A Search For Nearby Nature and Wilderness
Alastair Humphreys
Eye Books Limited, 2024, 367 pages
Paperback: £12.99 | ISBN 9781785633676
Review by Barry Larking
The sign was explicit and backed up by a seriously high metal fence. “Danger! Do Not Enter!” What the Hell, it was once a public park … We climbed over, all six feet something of it into a lovely dene.
Our combined ages came to 158 years. We ought to have known better.
It was during the Covid 19 Pandemic. We’d had our jabs but we couldn’t roam. So we explored the neighbourhood well inside the supposed limits. We amazed ourselves. The hidden away bits we hardly noticed when driving past en route to ‘the countryside of mountain and moor’. Blimey! What had we missed! Well, a marvellous gorge with mature oak trees framed by slabs of a high rock face sandwiched unseen down below 70s era housing estates for one.
I ought to feel miffed by this book. Mr Humphreys has ‘shot my fox’ – not a real one; he’d never do anything like that. No, my thoughts have been turning increasingly to the notion of ‘nature from our doorstep’. I had for a long while worried about lines on maps that separated ‘nature reserves’ from, well, ordinary nature. Where did one stop and the other start? Why? We need a re-think.
In reality, the mapping of ’spaces’ is no more than the practice of land agency carried over from our history of grabbing, owning and flogging off something no one can take with them, in the sense of leaving all our possessions behind some day. It worries me that designations fall into categories of purity. Otherwise just not worth worrying about – ‘do what you like to this bit’. I came to think we must begin to cherish more than those dauntingly strict criteria of excellence that under pin official, statutory, nature conservation. In this small island I don’t see a future if all that emerges for conservation is a series of ‘plots’ of land where real nature is saved and all else, ugly, flattened or abused, means nothing.
In writing Local Alastair Humphreys was doubly moved to take a look around closer to home, not just by Covid pandemic restrictions. He has travelled the world, walking or cycling over wilderness and paddling across oceans. To reach these jumping off points involved him doing lots of flying. He’s developed a conscience….
The Covid virus was no respecter of an adventurer’s wanderlust. So what to do? Think creatively, think local. He turned himself into a natural history urban explorer, even, psycho-geographer. He ordered a map of his locale, marked off in one km squares. Then, he decided to use a random number generator (online) to decide which squares he would visit – at first so long as they weren’t immediately adjacent to one he’d already explored. That was the end of any studied calculation and forethought for this adventure. Inspired beforehand by his readings of Thoreau, Richard Jeffreys and the late Sir Terry Pratchett, the first for philosophy, the second for empathy and the latter to help prime his amazement ‘at Absolutely Everything’, he set off. It would he thought take him a about a year.
He didn’t wait for ‘better weather’ either. Rain soaked pathways beside swishing traffic on dual carriageways – this traffic soundtrack pops up regularly – competing with few ‘natural’ sounds. Yet here on the unpromising edge of a semi-built up area close to home he found small marvels and some greater ones; an emblematic sofa dumped in a pond covered in floating algae and framed by reeds like a sort of Sarah Lucas alternative ‘Ophelia’, an oddly apt symbol; Mr Humphrey’s is a fine photographer and the book has many small black and white images of often quirky things that took his fancy, supported by his easy going yet insightful, conversational prose. Re-Wilding in such places is nothing other than a chaotic aftermath following degradation, with fly tipping or fencing-off the only subsequent sign of ‘intervention’. Yet, even here, he delights in the few survivors he finds on his exploration, the small evidences of the persistence of nature, holding on to a story from a better time.
Alastair Humphreys does not fall into the trap we old and angry men do too often; he goes with the flow (up to a point) and rarely springs into a rant. His judgements can, however, be very pointed indeed when aimed at ‘them’ – ‘the powers that be’ – how a lot of the muddled dross that lies like a strip system between the metropolitan districts and the countryside proper could have been, if not entirely avoided, then at least mitigated by virtually cost-free appreciation of what was there before.
Humphreys cycles to and fro inside his grid, or stashes his bike and does a bit of ’nosey parkering’, walking over the bedding plants of litter, puzzling how to get around a serious steel fence that has no reason to be there, placing a pond or lake out of bounds. As he goes he ponders questions as varied as climate, population, transport policy, food security, our awful diets and unhealthy eating, land use, marginalised people and culture, often amplified in precise data gleaned from publications by international agencies and researchers. It is the sights that interrupt these reflections that brings him back to real evidence before his eyes. He finds a fellow feeling in the thoughtless denial of values, insensitivity, beyond careless dereliction, with wirescapes, dotty suburban front gardens – or dotty people: “Don’t take fucking photographs” yells a man from a passing white van. Humphrey’s ignored him. Two traveller children were more amiable. Tribes of the left behinds, in a landscape that derives from the same cause.
“Every grid square in Britain has, over millennia been changed and managed. Nothing is wild, nothing is untouched… Somebody has walked each square before me, people whose tales I would be intrigued to know.” To which now he adds his own.
Alastair Humphrey’s infectious delight is uplifting. So much is published in this line of nature writing now that I doubt I could claim that this book is exceptional. But I will anyway. Get it, share it and enjoy your own ‘rurban’ roaming experiences. It is only natural.