The winners will be revealed at The Ivors Composer Awards, sponsored by PRS for Music and in association with BBC Radio 3, on 17 November at Grosvenor House, London.
Stream or buy Underland here via Bandcamp.
A world premiere of the score takes place as part of the Hannah Peel In Focus series at the Barbican on 23-24 October 2026, for which very limited numbers of tickets are still available.
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I had spent most of my summer in the river. I swam for exercise, but also for sheer bodily delight, sliding beside the red veins of the willow roots, writhing around submerged tree trunks like a snake in the mangroves, exploring the secret arbours and coves concealed by the falling cascades of leaves. These little ignored places, where the crayfish dig their nests in the clay, had become my favourite haunts and I would hide my naked body in them when the plastic boats of summer daytrippers rushed by, smeared in silt, wrapped in hornwort, like Jenny Greenteeth, unseen in their wake.
In these secret groves, I would meet coots and kingfishers,electric-blue speckled dragonflies, and, most commonly of all, the river’s rubbish. These sheltered coves are an Aladdin’s cave of shite, a thieves’ horde of detritus snagged and clogged for decades in the bankside roots. I would pull out old butane canisters caked with blue-grey clay; industrial baling wrap; cracked plastic tubs; webs of translucent fishing wire, each with a needle-thin hook trailing somewhere beneath my feet; infinite flimsy, yellowed plastic bottles, whose rust-coloured waters poured out of cracks as I lifted them; and harder, industrial bottles, brittled with age, that spilt what remained of their chemical concoctions back into the river.
Rivers used to be gods. Now they are sewers, run-offs for a catchment of shame that includes much more than sewage and litter: microplastics, pharmaceuticals, factory waste, chemical fertilizers from industrial agriculture, heavy metals from our motorways; it all seeps through the soil, and ends up in our rivers. The lowest point of our landscape, rivers now express the nadir of our culture: they tell a story of a society that has somehow normalized undrinkable, poisoned water. Meanwhile, English society is cracking; in the cities and towns, angry men gather around statues, draped in the Union Jack, burning cars and attacking migration hostels, defending a story of this land that ignores the land itself.
That summer, as I swam, I wondered what mantras, philosophies and cultures existed on this land before the story of England was harvested and bale-wrapped into what we have today. It seemed an act of extreme exceptionalism to suppose that we were the only country on earth not to have had a spiritual, mythopoetic relationship with the land, unmediated by its ‘owners’. But if there was such a land culture in England, I knew nothing of it. Why? The Māori were colonized by Britain and by France, by war and by treaty, their culture vandalized by physical and psychological violence wrought by invasive forces. But how had our land culture – our stories, practices, songs, dances and rituals – been taken from us? And without a culture of reverence for our land, is it any wonder that it is ailing? It seemed a complicated, grotesque irony for a country which had systematically destroyed traditional, indigenous cultures across the globe to be in such desperate need of one of our own.
*
Nick Hayes’ ‘The Medicine Tree: Repairing the Rotten Roots of England’ is out now and available here, published by Allen Lane.
]]>Adapted from Robert Macfarlane’s bestselling book, directed by Robert Petit and scored by Hannah Peel, Underland is a mesmerising cinematic journey into the depths of the earth. Beginning in the shallow soils beneath an old ash tree, ‘astronauts of the underworld’ travel into ancient sacred caves, flooded storm drains, melting glaciers, underwater burial chambers and a deep underground laboratory built to solve the mysteries of the Universe.
Buy your copy here.
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In March last year, we shared news of the Dartington Hall Trust’s intention to end the lease of The Agroforestry Research Trust’s groundbreaking 2 acre food forest project — housed on the Dartington Estate for the last 31 years. The garden has brought over 50,000 visitors to the estate, hosted important scientific research on carbon storage, and become what is often described as the best example of a food forest (or forest garden) in the temperate world.
Excitingly, ART now has the opportunity to purchase the forest garden, which will safeguard it in perpetuity!
ART has already raised some of the funds, but are looking to raise £100,000 towards the total needed to cover the sale price and legal fees. Whatever you can afford, it will all help and you will know that you have contributed to securing the forest garden for future generations. If you are a UK taxpayer then ART can also claim Gift Aid on your donation.
Forest gardens (also known as food forests) are long term sustainable integrated growing systems including trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals and fungi. They produce food or other crops while being highly resilient to pests, diseases and weather extremes; and at the same time storing a large amount of carbon. In the light of the climate crisis leading to a rapid increase in extreme weather events, the need for forest gardens has never been greater.
Almost half the money has currently been raised, with donations closing at the end of the month.
You can find out more about the project and donate here.
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Adapted from Robert Macfarlane’s bestselling book, directed by Robert Petit, and scored by Hannah Peel, Underland is a mesmerising cinematic journey into the depths of the earth. Beginning in the shallow soils beneath an old ash tree, ‘astronauts of the underworld’ travel into ancient sacred caves, flooded storm drains, melting glaciers, underwater burial chambers and a deep underground laboratory built to solve the mysteries of the Universe.
Stream / order your CD copy here via Bandcamp.
A world premiere of the score takes place as part of the Hannah Peel In Focus series at the Barbican on 23-24 October 2026, for which very limited numbers of tickets are still available.
