Peter Costello
Author Paul Clements
Year in the Woods: Montalto through the Seasons,
by Paul Clements
(Merrion Books, €18.99/ £17.99)
Our relations with the natural world have provided a theme which has engaged people of spirit and sensibility since writing began almost, but certainly in the last few centuries.
In receiving this book for review the title at once made me think of Paul Clements’ spiritual ancestor Henry David Thoreau, and sure enough one of the two epigraphs is from Thoreau.
But there are other books in the same line, such as Henry Beston’s The Outermost House, or The Natural History of Selborne, the writings of Richard Jefferies – all little known in Ireland. In the same line of country is A Sand County Almanac (1949) by Aldo Leopold, another American alive to the world of nature around him in the isolated farm lands Wisconsin.
Here in Ireland, as a book that sees nature with the heart of a poet and the insight of a scientist, we have The Way that I Went by Robert Lloyd Praeger, a book that bears constant rereading – though reading any book a second time now seems to be a lost habit.
Though the sensibility for the meaning of nature goes back a very long way, in our own immediate culture it can be said to have begun with The Natural History of Selborne in 1789. That was a book created out of the author’s close observations of nature and of birds and animals as living things, not mere laboratory specimens.
This new book is very much in that tradition of science. Paul Clements, who has worked for papers and for radio, has always been a busy man. He has written books about Ireland and been involved in contributing to the more serious end of modern guide books. He is still involved in such expositions, as a Fellow at Green Templeton College in Oxford, a place where graduate education meets modern scientific management.
But this book had a more deeply personal origin. A generation ago, while recovering from surgery – chilling words at any time – he and his wife went to live in a cottage in the ridings of the Montalto Estate in Co. Down.
There they passed a quiet year, one in which he took notes about what he saw and what he felt, but these jottings never got as far as making a book. They were put aside and only brought out again at the urging of his present publishers, who aided their transformation into a book at last.
In that year Clements came to appreciate the natural life of the woods and animals and birds around him. In this sense his book is more like the Rev. Gilbert White than Thoreau. These pages are delightful. But we have to remember that White was a clergyman, the curate rather than the rector of Selborne.
White was socially involved too. As was Thoreau during his time in the woods (in a cottage that belonged to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet and philosopher). Though absorbed by nature, Thoreau never lost contact with the society around him.
In this book nearly 50 pages out of just over 200 are devoted to the background and history of the Montalto Estate from 1641 – that ominous year- to this very year and the damaging effects of Storm Éowyn.
The background is important, but at the heart of the book are the seasons of Montalto as experienced by Clements and his wife over that year of healing. The birds were a vital issue with him, but so too was the process of how we as human beings can live in and become part of nature.
A fascinating book which manages to weave together so many strands of existence so often separated into a glimmering tapestry of life as a whole. One might almost call it ‘a book for all seasons.’