The Singing Sands
Contents:
The geology of the region is mainly metamorphosed Pre-Cambrian sedimentary rock Morar Group- semipelite and pelite , surrounded by Morar group psammite. The bedrock is exposed as rocky outcrops on the beach at Gortenfern. The outcrops are variously strewn with lichens, barnacles and limpets and fucoids, according to locality and aspect.
The beach and surrounding area was used for commando training during the Second World War and may contain unexploded munitions, so please take care. A battle associated with the uprising is also believed to have been fought here. The alternative loop also passes through a small section of mixed deciduous woodland, with fine views of a stream with a small waterfall. Trees include rowan, birch, hazel, holly and ash, with some fine specimen oaks strewn with lichens, bryophytes and epiphytic polypody Polypodium vulgare. This is a particularly lovely section of the walk.
The walk affords good opportunities to see a variety of wading birds e.
- The Singing Sands (Inspector Alan Grant, #6) by Josephine Tey.
- The Singing Sands.
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Look out for goldcrests, crossbills, siskins, coal tits, woodpecker, pine marten and red deer in the coniferous plantation. The walk is along gravelled and forest track and is easy to follow. The return loop passes through a lovely section of plantation on a wide grassy path, following a steam for part of the way, and ending up through mixed deciduous woodland. Park in the small car park at the end of the road to the small township of Arivegaig. Follow the track through a metal gate and across the bridge.
The track skirts along the southern shores of Kentra Bay providing good views of the bay and its small islands. Keep right on the coastal track and cross a wooden bridge, ignoring a path ascending on your left to a hydro-electric station. After crossing the bridge, the track passes by the front of two adjacent stone houses at Gorteneorn. Continue along the track until you reach the forestry plantation. Pass through the wooden pedestrian gate and head into the forestry plantation. From here, the track ascends gently up hill, skirted by spruce trees on either side.
This is a lovely section of the walk, and provides a good opportunity to listen out for the drumming of woodpeckers, and to look out for coal tits, siskins and crossbills feeding in the tree tops.
The ground is carpeted with bryophytes. The importance of the site for MOD training during the Second World War is indicated by the danger signs on unexploded munitions on route. Continue on this track for about 2 kilometres until you see a small wooden sign on your right directing you to the beach ot Gortenfern. Turn right at the sign and descend towards the beach through a short stretch of coniferous woodland and then onto to heath before reaching the golden sands.
The Glasgow accent gets a particularly raw deal. Such overt signs of Scottishness as wearing a kilt Grant finds bogus. Wee Archie, going around fomenting separatism, is derided, and turns out to be an agent for an unnamed — but we know who it is — foreign power Tey probably had in mind someone like Hugh MacDiarmid who was a nationalist Anglophobe Stalinist, though he had had a fondness for Mussolini as well.
The food in the highlands is uniformly terrible, the hospitality industry out of season dire. The fishing is about the only decent thing in the whole place. Home About this blog Authors listed alphabetically Douglas Blackburn Spoiler Policy I don't have one, so to be on the safe side it is best to assume that reviews contain spoilers, even if I haven't said so at the start.
General information and contact My main blog can be found at: If you would like to contact me, you can write to me at tom. Follow me on Twitter My Tweets. This site uses cookies. Mar 19, Jane rated it it was amazing Recommended to Jane by: Wall Street Journal in article 5 best books on thd Hebrides. The beasts that talk, The streams that stand, The stones that walk, The singing sands, That guard the way to Paradise This cryptic verse sends him on a hunt for the murderer of a fellow passenger on a train he is taking to Scotland.
He is travelling there to recover from a nervous breakdown, where he will stay with friends. This verse takes him to the Hebrides, to France, and to London. A classic of the genre. I've read only one other of Tey's mysteries, but consider this the better of the two--unexp The beasts that talk, The streams that stand, The stones that walk, The singing sands, That guard the way to Paradise This cryptic verse sends him on a hunt for the murderer of a fellow passenger on a train he is taking to Scotland. I've read only one other of Tey's mysteries, but consider this the better of the two--unexpected twists and turns galore.
