For almost twenty years Michael Viney and his wife Ethna have lived on a remote cottage farm on 'one thorn-edged acre' of County Mayo. Turning their backs on 'metropolitan complexity, consumption and frustration', they went west in search of a self-reliant country life and the freedom to wake up every day 'in delight with where we were'. Since then, Michael Viney's weekly columns in the Irish Times have established his reputation as a uniquely compassionate and informed commentator on the natural world, a reputation triumphantly affirmed by the publication of this lyrical new month-by-month journal.