Sea Room by Adam NicolsonNorth Point Press (FSG), 2002 (Originally HarperColllins, 2001)

In this pleasingly broad book, Nicolson delves into the geological, natural, and social history of the Shiant Isles, 600 acres of rock and sheep-grazing grass in the Outer Hebrides that Nicolson inherited from his father, who purchased them after his mother (Vita Sackville-West) noticed an ad for them in the newspaper. The Shiants are not an easy landscape; the wind and the weather, the rough waters of the Minch, steep rock faces: but Nicolson sees beauty in them, too: the beauty of the natural caves in which the sea booms and echoes, the beauty of the green sea, the geese and the puffins and the fulmars. And then there’s the past: the sense of a long history, generations and generations of life in a small place. Nicolson uses primary sources and the archaeological record to tell the stories of the Shiants and its environs: the ruins of a house from the 1700s, a gold Bronze-Age torc dredged up by two fishermen.