Wild Knowing: Raising Highland Cows and Finding Home in the Hebrides

'A warm, joyful book about the transformative effect of pursuing your dreams in middle age' DAILY MAIL
'A glorious celebration of humanity, nature and the magnetic pull of the Scottish islands' CAT HARVEY
'A joyous read with heart, bravery and spectacular scene setting' ARLENE STUART

'It was those glorious, hairy creatures themselves who made this strange, wild place a home for us'

A heart-warming memoir of leaving the city behind to build a new life among the wild beauty of the Hebrides.

When Fiona is given an old family ledger, she has no idea it will redirect the course of her life. With her husband, children, dogs and elderly father in tow, she exchanges the pressures of city living for sea air, open skies and a remote croft on a wave-washed island off the coast of Argyll.

Here, life is shaped by the land and the needs of forty-eight magnificent Highland cows. From the intensity of calving season to the long vigilance of winter, the rhythms of the herd dictate each day. As Fiona learns to care for them, she begins to see the world differently, guided less by certainty than by instinct, patience and a deepening awareness to the living world around her.

Over the turning seasons, what begins as a leap into the unknown becomes something steadier and more profound. In raising her cattle, Fiona finds herself drawn into a deeper kind of knowing, one that binds her to the landscape and draws her towards a sense of belonging she had never expected to find.

Warm, richly evocative and uplifting, Wild Knowing is a story of starting again, of what animals can teach us, and of finding home in the most unexpected of places.

Fiona Ross is a writer, teacher and crofter born and raised in Glasgow. In 2019 Fiona moved with her husband to a smallholding in the Scottish Highlands where they bought their first three Highland cows. Seven years later and the herd has grown to forty-eight. Fiona regularly writes for the Argyllshire Advertiser and lives on the Isle of Mull, Scotland.