Undiscovered Scotland

 

"Sea Marked" by Linda Cracknell is a beguiling and inspirational book that succeeds in bringing the author's experiences to life on the page. This is a book about the sea, about family and family history, and about boats. It tells the story of one woman's efforts to learn more about her origins and about those who came before, and in particular about the women in the generations that preceded her. The best books are those that open up new worlds in a way that transports their readers across time and place. This is one of those books. You may never have sailed a boat and you may have ancestors who never saw the sea. After reading "Sea Marked" you'll have a deeper understanding of the author's background: and the quality of her writing is such that you'll emerge having shared the experiences she describes.

You get a good sense of the breadth of the book from the publisher's description: "When Linda Cracknell’s quest to connect herself and her mother to a seafaring family history finds her in a harbour, bracing herself to throw a line, she is struck by the parallel of this physical action to her years-long mission of reeling the past closer to the present—finding her place in a family tree full of mariners and ship-owners, whose lives were defined by the ebb and flow of tides."

"She travels the Scottish and South-West England coast—where many of her ancestors lived—by boat and foot; journeys on a 121-year-old sailboat; joins a community effort to build and launch a rowing boat on a Highland loch; and lays a family palimpsest in the footsteps of her ancestors across marshes and clifftops."

"She finds that it is the women in her family who reach across the decades and centuries to catch the line she throws, and begins to understand the women in her family more clearly as the linchpins of the coastal communities they lived in—and as the undertow of her own identity. All the while, she is slowly untangling her complex relationship with her own elderly mother. What begins as a quest for legacy becomes something much deeper, as she grows to understand an elemental and unconscious pull to the sea, imagining her blood as salt-saturated, sea-marked."