]]>Taken from the album Highway to Hell — released earlier this year on Dead Oceans, but only just reaching us via pigeon post. Very nice. Thank you, pigeons.
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An early morning mist clings to the hillside and it is as if we are walking through a ghost, as if the ground were still smoking. My youngest is quiet against my back, bundled in her carrier, stormy eyes peering out. I grab the edges of my sleeves, pull them down across my fingers, picking at loose threads, unspooling.
A wren churrs and chatters and I hum in response. Hawthorns line our path, bare beneath the canopy where above is green splattered with red. Each footstep crackles with twigs and leaves, all is turning and falling, and this is what I love about autumn: everything is on the cusp.
Ahead, my collie Bear looks back to make sure we are near. She became ours through sheer stubborn love and would warn me if anyone was nearby.
Parkwood Springs is a palimpsest, hard to pin down as any one thing: a sandstone ridge formed 300 million years ago rising up from the River Don; an area dotted with pockets of ancient woodland carrying singsong names like Scraithwood and Rawson Spring; a former landfill always looming; graves peering out from bracken and ivy in Wardsend Cemetery, World’s End; a motley history of hunting, mining, coppicing, industry, recreation, and now my local stomping ground without which I wouldn’t have survived mothering through lockdown.
Ahead a barbed wire fence has an entrance cut into it and I squeeze through the gap, careful of my precious cargo. The ground is covered in a thick metal netting, a kind of diamond pattern stretching out in every direction, and where it hasn’t worn away toothbrush-like bristles mimic dry snow. I walk towards the viewpoint, careful of every step.
I am walking on the ruins of the Sheffield Ski Village, the parts that survived the fifty odd arson attacks of the last decade. Built in the 1980s, it was once the national training centre for the British Ski Federation, and at its peak had 180,000 visitors per year. Locals used to joke, The Ski Village is on fire!, and half the time it was true: smoke billowing up from the city’s edge.
On a clear day the views are spectacular – hills of terraced houses, towering apartment blocks, remnants of industry, and then, in the distance, the moors of the Peak District National Park. Not today. Today I shut my eyes and listen instead. Sheffield groans over the sound of the wind, a clunking, sawing, screeching, constant hum of traffic, whirring like a helicopter that never lands.
Carrion crows too, cackling and dipping and on more than one occasion I have seen them mobbing the odd, brave buzzard who dares to hunt nearby. When I open my eyes again just one remains, silhouetted at the top of a tall pine. There are many more out of sight. They will be there when the apocalypse comes.
Bear disappears into the treeline.
‘Bear!’ I shout.
‘Mama!’ I hear back.
My eldest daughter is herded into view, dragging her father after her, trying to wrench her hand out of his tight grip. The questions begin, Why are the leaves falling? Are the trees cold? Where do flower fairies live when the flowers are gone?
We make our way down a narrow path, bordered on either side by a dense thicket. The once plump and sweet blackberries are shrivelled and dry, as are the bitter nettle seeds, and the gorse’s usually edible yellow petals are absent too, much to our daughter’s vocal disappointment.
Buddleia has claimed the hillside here, spikes of soot-like flowers falling all around us. A peacock butterfly sparks. These are not the skeletal remains of a fire though you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking so. Buddleia is often found in wastelands and gained the nickname ‘The bomb site plant’ for growing in sites of destruction during the Second World War. Classed as an invasive species I can’t help but be quietly impressed by plants and creatures that can thrive in so-called dead spaces.
As we come to another clearing the ground flattens out before disappearing into one last steep drop. Here buddleia is replaced by pine, and the ground becomes soft underfoot as the metal netting is consumed by the hillside. It is too dangerous to continue with children, so we walk instead to the edge to peer over the ruins of a fire blackened structure, its bones jutting up from the scrub like a shipwreck out of shallow water.
The Ski Village was once the pride of Sheffield, driving its branding from industrial to outdoor city. In its final years I danced in a crowd of strangers here, staring out from a wooden platform onto the city that would become my home, its lights gleaming in the dark night. It is easy to stand here now amongst autumn ruins and slip into melancholy. Yet, there is a whiff of resistance, of survival against the odds as all around us green gains ground, lichen and moss patterning every hard surface, a sapling oak standing stark against the dying of the year.
I have been talking to my four-year-old about death and last night she clutched my face between her two small hands and said, earnest now, When you die, I will bury you, and surely that is the ultimate expression of love? Edges, ruins, wasteland, perhaps they call to us, like the changing seasons, to remember endings are beginnings, are transformations.
‘Stop!’ I shout, as she goes to pocket a shard of glass. She laughs, full of mischief, setting off her sister on my back.
We ascend another way, digging our toes into rusting metal as if pickaxing a mountain in the snow. I sway like a drunk in an attempt to rock my youngest to sleep but we are flanked on either side by life that wants to keep us there: rosebush, hawthorn, gorse, bramble, clawing at us the whole way up.
My eldest chatters in a torrent of observations, Crow! Spider web! Bottle! Holly! If it spikes you, say thank you! And then, as if remembering she too has a voice, my youngest chimes in, Down! Nothing is clean or fixed, no material stable, no colour alone, every surface is alive, porous, deep, surprising. Ruins bleed into the imagination, time itself is a playground. They climb the final few steps themselves.
