Written by John Ridgway and published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1988 (OUT OF PRINT)

Ardmore is the pulse beat of Flood Tide. It is the windswept peninsula of rock and lochan to the north of Loch Laxford to which John Ridgway came one wet spring day nearly forty now and where he has put down enduring roots. On this remote seaboard of north-west Scotland he has built a livelihood in one of the least accessible corners of the British mainland. There is no road to Ardmore, and until 1981 there was no electricity. It is the place to which he returns after each of his own self-challenging world-quartering expeditions. It is where he works.

The core of this book is how the Ridgways, John, his wife Marie Christine, and daughter Rebecca, became part of a dwindling crofting community and accepted among their neighbours – old men for the most part, living on their memories of lucky sea rescues , or notable herring gluts, of prowess at the Durness Highland Gathering and in the pub afterwards, or days when the sheep sales still took place in the north-west. Present issues revolve around the idea of a shellfish farm, the coming of electricity, and the gradual departure of the local born population to the graveyard in Scourie. John Ridgway is describing a life that is fast disappearing. But the seals, otters, badgers, sheep and foxes remain. And each spring the grey lag geese, spying the green grass of Ardmore as they fly over Ben Stack, abandon their plans for Iceland, and circle down to nest on the fox-free Chadh-fi Island. When the goslings hatch they swim across the smooth waters of the sea loch, to grow big and strong on the grassy hill-side of the croft.

John and Marie Christine run one of the UK’s most successful and long-established adventure schools at Ardmore, beside the most northerly wood on the west coast of Britain. But John Ridgway is also a crofter, and the patches of emerald green grazing, hard won by liming from the encroaching wood-land and bracken, are as precious to him as hours of twilit escape to do battle with the canny brown trout of the hill lochans. Flood Tide is the story of teething troubles and slow growth to success of a remarkable business enterprise, started by one of life’s natural pessimists. It tells of the launch of adventure courses - for young people, for ladies, businessmen, and the special team-building courses run for the big conglomerates. It is the story, too, of people who help run the place, like a succession of young Instructors and the indomitable Lance Bell who built most things and kept everything in working order and his wife Ada who even turned school ma’am when Rebecca was small.

In describing how a dream developed, John Ridgway also describes the wild, elusive and beautiful world of mountains, lochs and islands, which he loves in all seasons. From the remoteness of Cape Wrath and the long white beach of Sandwood, to the sheer bird cliffs of Handa Island, and the snowy tops of Foinaven, Arkle and Ben Stack, home of ptarmigan, raven and eagle.

In counterpoint, he tells, too of winter expeditions taken to recharge summer batteries, to the Spanish Sahara and Nepal, to Patagonia and the Amazon; and of setting off on the ‘magic carpet’, which is the loch at the foot of the croft, on two epic circumnavigations, one record-breaking. But he always returns to Ardmore and the mooring under the wood in Loch a’Chadh-fi, to a world governed by tides and the seasons which is home.

Postscript 2003 by John Ridgway I never worked harder at a book than Flood Tide. Journey to Ardmore tells the story up to 1969 and I began writing Flood Tide in 1978. It took me ten years.

Much of it was written from my diaries, heeled over, on the 203-day non-stop sail round the world, with the portable typewriter propped up at a steep angle on the little chart table. And I remember how much Andy wished he’d had such an absorbing project to work on, just to distract his mind from those seven long months when we saw the land only once. Fifteen more years have passed since it was published and the old people are all gone.

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