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Sarn Helen: A Journey Through Wales, Past, Present and Future

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The problem was that, in 2009, our son Edwyn put in his appearance and all ambition was redefined – principally, as getting any sleep at all. Bullough provides a massive wake up call to action. We need to live locally and sustainably, shout on the steps of the Senedd to be heard, join thousands (no, not just thousands but hundreds of thousands) in London, and raise our voices in solidarity.

Part love-letter, part lament, part call-to-action, Sarn Helen is one man's passionate attempt - in prose that's at once lyrical and forensic - to put into words what's at stake for us all in our present moment -- Carys Davies Sarn Helen: A Journey through Wales, Past, Present and Future by Tom Bullough is published by Granta. It is available from all good bookshops. One of the species that you won’t find on the endangered list is humanity, but that doesn’t mean that the outlook is good. About 60% of the Welsh population live on the coast, yet relentlessly rising sea levels mean that the country is fraying at the edges. Fairbourne, on the south side of the Mawddach estuary not far from Saint Elen’s home, is the first village in Britain expected to be lost to climate change.

From coastal castles to the steep pitches of Snowdonia National Park, mountain passes to the UK’s first trail centre at Coed-y-Brenin, traversing the ‘desert of Wales’ through the Cambrian Mountains and spectacular Elan Valley and lastly crossing the rough and wild Brecon Beacons National Park into the valleys of South Wales, there are few long-distance routes that rival the variety of landscapes that you’ll find on Sarn Helen. Sarn Helen is accomplished and stunning in every one of its many personalities: as history, as memoir, as eco-parable, as impassioned call to arms” I thought this mix of travel, nature and environmental writing was really good. Bullough gets the balance between each element right.

I love to write, and most of all I love the way that (on those occasions when it works) it can happen almost weightlessly, as if by itself. There is a sense that you, the writer, are aligned with the world in a manner surpassing any conventional understanding. For me, it brings to mind convergent evolution: the way that a pair of unrelated species, such as Smilodon fatalis and Thylacosmilus atrox (respectively, once, an American saber-tooth cat and an Argentinian saber-tooth marsupial), could somehow arrive at a similar form. If there is no mightier hand at work, and there is no Platonic ideal of your book already somehow latent in the cosmos, then it feels at least as if the world comprises some sort of underlying pattern – and as if, for now, you and it have become one seamless thing.

In the same way, the landscape itself contains multiples. You can be walking past a cluster of yews that are older than Christ, turn a corner and find yourself in a standoff with a herd of alpacas. As Bullough presses on through the guts of the country he encounters Roman hill forts guarding post-industrial villages and natural springs bubbling up in the middle of housing estates. Sometimes the timeshifts are crammed into a single building: a nonconformist chapel is turned into a bijou domestic home by the incongruous addition of a front porch that appears to have been filched from a county hall. We recently joined a coachload of local people travelling up to London for the XR Gathering. It was peaceful, organised, with upwards of 60,000 very nice people attending of all ages, hardly terrorists. Well, that’s how it is in that adrenalised condition. (There have been times when I have felt that I could walk across a motorway without any concern for my safety, I was that sure that a book must happen – which goes to show, if nothing else, that it is also a form of intoxication.) In fact, there are more tangible aspects. For one thing, this state of clarity never simply comes from nowhere; it follows an immense amount of thinking and research, and in my case, usually, a deep, despairing murk. For another, it always seems to come when you find yourself in possession of a shape.

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