Cirrus@Austlit

'A few days before I flew from Australia to travel alone through Scotland for three months, my eye caught on a book behind the counter of a book shop: Landmarks by the British nature writer Robert Macfarlane. The blue-and-white cover looked like a wood cut. I asked the assistant for the book, and opened it to a glossary of words under the title ‘Lights, Hazes, Mists and Fogs’. I mouthed the words listed there: brim’skud, from Shetland, was the smoke-like haze that rises from breaking waves. Maril’d, also from Shetland, described the sparkling luminous substance seen in the sea on autumn nights, and on fish in the dark. The contents page of the book was divided into regions such as ‘Flatlands’, ‘Waterlands’ and ‘Coastlands’, and each section was followed by a glossary of place-terms for weather, landscape and nature gathered from Norn and Old English, Anglo-Romani and Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Gaelic and the Orcadian, Shetlandic and Doric dialects of Scots.' (Introduction)