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The Past is a Dangerous Driver by Neal Mason
Neal Mason is a mature poet who has been publishing collections of his work since the early 1990s and has appeared in many poetry magazines. I had not previously come…
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Coed Felenrhyd
My first visit to the temperate rainforest of Coed Felenrhyd in North Wales was in early autumn. Entering the ancient site was to walk into a cathedral, a multi-layered, multi-faceted…
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A River Runs Through Me by Andrew Douglas-Home
A clever title by a man with a name incredibly familiar to those of us of a certain age. In A River Runs Through Me, Andrew Douglas-Home gets the details…
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A Winter Walk Around St Ives
My eyes lighted on something dark, in the distance, on the beach. Coming closer, I saw it was a dead porpoise. Mouth frozen in a smile, skin radiating a silvery…
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The Ghost in the Garden by Jude Piesse
In her wonderful book, The Ghost in the Garden: in Search of Darwin’s Lost Garden, author Jude Piesse observes that gardens have the unique distinction of being created by people as…
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Deliverance
For days there had been no signs of human life. Pine forests shrouded in snow and half-frozen lakes glittering in the sun stretched into an unspoilt Canadian wilderness. It was…
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Outlandish: Walking Europe’s Unlikely Landscapes
In Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, he remarks that the permanence of a mountain seems to structure our understanding of the natural world, thereby conditioning the eye…
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A Thing of Beauty
I’d been looking forward to reading Peter Fiennes’ new book A Thing of Beauty since its first mentions on social media, having read and reviewed its wonderful predecessor Footnotes (2019,…
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The White Birch
Edgelands, not the ones where concrete and vegetation intersect, but the ones where culture and nature face each other in the mirror. A major thread in Tom Jeffrey’s new book,…