Oct 21, Alisha rated it really liked it Shelves: The mystery is subsidiary and unfortunately the solution relies on a letter of exposition from the perpetrator, so that was a bit disappointing Josephine Tey is simply one of the best writers I've ever come across. One feels merged with Alan Grant as a character, able to explore all the nooks and crannies of his mind. In this installment, Inspector Alan Grant is ordered by his physician to tak The mystery is subsidiary and unfortunately the solution relies on a letter of exposition from the perpetrator, so that was a bit disappointing In this installment, Inspector Alan Grant is ordered by his physician to take some time away.
He's dealing with nervous exhaustion that takes the form of very bad claustrophobia. He goes to his friends in rural Scotland yay! But on the railroad journey, he has a fleeting encounter with an evidently accidental death. He finds himself unable to forget this circumstance, and keeps returning to it in his mind, spurred on by a scrap of poetry found in the dead man's possession. As I said before, the mystery itself is not an urgent, cliff-hanging puzzle.
It's something he turns over and over in his mind while fishing on the river and spending time with his friends during his rest-cure. It moves him to go even further afield to the island of Cladda, the place of singing sands. But the real meat of the book is in Alan's thoughts and the slow process of recovering his nerves and sanity. The characters are beautifully drawn and all interesting. There are a few slow portions, but they are in the 1st half. Get through them, and it picks up to a fun end. The book is very atmospheric and is mostly set in Tey's home world - the northern portion of Scotland and the Hebrides.
There really is two stories to this: Inspector Grant's recovery from mental exhaustion, and a death. It's not glacial, but I wanted a little more "excitement".
Kentra Bay and The Singing Sands | Walking in Lochaber, Ardnamurchan and The West Highlands
I stuck with it to see if our detective would also achieve his aim of catching our villain. This book was found amongst the papers of Tey when she died all too early. She might have tightened it some before publication, but it is most certainly isn't a book to dim her powers as a writer. Ideal lazy day reading. I loved this story. The panic attacks that afflict Alan Grant are just so affecting. His desperate need for time off work - and his retreat to the Scottish Highlands - are the catalyst for an investigation of the death of a passenger on the same overnight train.
Grant inadvertedly picks up a newspaper and later finds it belongs to the deceased. A scribble in the blank Stop Press section intrigues him: It appears the deceased met his I loved this story. It appears the deceased met his end due to a fall while drunk. But Grant is not quite satisfied. On impulse he goes to Cladda, a fictional island in the Hebrides to try to discover the reason for the deceased's seeming obsession with the place. He also puts an ad in several London papers in an attempt to discover the source of the verse.
- The Corrigan Legacy.
- Singing Sands, near Kentra.
- 9 Rejection.
Gradually he sorts through the misdirections of an arrogant, entitled narcissist who believes he has committed the perfect murder. There is in this a very similar set-up to 'The Daughter of Time' by the same author, though in this case the crime was more current and s, when it was written contemporary. As pleasant a read, I'd say that the quality wring was scattered throughout, but that the central narrative felt a little quiet and contrived.
Start by marking “The Singing Sands (Inspector Alan Grant, #6)” as Want to Read: Josephine Tey was a pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh. As Josephine Tey, she wrote six mystery novels including Scotland Yard's Inspector Alan Grant. With The Singing Sands, the victim is dead from the beginning, but I still got to know and like him through the course of the book, even as Alan Grant did. Josephine Tey was the second, lesser pseudonym Mackintosh used: Gordon Daviot was the name she used for her serious work, her.
May 19, Seonaid rated it it was ok Shelves: I was feeling homesick, so I downloaded this novel because of its references to the Outer Hebrides, and its rather evocative front cover. As a mystery, it's not bad. Who is the dead man on the train, and what does the mysterious verse mean? Inspector Alan Grant, on holiday in Scotland, determines to find out in an investigation that takes him out west, to an island based on Barra, where the plane flies in and lands on the sand.
Though not the singing sand. And then — oh my fucking God!
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Fair enoug I was feeling homesick, so I downloaded this novel because of its references to the Outer Hebrides, and its rather evocative front cover. Fair enough, the description of the islands in March is pretty spot on — the howling wind, the 3-days gales,the relentless rain, the biting cold — but the excruciatingly stereotypical view of the Gael was jaw dropping. Take this, for example: The Gaels are portrayed as lazy, gullible and uncultured, and it only gets worse. This is a novel that suffers deeply from the cringe. Grant, and through him, Tey, despises Scotland and the Scots.
