Beyond the Imaginary Gates

There are now precious few places left on earth with which we do not feel familiar, if not from first hand experience then at least from the perspective of the armchair traveller - and fewer still where the camera has not yet prescribed our vision. An unrivalled collection of images of one of the last unsullied wildernesses in the world: the vast, uninhabited spaces of north-east Greenland. These beautiful, majestic and poetic landscapes exist in one of the harshest environments on earth. Roy traces the historical background with a brief outline of Greenland's early exploration. He documents the poignant traces of the Inuit tribe - their winter houses, summer tent circles and graves and enigmatic stone mosaics - and the structures left by the European trappers who once plied their dog-sledges in the lonely fjords. Iain Roy's first expedition to Greenland was in 1982, to the mountainous region of the south near Cape Farewell. He was a member of a small group of Arctic enthusiasts who shared a love of wild spaces and whose ambitions were fuelled by the accounts of earlier pioneers - early whaling and expedition journals and memoirs of scientists and trappers from the pre-war period. The group pooled their resources in order to reach remote corners of a faraway region that had become their common obsession. Roy himself has since made ten expeditions to the region.