One day people will pull up the metal and the shrubs, cut down the trees and build platforms, bring order and purpose, chase out the alcoholics and the artists and the ramblers. What will become of its ghosts, its particular turn of memory? What is it I desire to find here, to offer my children? I fight off entropy every day along with everyone else: take the bins out of sight, pull up bindweed from the garden, say no no no to death. Every season my daughter wants to name what we are losing whilst I try to show her what is to come.
We sit down, trees arching above us, illuminated at the top of a steep wild slope. The sun hangs low in the sky, grasses and mosses are enfolding sharp edges into the earth. The children press their faces close to the ground, investigating the remains of the old ski slope which now looks like hundreds of petri dishes, all lush effervescent green, as if the remains of summer have been framed for us, held for one last moment in stasis, before they turn as well.
*
I wrote this piece a couple of years ago and dug it out in light of recent developments. Parkwood Springs is a much-loved 150-hectare green space in the north of Sheffield, bordering communities identified as having some of the city’s greatest need for access to nature. By the end of this year, tourism company Skyline Enterprises will be submitting their formal planning application to build a major outdoor leisure facility there. While we expected the former Ski Village site, which I wrote about above, to be redeveloped, the current plans extend into the surrounding area: an important habitat for wildlife and crucial for our own wellbeing too. If you would like to learn more or support the campaign to protect Parkwood Springs from overdevelopment, please sign our petition.
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Coco Lone Neal is a mother, rambler, writer and associate at the Writers Workshop in Sheffield. When she isn’t dragging her children and dog up hills in the rain, Coco is working on a book stitched together with river-blue thread.
Follow Coco on Instagram here.
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I knew that I wanted to earn my living using my hands. I had previously got as far as thinking about weaving, but shoemaking was, quite literally, a better fit, as shoes were a necessity for everyone and something I found difficult to find. I had no idea about how to become a shoemaker, so I went to the careers office on campus for advice. The interview was quite awkward, as the poor careers advisor was almost lost for words. ‘We once had a student who wanted to become a thatcher’ was her first response. However, she did make the very useful suggestion that I find work near craft workers so that I could pick up leads to a shoemaker or to shoemaking itself.
So that is exactly what I did. After my finals I got a summer job at Bickleigh Mill craft centre, working in the cafe and then running it. My plan worked: the wood turner at the centre told me about Hood Fair. He showed me a beautiful hand-drawn flyer advertising the fair, which was taking place midsummer near Dartington, south Devon. Somehow I had not heard about this village, which was a hotbed of radical bohemianism, so different from the conventionality of Exeter University and the rest of Devon at that time. It sounded fun and would expand my limited knowledge of what was going on beyond my university bubble. This was 1978, years before the internet and mobile phones, so contacts literally had to be made on the ground (it’s already hard to remember the world where you didn’t just search online for ‘shoemakers in Devon’).
That would have been my search because I loved being in Devon. I had grown accustomed to the simple rural life we had lived as students: growing vegetables, making our own bread and socialising with friends. I could just about afford to run my old Mini, pay my rent in a shared house and have a social life on my waitress wage. It wasn’t a flashy lifestyle; you had to make it work as there was no such thing as a credit card. Living beyond your means was not an option and I was completely used to my hand-to-mouth existence. I was young with no debts, contracts or responsibilities beyond myself.
That midsummer Saturday I happily loaded my Mini with a blanket on which to sell my wares, a bundle of vintage clothes and some jewellery that I had made, to seek, if not my fortune, then some leads for my future. My previous experience of selling from a blanket on the ground was at Barsham Faire in Suffolk, just after my A-levels. Barsham was the precursor to Hood Fair, and it came to an end in 1976 as a victim of its own success. Too many people came, and at the end of the fair a leaflet was handed out on which was written the instruction ‘Build another Barsham’. If you enjoyed this, it said, then go home and make one happen where you came from – and that’s what a bunch of people did in Totnes.
Barsham was an amazingly simple festival, where the site became the size of a village for a week, attracting locals and alternative types from miles around. Stalls were built that could have lasted for years, selling wholefoods, bread, baskets, candles, jewellery and wooden bowls, many of which were made on site during the festival. It was full of activity and energy, and the sun always shone. Pennants were put up around the site, and there was a great sweep down to a wide-open space for performances from the many theatre groups and performers who turned up. Music was played on all manner of instruments; there was a medieval vibe with lots of dressing up: men with long hair and beards in tights and tunics, women with Maid Marian-style dresses and flowing locks. Groups of children played and roamed around the site. There was plenty of beer and mead, followed by sore heads and sleeping minstrels. It was the perfect 1970s version of ‘a field full of folk’, the evocative phrase from Piers Plowman by William Langland, whose medieval allegorical poem I studied in Medieval English as part of my degree.
The best way to be at the fair was to be part of the action, so my friend Helen and I rather shyly laid out the necklaces and hand-woven purses that we had made on a blanket by a track. It was fun to be there and make some money, and we certainly looked the part in our Afghan dresses and long hair. As people wandered by, they would stop and look. It was one of my first experiences of selling something I had made, and it felt satisfying. When we’d had enough for the day, we would roll up the blanket and go home.