The quality of Scotchness was a highly concentrated essence, and should always be diluted. As an ingredient it was admirable; neat, it was as abominable as ammonia' p. The Scots are seen as careless, smug and dangerous, an unpleasant nation that needs to be Anglified to make it palatable.
I'm fairly sure the only reason Grant himself is a Scot is to show the rest of us the errors of our ways. By this point, who cares who the dead man is? One can only presume he died as a means of escape from the God-forsaken region that is Scotland. A disappointing read, but one that should be studied by all students of post-colonialism, because if Tey ever mastered anything, it was the art of superiority painfully perfected by the British colonial.
This novel is a classic 'whodunnit' from a true 'mistress of the golden age', Josephine Tey. Go see it I mean 'read it'! Go see it I mean 'read it'!! Aug 12, John rated it liked it. Tey's five Alan Grant novels six if you count The Franchise Affair , in which he makes a brief appearance or two are each quite different from the next.
The Singing Sands , the last of them, is no exception. It gives the impression of having been stitched together using two quite different ideas Tey had for a novel: Holding all Tey's five Alan Grant novels six if you count The Franchise Affair , in which he makes a brief appearance or two are each quite different from the next.
Kentra Bay and The Singing Sands
Holding all of this together is an account of Grant, given medical leave because suffering from nervous exhaustion through the stresses of work, going north to Scotland to spend some quiet time with his cousin Laura and her family, fishing and walking and generally getting over things. We must remember that the version of The Singing Sands we have is almost certainly not a final draft, it being a manuscript discovered among Tey's papers after her death.
No doubt, had she lived, she'd have tidied everything up to render the published version a seamless whole. When Grant's night train arrives at Scoone sic ; not Scone in Perthshire but an invented town in the Western Highlands , the sleeping-car attendant discovers that the young man in compartment B7 is dead. Grant leaves him to it -- he's a copper, but an off-duty copper -- and it's only later, when struggling through a Scottish hotel breakfast, that he discovers he's accidentally purloined the dead man's newspaper. Mysteriously, in an empty space in the paper appear a few penciled lines, an incomplete poem: The beasts that talk, The streams that stand, The stones that walk, The singing sand,.
That guard the way To Paradise. Those evocative lines help make this a cracker of a start to a detective novel.
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But there's a problem for the book as a whole: Moreover, when we later piece together the chronology of what happened to him, it's hard to know when he did the actual writing. Tey's evocation of the Highlands and its people is wonderful. This sense of delighted familiarity continues as Grant, his neurosis ebbing, becomes obsessed with the dead man and that fragment of verse. The obsession takes him to an island in the Hebrides reputed to have singing sands.
While his detour there gives Tey the chance to tell a very amusing, near comedic tale, this section of the novel is completely redundant; those singing sands aren't in Scotland at all but, as Grant discovers upon his return to the mainland, in distant Arabia. And it's with this discovery that the story properly restarts -- and a very fine story it becomes. I mentioned above the elements of Buchanesque adventure; Grant doesn't actually partake in that adventure himself, but the plot and its solution hinge upon it, and we do actually feel the same sense of awe that Buchan and indeed Haggard could conjure in their relevant tales.
Tey's prose is marvelous, a constant source of entertainment. It does flag for a page or three late in the book, when Grant is making the acquaintance of Arabian explorer Heron Lloyd, but this may have been a stylistic experiment that, for me at least, didn't come off. There are places in the novel, particularly in the first one-third or so, that had me giggling aloud. The solution to the mystery is all a bit hurried and perhaps a tad contrived the murderer sends Grant a detailed confession, saving him perhaps fifty pages of further detective work , but that didn't bother me.
I first read The Singing Sands about 35 years ago, as far as I can reckon. I was prompted to reread it by the Past Offences Book Signup , and am very grateful to that site for the prompt. The book offers a thoroughly enjoyable reading experience despite being a bit ramshackle as a mystery novel. And now I must think to reread some of Tey's other novels.
May 03, Maggie Craig rated it it was ok. I found this book astonishing and not in a good way. I understand the ms was found among Josephine Tey's papers after she died - in , I believe. I think her publishers should have left it there. It's a bitter little book, threaded through with the most appalling prejudice against Scots and all things Scottish. This is all the more unpleasant when Josephine Tey was herself Scottish. So was her fictional detective. Over the last few days since I finished The Singing Sands I've really swithered I found this book astonishing and not in a good way.
