Annie O'Garra Worsley

Writer Crofter Geographer Grandmother
#WINDSWEPT (2023) An instant classic of British nature writing

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

Some very heart warming & for me, emotional responses to #Windswept in letters from readers & practitioners. It's more than 2yrs since the book was published. To this day, I'm astonished by original reviews but these recent letters? They are incredible. Thank you.

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

I love seeing the croft come to life, revealing old stories, full of hope for the future. On the high steep river terrace are dozens of pretty pink heath spotted orchids, on the modern rapidly rewilding riverbank, bluebells (memories of old woodland) & broad-leaved marsh orchids.

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

For goodness' sake. When will this anti science madness end?
We need reliable scientific data from land, ocean and atmosphere now more than ever!
https://t.co/JuwsSbPgAW

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

@holnicoteNH 🤬

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

Chance meetings with Kiwis, a house martin's house, wildflowers blooming, warm sunny days and beach games with the grandchildren.

A new blog for the start of summer.

https://t.co/Tm6kTkE5Lm

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

Chance meetings with Kiwis, a house martin's house, wildflowers blooming, warm sunny days and beach games with the grandchildren.

A new blog for the start of summer.

https://t.co/Tm6kTkE5Lm

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

The latest in the series of letters with Lochaber crofter Kirsteen Bell for @tweetbytheriver's Coast, Croft & Hill: letters from the NW Highlands.
This month we talk about nightjars, spinning, cuckoos and wildflowers. 
Happy reading 🤗

https://t.co/oXAvLLfIfy

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

Beach life.

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

@KHD_2017 @accessstratford @UllapoolB @warkslibraries How absolutely wonderful. Happy reading 🤗

[Nigel Hester @holnicoteNH]

The English community that brought its river back from the brink: ‘If we can get it right here, we can do it everywhere’ https://t.co/yAR9848H2j

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

Great fly past by a (huge) female golden eagle on the croft this morning. Closest I've ever been to one, closest and lowest flyby I've ever experienced. Bit shocked tbh 😱 She was HUGE
Sadly, no pictures. Too slow. Dram (the dog) wasn't bothered. He just sighed as I got excited.

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

Winter is back!

View upriver to Beinn Alligin, Torridon mountains, Wester Ross.

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

Wonderful thread on mason bees. I've learned so much from @StevenFalk1 🤗

[Steven Falk @StevenFalk1]

1. Lets celebrate Britain's Osmia mason bees. 4 species can occur in gardens using bee hotels. O. bicornis and the recenty arrived O. cornuta use mud to create cell partitions and nest plugs whereas O. caerulescens and O. leaiana use chewed up leaves (pesto-like 'leaf mastic').

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Harrison Ford, "Humanity is a part of nature, not above it"

"We have an essential mandate to protect 30% of the world's land and sea by 2030, to prevent the mass extinction, to slow the warming of our planet"

"We are still losing nature to profiteering, corruption, conflict, including land that is already protected on paper. These efforts matter but they're not enough"

"We need cultural change"

"We need to extend social justice"

"We need to respect and elevate the indigenous people that are being marginalized, and in many cases, killed in cold blood"

"These communities have long understood that the trees, the mountains, water, soil, are not commodities, they are relatives to be cherished for following generations to embrace and protect"

"We can all play our role in embracing that wisdom in our day to day lives by loving the planet"

"By honouring nature's authority, her generosity, the bounty she affords us. The justice of her example"

"Because the world you’re stepping into, the world my generation left you, is a real mess”

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

@ArabellaPike I would have loved to hear her and see you all 🥰

[Arabella Pike @ArabellaPike]

Thank you so much for your support Annie. The book is exceptional and overturns many easy fallacies about wilderness. At the launch Cal read the terrifying passage about her search for the wild as sublime by chasing lava flows in Iceland. A book not to be missed.

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

I was privileged to receive an early copy of this extraordinary book for review. It is exceptional, a brilliant exploration of landscapes, geographies and wildernesses both of the mind and of place.
The Savage Landscape by @calflyn is simply superb.
@ArabellaPike @WmCollinsBooks

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

Oo hello.
Incoming.

View from the back door over the bog just now.

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

@GardenerFliss @AppreciatingP Thank you for this!
Here's a little (carder?) bee at the edge of our croft next to a peat bog.

[The potting shed @GardenerFliss]

Who doesn’t adore a Bumblebee. Keep a look out for these furry pals. Grow plants that they love, create habitats that feel like home and they will reward you with their beautiful array of stripe jumpers. 💚

[Annie O'Garra Worsley @RedRiverCroft]

Yep, @BenGoldsmith but some of us are making a difference!! Even at the (relatively small) crofting scale! Come for a visit. Read my book #Windswept: Life, Nature & Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands to find out more!

[Ben Goldsmith @BenGoldsmith]

I’ve just been in Scotland.

The writer Aldo Leopold once said that even the smallest ecological education leaves you walking through ‘a world of wounds’ which nobody else seems to see.

Scotland’s beautiful hills and glens have for the most part been stripped and scarred and left utterly desolate by generations of landowners, land managers and dreadful politicians.

You can drive in any direction for hours and see nothing but sheep and more sheep on denuded hillsides, pockmarked with vast, artless blocks of monocultural conifer plantation deadzones.

Even where there are few sheep, red deer numbers are artificially inflated for the canned shooting industry and the deer do just the same as the sheep, leaving nothing but cropped grass from the top of the hills to the bottom of the valleys, a gigantic bowling green with contours.

Developing countries which have suffered a loss of trees and nature on anything like the same scale have the rest of the world rushing to offer assistance in restoring it. Think Madagascar, or Nepal, where things are fast now being turned around.

Many of the pockets of natural woodland that remain in Scotland are totally infested with head-height invasive rhododendron.

Some landowners are turning things around, to the fury of their neighbours, but they remain a small minority. Those places are fast becoming truly magical islands of what once was and what could be again.

It’s even worse under the sea, out of sight, out of mind. Scotland says that marine protected areas represent 38% of its seas. It’s bollocks. Even the most destructive fishing practices such as bottom trawling are permitted with impunity in nearly all of it. Just 1% of Scotland’s seas are actually protected.

This is what happens when you have a population that has lost touch with what nature is, and can’t see the ravages which surround it; governed by politicians who are in hock to a small minority of established vested interests who simply won’t have it any other way.