A weathered poet with four decades of fieldwork behind her, Valerie Gillies is a true guide to Scotland and beyond, and this collection affirms the companionship of poetry on the journey. The Cream of the Well contains a rich gathering from her earlier volumes, along with poems never published before.

Traditionally, the ‘cream of the well’ was the first sip of the well taken at sunrise, when the healing properties of the water were believed to be most potent. People would sleep out all night close by the well, and then they would run to drink as the sun came up.