I realised that Hood Fair was Devon’s answer to Barsham Faire, a non-electric medieval-style festival held in Hood Meadows, outside Dartington. It was brimming with ideas about counterculture and had a strong focus on performance and craft. Here again was a ‘field full of folk’ but this time on the banks of the River Dart. When I arrived, I was directed to a pitch, and there, just down the field, was a stall displaying a few pairs of handmade shoes. What luck! But the two men were both bearded and wearing work aprons; they looked old – at least thirty – and intimidating. I had to pluck up courage to go over and talk to them. First, I looked at the boots. There was just one style: an ankle boot made in light brown leather, the foot shaped with three lace holes and a brown crêpe sole. I loved them. Andy Langford and Graham Kitchener of The Conker Shoe Company, as they soon became, told me that they were just starting out themselves. My request to volunteer in their workshop in return for instruction on how to make shoes was received with little interest. ‘It’s tough work for a woman,’ said Graham.
However, I made a date to visit their workshop and volunteer my services. They agreed but didn’t think I would turn up. When I did, they didn’t believe that I would be consistent and reliable, but I was. They didn’t put me off shoemaking, but I understood their coolness. Why should they want to share their skills? I would have to make myself useful. Apparently, many people had said they would like to come to their workshop to learn but had never appeared.
I tried to be helpful. Andy and Graham were operating from Andy’s mother-in-law’s basement in a large house called ‘Lakemead’, which was high above the River Dart in Totnes and had a walled garden. We largely kept to the basement, but in forays upstairs I was introduced to Andy’s wife Verity and her extended family. The house belonged to Guida Swan, a poet, whose husband Donald had taught at Dartington Hall School and had recently died. It was a beautiful and simply decorated house – artistic and intellectual – with wooden furniture, patchwork cushions, and paintings and books everywhere. I loved it, and it was typical of many of the houses I visited in Totnes at the time. However, the atmosphere was a little strained, as the extended family of three generations tried to find a way of living together in their new situation. I am not sure that having a shoemaking workshop below them helped. Graham and I would work in the basement while Andy pursued his main job as a business consultant above us in the study.
We accessed the workshop through the back gate from the lane so that we didn’t disturb the household. It was a large room with a big window looking out onto the yard. As you entered, behind the door on the right was a pile of leather. A long workbench ran through the centre of the space and was equipped with a small grinding wheel for finishing the shoes and a couple of boards for cutting out the leather. Another workbench, in front of the window, came with a vice used to hold a raised workstation, which I would learn to dislike. At the far end of the room was a fireplace, and attached to the mantelpiece was a vintage pipe-whistle communicating device, a relic from the days of servants. By blowing down the tube, a whistle would sound. You would then pull out the bung and hear what was being relayed down the pipe. We used the device to communicate with Andy upstairs.
I was given an apron and simple tasks: punching and awling holes, then gradually moving on to hand sewing. That summer I would sit outside for my break, while Graham would often go for a pub lunch and never return. It was all rather chaotic, but I absolutely loved it. One day I was hammering away, punching holes in a component, when the worksurface I was using fell out of the vice and onto my right foot, splitting the upper of my precious red Clarks T-bar sandals. Blood spurted everywhere and we were all in shock. I remember a bowl and towels being found, then being helped into the back of Graham’s 2CV and driven slowly up the hill to Totnes Hospital. This careless, painful accident has acted over the years as a cautionary tale in the workshop as a reminder to think about how I work. It took weeks of healing before I could drive again. At the time, I thought I’d got away with no lasting scar, but now, in my sixties, I can see and feel that my foot was damaged.
This mishap did not put me off. I continued to go to the workshop during the week, while on Saturdays Andy and Graham had a stall at Dartington Cider Press Craft Market. Local people were interested in our endeavour to make comfortable, robust and repairable shoes. Customers had their feet drawn around and chose their colour and style, as by then we had a couple of options. As summer moved into autumn Andy and Graham asked me to work longer hours, as orders were increasing. However, they were not yet able to pay me, and I was still learning, so they wanted me to sign on for unemployment benefit while working for them. Up until then I had been working evenings and weekends at The Market House pub in Crediton to earn money. I was too nervous to sign on and work, as that was illegal, so it was agreed that they would pay me a little. Then, with perfect timing, my friend Jill rang one evening to say she had found a job that came with a cottage in Manaton on Dartmoor, and would I be interested in sharing? I quickly looked at the map and saw that Manaton was much closer to the workshop at Totnes than Sandford, where I was then living. I said yes, as I needed somewhere more convenient; at that time my daily return journey was eighty miles.
*
Green Shoes: Forty years of a radical women’s craft collective by Alison Hastie is out on 8th October (The Indigo Press, £14.99). Buy a copy here.
]]>Adapted from Robert Macfarlane’s bestselling book, directed by Robert Petit, and scored by Hannah Peel, Underland is a mesmerising cinematic journey into the depths of the earth. Beginning in the shallow soils beneath an old ash tree, ‘astronauts of the underworld’ travel into ancient sacred caves, flooded storm drains, melting glaciers, underwater burial chambers and a deep underground laboratory built to solve the mysteries of the Universe.
