Ardmore is the pulse beat of Flood Tide. It is the windswept peninsula of rock and lochan to the north of Loch Laxford, where I pitched up one wet spring day forty-two years ago and where Marie Christine and I put down our roots. There are three generations of us living here now. On this remote seaboard of the North West Highlands of Scotland we built the John Ridgway School of Adventure 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 we always yearn to return to. It is where we work. The core of this book is how Marie Christine and I, with our young daughter Rebecca, became part of a dwindling crofting community. Gradually we were accepted among our 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. At the time of writing this book, main issues revolved 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. I was describing a life that has all-but disappeared now. But the seals, otters, badgers, sheep and foxes remain, along with the busy resident population of small birds in the wood. 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 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 hillside of the croft.