A beautiful book, recounting the author’s journeys through some of Britain’s wild places, sometimes alone, and sometimes accompanied by one or two close friends who share his love of the wild. The language of the book is spell-binding, taking the reader on a parallel journey, weaving science and literature, knowledge and wonder. .
“From the bottom of the hill, I could hear the noise of the trees with the wind; a marine roar that grew in volume as I approached. Looking up at the swaying wood, I remembered something that I had read: when you see a wood or a forest, you must imagine the ground almost as a mirror line, because a tree’s subterranean root system can spread nearly as widely as its aerial crown. For the visible canopy of each tree you have to imagine an inverted hidden one, yearning for water just as its twin yearns for light.”
“Once, emerging from a high-hedged lane, I put up a flock of white doves from a brown field, and watched as they rose applauding into the sky.”
“Lines of spider’s silk criss-crossed the air in their scores, and light ran like drops of bright liquid down them when we moved. In the windless warm air, groups of black flies bobbed and weaved, each dancing around a set point, like vibrating atoms held in a matrix. I had the sense of being in the nave of a church: the joined vaulting of the trees above, the stone sides of the cutting which were cold when I laid a hand against them, the spindles of sunlight, the incantations of the flies.”
“Coleridge once compared walking at night in his part of the Lake District to a newly blind man feeling the face of a child: the same loving attention, the same deduction by form and shape, the same familiar unfamiliarity. At night, new orders of connection assert themselves: sonic, olfactory, tactile. The sensorium is transformed. Associations swarm out of the darkness. You become even more aware of landscape as a medley of effects, a mingling of geology, memory, movement, life. The landforms remain, but they exist as presences: inferred, less substantial, more powerful. You inhabit a new topology. Out at night, you not only understand that wildness is not only a permanent property of land – it is also a quality which can settle on a place, with a snowfall, or with the close of day.”
Read, and find yourself wanting to begin your own journey.
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Top reviews from other countries
Stephen Hobbs, EdD
Oh the word descriptions of his landscapes ))smiles
Reviewed in Canada on 28 July 2022
Stephen Hobbs, EdD
Reviewed in Canada on 28 July 2022
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Cliente Amazonclt
Wild places, and their history.
Reviewed in Italy on 6 December 2019MR JOHN H D FRITH
One of the best books I have ever read, and I have read thousands.
Reviewed in France on 19 August 2019
Srikumar M Menon
Disappointed with the writing overall
Reviewed in India on 25 October 2016illiterate
Leider mehr eine Ansammlung von Aufsätzen für Wissenschaftszeitschriften
Reviewed in Germany on 27 April 2016