And what better day than today, Bandcamp Friday, to preorder your CD copy? On Bandcamp Friday, the platform waives their cut of sales, meaning 100% of proceeds go to labels and artists. Hooray!
Stream / buy digitally or physically below or here.
Peruse the full range of books, zines, merch and records stocked in our Bandcamp shop here.
And if you’re a Lunker-tier subscriber via Steady, remember you can cash in a sweet 15% off our Bandcamp shop for the entire length of your membership. You should be able to find the code in your email inbox.
]]>A balm for the ears.
Taken from the (lovely) album Rural Tapes, out now via state51.
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Bogs are messy and wild, places the human mind has difficulty understanding. Can we comprehend a place suspended between life and death? Do we want to? Most folklore around the world portrays boglands as places of venerable fear, filled with danger, disorientation, and disillusion, “without clear borders and without solid sub-stance below.” As a child, the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney was told never to go near the bog, because it was bottomless and hid bogeymen and other perils.
How can boglands be so beautiful, yet maligned and scorned in recent history? How can they have persisted through massive environmental change, yet today be vulnerable and fragile? Boglands refuse to be boxed into simplistic binaries; they are difficult to categorize or label. Their in-between nature makes them curious and interesting, to be sure. But has it also influenced us and our thinking, turning bogs into the most misunderstood and feared ecosystem on our planet?
The word “liminal” (from the Latin limen, meaning threshold) describes in-between states of being. Many studies have documented how liminal spaces affect human psychology. The human mind often finds these places—connecting areas or stages, such as those that lie between somewhere we have left and somewhere we want to go—eerie and unsettling. We might frequently think of examples from our built environment, like desolate stairwells and corridors, but the concept is easily applied to boglands. Often found between firm ground and lakes or rivers, boglands are too wet for vehicles or easy walking but often too solid for boats. They certainly are not a convenient physical threshold for human travel. The liminality of boglands is unmistakable: They are neither dead nor alive, safe nor dangerous, beautiful nor dreadful. They are the thresholds that lie in between all these states, refusing to be one or the other. Could this be why bogs have been portrayed as weird, spooky systems—why most of us genuinely think of them with disgust and contempt? In the end, perhaps they are simply too complicated, defying concepts we need to rationalize for humanity, for us to admire.
And yet, liminal spaces have their role to play in human society and culture. Mediating the world of the living and the after-life of the dead, liminal spaces long have been revered as sacred. Often, religious ceremonies are conducted in spaces defined by liminality—for example, where worshippers can connect with beloved ancestors while also praying for their future. It thus seems fitting that throughout history, even as they have been feared and misunderstood, bogs were honored as portals connecting various realms. For thousands of years, they have served as quiet receptacles, accepting treasures offered to the gods or aiding post-burial journeys to the afterlife. Boglands not only receive these riches, but also preserve them, protecting organic materials from decay for centuries or even millennia. It requires violent destruction of their very foundation—peat drainage or mining—to force boglands to give up their secrets.
It is only in the past few hundred years, in fact, that bogs have been interpreted consistently as dreadful places. As we have seen, bogs once were woven into the fabric of human life and survival, from early communities to the traditional peat uses still common today. The concept of wetlands as wastelands—boglands as eerie, dangerous, and marginalized—arose in a near-blink of an eye with the spread of modern agriculture. At that time, taming, draining, and ultimately destroying bogs became synonymous with societal progress. Like so many traditional practices, respect for boglands seems to have been forgotten, undermined, or actively destroyed by colonialism. Colonists and conquerors saw strange-looking plants and stagnant water, and assumed their difficulties and dangers outweighed benefits that they neither understood nor appreciated. Meanwhile, Indigenous knowledge not only valued these in-between places, but often thrived because of them. This was yet another reason for colonists to firmly reject boglands and the surrounding traditional knowledge stemming from generations of respect and wise use.
This reality is unfortunate, but it gives me hope to know that the tides of human sentiment reversed against boglands only recently, with respect for them dwindling in a brief window of time. For most of our history, humans and boglands have shared a special relationship. These deep ties mean we can reclaim these places for what they really are: magnificent thresholds between land and water—and past, present, and future—that deserve our admiration and gratitude in so many ways.
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Extracted from ‘Boglands: The Hidden World of Earth’s Most Extraordinary Ecosystems’ by Merritt R. Turetsky, published by Profile Books and available here (£20).
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South Erradale, September 12th
Dear Kirsteen,
How was your ‘summer’? We escaped the terrible heat although I confess to grumbling and moaning because of the relentless rain. 2026 will be remembered for extreme temperatures and drought in the UK but our Wester Ross summer has been such a soggy damp squib.
R. and I did get a taste of the heat. In early August we drove south to a family gathering in Wales. To celebrate our 70th birthdays, our four kids, their partners and children holidayed with us in a big house close to the sea; ten adults and nine little ones together in mayhem.
