Thirty-three years in the life of a forest is nothing. Yet in the decades since I lived in the Montalto estate, near Ballynahinch, Co Down (1992-1993), there have been spectacular changes as well as devastating storms that wreaked havoc in the grounds.
During 12 months in Lakeside Cottage with my wife, I kept a large red journal with notes on shifts in the weather, changing seasons, the forest flora, wildlife and epiphanies of nature. Made up of brief entries, a mix of bricolage and trivialities known to writers as “nibble” notes, my journal was interspersed with the squiggles of Teeline shorthand. But after leaving Montalto, it languished in a drawer.
As the years slipped by, occasionally I glanced through the notes, wondering if I should do something with them, or if anyone would be interested. There was insufficient material, I reckoned, to stretch to a book. However, I was busy as a full-time journalist, later writing books and working for guidebooks to Ireland; I felt that if I approached a publisher, I would have been unable to free up the time required to work on a manuscript. But still I kept reflecting on the Montalto months, which developed into an itch and led to considerable “thinking” time. I was aware that a few of my favourite outdoor books – both travel and nature – benefited from a lengthy marination.
Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain about the Cairngorms in the Scottish Highlands, was written in 1945. However, because of a shortage of paper in the postwar years, publishers were risk-averse, so the book was not released until 1977 – some 32 years later – by which time she was 84.
After its publication her reputation grew exponentially, her book became hugely successful and has been championed by writers and academics as a masterpiece of landscape literature. It went on to sell more than 200,000 copies, was translated into at least 16 languages, and the author even features on the current Scottish five-pound note.
Shepherd (1893-1982) published three novels between 1928 and 1933, as well as an anthology of poems, but it is for The Living Mountain that she is best known. Her slim book is less than 100 pages long, yet critics have noted that each time they read it, they find something different. Shepherd’s landscape itself is constantly renewed, something that is echoed in the book: “However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.”
Several years ago, the Australian writer Merryn Glover, who now lives in Scotland, explored the same landscape and themes in Shepherd’s seminal work, following in her footsteps and contours in the mountains. In 2023 her remarkable book, The Hidden Fires: A Cairngorms Journey with Nan Shepherd, brought the writer of The Living Mountain to a fresh audience. Glover’s book affirms what she refers to as “the enduring validity” of Shepherd’s original account.
Another celebrated book, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (the title is taken from a Louis MacNeice poem, Twelfth Night) was based on his 18-month teenage walk across Europe in the 1930s, but not published until 1977. The delay was caused by the fact that one notebook was stolen from a youth hostel in Munich, while others he had lost were returned to him after the war. All of this meant that 44 years separated the experience of the journey from writing the book as he did not start work on the first volume until he was in his sixties.
Leigh Fermor, who was of English and Irish descent, set off on his trans-European odyssey in December 1933, which eventually produced a trilogy of books. He walked an average of 12 miles per day, taking him from the Hook of Holland following the courses of the Rhine and the Danube, with innumerable detours and side excursions before reaching Constantinople (Istanbul). Along the way, the young writer met farmers, woodsmen and innkeepers, as well as counts and aristocrats whose private libraries he visited. He slept in cowsheds, barges, lofts, monasteries and castles: “There is much to recommend,” he wrote, “moving straight from straw to a four-poster and then back again.”
The second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, was published in 1986 when he was 71 – by then it was 53 years since setting out on his journey. He ended this book with three words in capital letters to keep readers in suspense: “TO BE CONCLUDED.” The trilogy was concluded, but not by him since writer’s block had set in and it remained unfinished at the time of his death in 2011. The third and final volume, The Broken Road, came out posthumously in 2013, with light edits by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper.
Leigh Fermor had an insatiable curiosity and his books are disquisitions on numerous subjects. They represent vivid recollections of his journey, and are important historical documents of a Europe that no longer exists. But they are also a mix of the artistry of the author in later years and the boyish enthusiasm of the teenager setting out in the 1930s. The books have become known under the term “intergenerational collaboration”, ie the older man teleporting himself back to the carefree innocence of his youth.
Books such as these, where a lengthy timespan is involved in their journey to publication, festered in my mind. Early in 2024 the commissioning editor of Merrion Press, Síne Quinn, asked me if I would give some thought to writing up my notes from Montalto. She suggested weaving in the history of the storied estate, which was at the centre of the United Irishmen’s 1798 Down rebellion in Ballynahinch. The social and cultural aspects included the dynasties who lived there from 1641 up to the present. This was the catalyst required to jump-start the writing.
I went through my journal, turning notes into prose and bringing the story up to date through the work of the Wilson family who bought the demesne in 1994, spending 12 years restoring the house to its original condition. In the grounds more than 30,000 trees were planted with fresh flowering shrubs and bulbs, while new gardens were created and a lost garden was uncovered.
As well as visiting Montalto with a photographer, I recorded interviews with foresters and gardeners working there, spoke to historians and delved into archives and libraries. I then concentrated on writing an account of our time there, weaving in the estate history and its resurgence. The fact that Montalto opened to the public in 2018 meant that I was able to revisit woodlands where I had spent considerable time in the early 1990s. I also discovered that our tranquil cottage had been turned into an office and toilet block.
Frequently, I am asked at talks how long it takes to write a book. Now I can say with accuracy: 33 years. There is, of course, no definitive answer to that question since it depends on the type of book and scale of research. In my case this involved transcribing interviews, reading around the subject, as well as writing, rewriting, fact-checking and revising the manuscript. Then there is also the work involved in compiling the index, glossary and bibliography, writing captions for photographs, and seeking copyright clearance to use quotations.
The world has changed dramatically in the intervening three decades and so too has the English language. Those early years of the 1990s were pre-internet, smartphone and email. New words have been introduced while old words have different meanings. Twitter was the sound of birds making high-pitched, chirping sounds; a snowflake was just that, clouds were in the sky, tick-tock was the noise of our cottage clock, while AI is no longer just farm-speak for Artificial Insemination in animals.
In the spring of 2025 A Year in the Woods, fusing history, nature and memoir, was published. The book is about change in one place over the centuries. But it also looks at how living there sparked an interest in birdlife leading to an ornithological epiphany. Thirty-three years have elapsed since we lived cheek-to-beak with woodland birds such as treecreepers, goldfinches and long-tailed tits. The book reflects our life then during the four seasons we spent there, so the writing – or thinking about it – has had plenty of time to crystallise.
Paul Clements’s A Year in the Woods: Montalto through the Seasons is published by Merrion Press