Over the last few days since I finished The Singing Sands I've really swithered about writing this review. As a writer myself, I never publicly review a book I really didn't like or thought was poorly written. It seems like professional discourtesy. I expected to love The Singing Sands but it's left a really unpleasant taste in my mouth. There's some great writing in here. Tey was one of the doyennes of the Golden Age of crime fiction, after all. There's an intriguing premise, a mysterious poem, some fantastic descriptions of landscape and unflinching descriptions of Alan Grant's experiences while going through a nervous breakdown.
However, none of it really knits together and makes a coherent whole. It's hard to forgive the snobbery. The aristocracy and gentry are all humorous, intelligent and self-effacing. The lower orders, both north and south of the border, are stupid, criminal or comical. There are side-swipes at Scotland and Scots threaded throughout the book.
Nobody in Scotland can cook or bake anything palatable. Gaelic songs are poor efforts, sung by people with expressionless voices. Anyone who advocates Scottish independence is to be mocked or possibly reported to Special Branch. Even Scotland's buses are painted "that most miserable of colours: The killer comment comes towards the end of the story.
Grant's posh cousins are amused by their son speaking "clotted Perthshire". They do actually live there, so that doesn't seem too odd.
However, Grant hopes they won't wait too long before they send the young boy away " As an ingredient it was admirable; neat, it was as abominable as ammonia. I find it very sad that such a talented writer should clearly have felt the need to do down her own people. In Scotland, we call this chip on the shoulder lack of self-esteem the Scottish Cringe. I'm glad to say it's rapidly fading into the past.
I'm sorry that Josephine Tey isn't around to see the much more confident Scotland that exists now. May 01, Jim rated it it was amazing Shelves: He leaves by train to visit his cousin and her husband on their farm in Scotland, planning on fishing the local waters and relaxing. His future activities are altered when he discovers the dead body of a young man on the train. Aug 19, Laurie rated it really liked it.
I read mystery books not for blood and gore, but for atmosphere and suspense. The Singing Sands, like Tey's other books, is very well-written and provides a contemporary glimpse into another place and time: As always, the characters are intriguing and the story is suspenseful. Note that this not a traditional mystery in the sense that the clues are all provided fairly early in the narrative.
The reader's deductive powers are still put to good use. Jun 28, tom bomp rated it did not like it Shelves: Minor spoilers here but nothing about the mystery itself I did not enjoy this book.
Fired up for books! It's like knitting, a pleasant past time with many a reader and in fact Tey often referred to her novels as being tantamount to "Yearly Knitting. May 31, Julie Durnell rated it really liked it Shelves: A Shilling for Candles. For example, there's a point where he's staring at the ocean and is feeling overwhelmed by a sense of insignificance, and instead of recognizing that as a small taste of the gap between himself and the One True God who CREATED the ocean that's scaring him, he turns around and sort of smugly walks off, congratulating himself on how easily the ocean can be walked away from Scottish Gaelic culture and stuff?
It's not a typical mystery - the death occurs in the first few pages but it's not for a long time that it's thought of as in any way interesting or suspicious. And until you get to this point you get a very unconvincing story of a holiday in Scotland. That's full of hatred of Scotland and Scottish people - or at least highland ones, ones from Glasgow and god help you if you speak Gaelic. The anti-Scot thing is the Minor spoilers here but nothing about the mystery itself I did not enjoy this book.
The anti-Scot thing is the biggest thing in the book but later on near the very end she gives us a paragraph where she mentions how horrible it'd be if the French had colonised India - no colour-bar and "so racially intermarried that it had lost its identity" - and says how all Americans "look like Red Indians even if they begun as Saxons". The first half of the book or so is concerned with Inspector Grant travelling to Scotland, staying with old friends, going fishing, and having panic attacks when he's in cars due to claustrophobia.
I was genuinely surprised to see a plot point about panic attacks and it's described pretty well but at a certain point in the book he just gets magically cured. He meets a guy literally called "Wee Archie" who's some kind of Scottish nationalist and described as a "revolutionary" in what sense is never explained. He's given as nasty a description as the author can manage.