The journey down was interesting. We passed lorries loaded with bales of hay heading south, and once we were in England, saw mile after mile of pale parched fields, dust devils, dull dark hedges, and woodlands flailed by heat. No summer greenery. Everywhere looked faded and tired. It was shocking. And after the deep, dense jungle greens of home, upsetting too. The pressure on hay supplies for cattle and horses, on food crops and ultimately on supermarket shelves, seemed insurmountable.
Our kids and their families in Paris, London and NW England struggled in the prolonged heat and stifling conditions; they longed for our Highland rains. We listened to their complaints about how hard it was to keep cool, especially at night, and sympathised of course. Being together at the holiday house, listening to the joyful laughter of children playing was the best medicine for everyone.
We watched the eclipse armed with special glasses, boxes with pinholes, a colander. Amidst all the news of forest fires around the world, the irony of a hot burning sun tamed by sister moon, the blistering fury of fire cooled by the slow calm movements of an orb 400 times smaller, was not lost on us. When the birds fell silent and the air cooled, the children hollered and danced with excitement. Later, we watched the Perseid meteors and battalions of satellites, grieving for a future in which stars might be lost behind a man-made grid of technology.
Red River Croft’s hay meadows were in my mind as we holidayed. Crofters cutting silage had waited until the end of July – a month later than usual – delayed by a very cold spring then summer downpours. Meadows were late to get going; growth was slow. I fretted about whether we’d even get a crop of hay.
We came home to familiar green fields, gentle breezes, misty rains. Some of the family came with us and revelled in wearing wellies and raincoats while building sandcastles and collecting shells. Finally, the weather changed with more dry August days than wet ones. And at last, the meadows began to flourish – growing tall and dense, filled with grasses and wildflowers. But with hay-making in mind, I obsessed over forecasts, repeatedly checking the weather app on my phone.
Occasionally, we lost the sea breeze and endured clouds of midges. But there were some glorious sunsets and fine days with azure skies and straggles of high translucent cloud. One day, we picnicked at Firemore beach. I remembered the militaristic lines of satellites wondering if they’d be visible in the clear air and deep blue sky.
Over the summer our garden became a riotous tangle of all sorts of things. The jungle yielded a bumper crop of strawberries and blackcurrants and a feeble attempt by runner beans to find the sun. But we grew giant courgettes! We’ve laughed about that and filled the freezer, wondering how they managed to grow so big with so little heat.
The expansive, tangled growth is everywhere – great clusters of brambles heavy with fruit, dog rose in bloom but spotted with mildew, rowans buckling under the weight of crimson berries. Our young trees have coped with the rains but we will need to think carefully about drainage in the future.
And what about your family and the croft? Has your polytunnel been productive? Are you still thinking of getting pigs?
After fretting too much, our hay harvest happened! The cutting, tedding and baling was done in a rush in early September, in a tiny weather window between awful forecasts for yet more rain. We rely on local young crofters, the three sons of Donald “Duck” Mackenzie affectionately known as the “Ducklings”, to harvest our hay. They take the hay for their cattle, Red River Croft and our wildlife neighbours benefit from management with nature at its heart. This symbiosis seems to work although our arrangements might need to change in the future if UK weather patterns become less predictable and more extreme.
The boys came with two tractors and began the cutting framed by rainbows. They worked by the orange glow of a hazy sunset and on into the darkness. The gamble paid off. A few days later, just as the last load of bales left the croft, the rains returned. As the “Ducklings” stored the precious harvest in their barn, I remembered those wagons of hay heading south.
How precarious everything feels when our climate is upended and re-ordered. Giant courgettes in the cold wet northwest, failure of crops in the far south. What a topsy-turvy world. Our forebears must have suffered similar variations and rapid change, right? I wonder if we have their strength and resilience. Cold, wet summers certainly contributed to the potato famine, the Clearances and the instigation of crofting, but local croft and estate records in Gairloch Museum may reveal more about specific harvests.
I’m still hoping for a sunny dry spell. Even the midges have given up. The meadows are pale gold but edged with colour – purple scabious, knapweeds and vetch, red clover, white sneezewort and yarrow, yellow hawkbit and tormentil. In the tangles are orb spider nests – wee globes made from grasses, rushes and vetch, tied together with webs. Ah! the resilience, determination and ingenuity of nature. That’s where the answers lie. In margins and edgelands, and the wild, wild spaces all around us.
Send news soon,
A xx
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Duisky, September 20th
Dear Annie,
Yes, it very much feels like we are living in a world of extremes. Our August was also full of contrasts, sunlight glowing on the young birch round the house while the whole of the head of the loch, its hills, the wide glen, were lost to impenetrable grey rain. So many rainbows though, wavering between.
Unsettling seasonal changes too. I looked ahead in my calendar to find a free weekend in which I might run the gauntlet of bramble thorns, before realising that bramble season was already upon us. Rosehip vines over the garden fence were red and luscious long before summer hinted towards autumn. The apple trees we planted are still too young for fruit, but in a hidden corner of the croft two Bramley apple trees were full, their branches dipped down with the weight so that I barely needed the ladder. I had to enlist one of the kids to help me gather the apples before September gales emptied the boughs.
