Wild places

Christopher Somerville is the author of bestselling Coast, that accompanied the synonymous BBC TV series. He has been walking Britain and Ireland for 25 years, writing for the Daily Telegraph and Saga. Here's his first blog for us, providing a fascinating insight into the world of the travel writer.

T-t-t-totally wild …

It’s quite extraordinary how the Wild has suddenly leaped up into the foreground of everyone’s imagination. In the 1970s, when I started exploring Britain and Ireland on foot in order to write about obscure, overlooked byways and disregarded corners, I was thought of as a bit of an oddball. What the hell was interesting about some old farmer’s pond in Rutland, or a tangly chunk of woodland in Northumberland, or some godforsaken, wind-bitten Hebridean island out at the back of who-cares-where? I couldn’t get my wild writings published for a long time; and when a couple of brave publishers did take a gamble, their gloomy head-shaking and heavy sighs – followed by a dead phone line – told me all I needed to know about sales figures.

Now, the sun has got his hat on and he’s coming out to play in the wild places of these islands. Was it Roger Deakin’s wonderful paean to swimming, Waterlog, that started it? Or Roger’s friend and disciple Robert Macfarlane and his lyrical The Wild Places? I suspect it was both, and a whole raft of others – Mark Cocker’s fabulous Crow Country, for example, and Daniel Start’s lusciously and seductively photographed Wild Swimming – all tapping into a need we feel to reconnect with the Wild, with something outside man’s control. We long to turn our backs on the frantic, killing urbanisation of these lovely islands of ours, to scare and challenge and amaze and astound ourselves, because everyday life in the city and the concreted countryside isn’t even scratching the surface of our deep-rooted, inborn need for the Wild. We fear the Wild, more and more as we block it out with Gore-Tex and double-glazing – yet we crave it and yearn for it, too.

I’ve spent the past two years intensively travelling, walking, scrambling, looking, poking about, photographing and gasping with pure pleasure as I scoured the length of Britain and the breadth of Ireland in search of 500 of my favourite wild places. I cast my net widely, not just over rugged mountains and wave-lashed isles, but also to catch wild places as intimate as a frog pond in a Midlands wood, as urban as an overgrown London cemetery, and as strange as a howling wild man’s head carved in a country church. Now they are brought together between the covers of Britain and Ireland's Best Wild Places. I’ve described each place as lyrically as I can, and added lots of practical detail about how to get there, what maps to take, useful websites and so on. Very often nowadays a writer has to grin and bear the look and feel of poor, cheap production, with blurry photos and cheap’n’nasty paper. But Penguin have done a beautiful job – thick creamy paper, nice stylish typeface, muted greens and blues and browns of the hand-drawn maps and symbols.

I’m tremendously looking forward to reading at Stanfords in Bristol on 10 September. And I hope everyone who buys Britain and Ireland’s Best Wild Places will chuck their copy on the back seat of the car and keep it there, to be checked and pored over and used every time they venture to Somerset or Surrey or Leicestershire or Gwynedd or Durham or Angus or Armagh or Galway…

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Christopher Somerville has also written Walks in the Country Near London and a collection of poetry, Greenwood Dark - A Traveller's Poems.

Author: Christopher Somerville
Date: 12 August 2008