television aerials, descending down to the fields behind the houses.’’

‘’November bleeds greyness into December. December’s dampness begins to freeze. Fog spends several days cloaking the street, shrouding the graveyard over the road. I walk through it – an impromptu Gothic wonderland – and down to the footbridge over the river, visibility so low that I can’t see either bend and it feels as if I am trapped in a cloche, my own bubble of the world, everything else dulled, hidden or gone. At night along the road, it is possible to see only the streetlamps and the way the freezing fog curves out from and defines their light, until it looks like a low-vaulted ceiling, the world a cloister of light strung up by each lamp post.’’