It would have been no hardship if I’d missed the early fruiting. I have in previous years, even when everything grew on its expected schedule. I have shrugged the loss off as leaving more for the deer and birds. There are two young female roe deer currently browsing the croft; they would undoubtedly make use of the windfalls. That said, histories of past hardships here combined with visible suffering in other parts of the world make it harder to leave anything. And the threat of hardships returning seems like a closer reality than it has before in my lifetime.
The extremes of moisture in the Highlands is indeed one of the constants we share with our predecessors. You’re right; it was a mild spring followed by incessant summer rains that destroyed the potato crops in the Western Highlands in 1846. Descriptions of mass decay and the consequences for crofters are as alarming to read as the news of the equally devastating desiccation we are seeing now.
The inability of waterlogged soil to nurture growth has long been a source of work. Ditches and underground drains score every slope and level. It’s one thing to learn how to manage an abundance of water, quite another to learn how to work with the opposite. I don’t imagine we can easily find ways to adapt to these new climate changes, but, as you say, there is resilience in and around us in the living landscape. The process of turning hay to silage in some ways gives me hope; the cut grass wrapped against the air and allowed to ferment. At some point, someone found a way to make anaerobic environments work with them instead of against.
The varying extremes have continued into September, although these ones feel more like the Septembers of my memory. Morning mists obscure loch and hill with a gentleness at odds with the heavy rains that saturated them to begin with. And when the mists clear, sharp sunlight lances through leaves into wilting undergrowth.
The air now is sweet with decay, edged with a promise of cold. I keep getting adverts asking if I want perfume that makes me smell like the Highlands, which makes me laugh, living as we do beside a landfill. Although, it no longer accepts food waste and the heavy sickly methane clouds have gone. Instead, I breathe deeply into the dark fecund air of summer’s rot. Foxgloves are columns of mottled brown tongues, and sedge grass hangs empty of seed, architecture for orb spiders and sheetwebs.
I am worried for the fieldfare and redwings that usually visit in October. The rowans fruited so early that the berries are already losing their vibrancy. The moss below their trunks is scattered with dried berries like beads.
I found the remains of a sickle amongst the fallen fruit today. It had been embedded into the middle of a cluster of coppiced rowan for as long as I’ve been here, a curved metal heart. The blackened edges had finally rotted through. I wonder if the crofter who lodged that sickle knew that it was the last time they were going to use it.
On the ground between the trees and wall is a slightly raised circular platform of stones, now covered in a thick layer of wood sorrel, deer fern, moss, and thin dried grass. It was once the foundation for a hay stook.
For haymaking here I have to look back. I found again black and white photos someone sent, taken in the 50s perhaps. One image looks from the west onto our croft, we think. The stone wall along the level beside these now overgrown stones appears to match with a stone wall and a stook that points up like a witch’s hat. The fields are pale and shorn in the image, with only a few dark patches of trees. My old oaks are young on the steep slope behind the stook, and a cluster of dark scrub around rough ground where our house now huddles heavily against the hill.
A fence line in the foreground of the image has a black jacket propped on one of the posts. Those fenceposts have long rotted away. In the far distance, Ben Nevis and Aonoch Mhor are held in their own vast timelines. The stones of the old houses and walls, and the traced lines of slope beneath our feet, are the only other fixed points linking that landscape and ours.
I suppose the photos I take now might receive the same attention one day. Our kitchen table conversations revolve around where new fences should go, which ditches need filled in, which need cleared. I am itching to get pigs again but the fences need sorted first. Nothing happens quickly, Annie! Over the almost twenty years I’ve lived here, the croft has taught me what I need most is patience and the ability to envision this land on a far wider scale than our individual lives.
I almost wrote ‘that’s needed now more than ever’, however I suspect many of our predecessors felt the same way about their own times. Their future arrived and we are still here.
With love,
Kx
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Kirsteen Bell is a Scottish writer of narrative non-fiction and sometimes poetry. All her words are gathered from the croft in Lochaber where she lives, and the surrounding Scottish Highlands. Her writing and reviews can be found in such places as Paperboats, Caught by the River, The Guardian Country Diary, The Lochaber Times, and Northern Scotland Journal. Kirsteen can also be found at Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre, where she is Projects Manager and Highland Book Prize Co-ordinator.
Annie Worsley is a writer, crofter, grandmother and geographer with an enduring love of the Scottish Highlands. In 2013 she and her husband moved to the crofting township of South Erradale near Gairloch. While her husband was a community pharmacist, Annie worked on Red River Croft. She began a blog about life on the croft and then wrote essays on nature and environment for various publications including Elementum Journal, Women on Nature, the Seasons’ Anthologies edited by Melissa Harrison, Caught by the River and Inkcap Journal. Her first book about life on Red River Croft and the natural history of Wester Ross, ‘Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands’, was published by William Collins in 2023, and is out now in paperback.
]]>Find an extract from the interview below.
Elizabeth Sulis Kim, photographed by Michael Vince Kim
The first thing I wanted to ask about is your discussion of transitioning from childhood to adulthood. In your words, that meant becoming sharper, less animal, ‘more bordered and exact’. Can you explain how loneliness followed from this process, and perhaps also, if and how this loneliness led you to writing The Book of Beasts?
It wasn’t so much loneliness but a reprieve from loneliness. As I write in the introduction to the book, when I was very young I felt a strong sense of kinship with other animals, and there was this sense that every hedgerow, tree, river, was teeming with life. As I got older, I would walk into a forest and I would feel alone. It wasn’t just aloneness, it was a real sense of existential loneliness. I had this feeling that everything around me at the time was inanimate, even though I knew it wasn’t really. I knew that there were animals, but I felt a severance. When I had travelled to other countries, where they have a stronger relationship with their ecology, I had a sense that these places were more alive. As I read about prehistoric Europe, I realised that actually our culture was once more lively; it hasn’t always been as it is now. I experienced this on a personal level too — the child I was versus the adult I became. I’m cautious to say that other children have a natural affinity for animals. I’ve seen children my daughter’s age squish bugs, but I do think that their sense of self is less categorical. I didn’t have such intense self-focus as a child, and I didn’t have such a bordered sense of self.
I trained as a forest school assistant a few years ago, and something which always stuck with me was one of my tutors talking about discipline. He had this story of a little boy who was accidentally, or unintentionally, torturing a woodlouse. Instead of immediately disciplining the child, he asked what he was doing, and the child said ‘I’m trying to find the cure for COVID. To find a vaccine.’ So the child was replicating an adult behaviour — experimenting on an animal — in a primal way. There was no lab, no layers of human explanation to distance yourself from what is a violent act. So when you were talking about children’s relationship with animals, I was thinking about how early we begin to reproduce the society in which we find ourselves, and maybe this is what your loneliness consisted of too.
I think it’s also worth saying that being in the woods for a forest school session, or enjoying close proximity to animals in any way is not necessarily a freeing exercise, right? In the Wolf chapter, for example, you talk about the Turkish far-right’s use of the wolf and about Hitler’s preoccupation with the wolf pack and his view of himself as a wolf. Could you speak about the incidences of reclaiming animal wisdom for sinister reasons, and how that has in turn shaped your thinking?
To first go to the example of children in the play park or the forest school: as well as absorbing culture at large, young children don’t have a strong concept of death. Do they know what they are doing, then? As regards to the nefarious use of animals as symbols, there are really chilling stories. They point out that humans across the world have a strong emotional resonance with animals, and of course this is not always going to be used for good. But it does point out that we see animals through our projections, we’re not always looking at the animal for its own sake. The Nazi regime used the wolf, as you mention. The Klu Klux Klan used the eagle. There are so many cases of fascist groups using animals, as many as there are examples of pacifists using animals. The Klu Klux Klan used the eagle as a motif — it is a strong, predatory animal, and so they use it. Brands also use emotional resonances with animals all the time, and this is quite insidious. Red Bull, Puma, Jaguar, the list goes on. We’re often thinking of the ferocity and virility of animals, we very seldom tap into their other facets.
I’m thinking of an advert I saw at the cinema a few months ago. A gorgeous man driving a Land Rover around the grounds of an estate, surrounded by beautiful manicured horses, deerhounds, the shadow of the country house. It’s tapping into what I think is a really sinister idea of the natural order — expensive car-driver equals land-owner, equals pedigree human amongst his pedigree animals. It’s like saying the quiet part out loud, because who isn’t part of the picture, and why? And I think this links to the problem of charismatic versus uncharismatic animals, which is what I wanted to ask you about next. I was thinking about this particularly in your chapter on birds, when you write about the cultural distaste for corvids like jackdaws, ravens and crows. I loved when you wrote about the contrast represented by chickens: ‘Is there something intrinsically lacking in them which disqualifies them from the role of heavenly emissaries?’ Some of my favourite churches have these beautiful emblems of birds in their stained glass windows. Birds like owls and wrens which are obviously seen as worthy of veneration. I wonder how you make sense of how culturally constructed endearments affect our conservation priorities, and how our society facilitates this kind of hierarchy of life?
In answer to the question of charisma, I think there isn’t really such a thing as an intrinsically charismatic animal. These things are very much created through cultural institutions. Animals have different meanings at different times and different places across history. The polar bear can be an emblem of conservation in one moment, but for a community in Alaska it can be a beast, a menace. My sense is that the things we have commodified, we have collectively, culturally, all played a role in changing narratives about certain animals not being charismatic. If we trace the story of the auroch, for example, it was once an incredibly important part of our culture, but it is now something we hardly think about. When we think of cows we might think of fields or abattoirs, not a sacred art-worthy creature. It’s hard to discern which came first, but it does often happen that we facilitate commodification by devaluating things in our stories. I would imagine these are not distinct processes but parallel ones.
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Elizabeth Sulis Kim’s The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom is out now and available here, published by Chatto & Windus. Read an extract from the book here.
Elizabeth Sulis Kim is a writer and editor based in Edinburgh but originally from England’s rural West Country. Her writing has appeared in publications such as BBC Culture, Mslexia, the LA review of Books, The Guardian, Hellebore, Fiddler’s Green, Litro, Stylist, and Dazed, among others. She is the author of ‘The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom’ (Chatto/Vintage) as well as ‘The Art of Folklore’ (Frances Lincoln/Quarto). Her fiction was shortlisted for Penguin’s #WriteNow scheme and she is currently working on a novel. She is also editor of Cunning Folk magazine and the occult writing anthology Spiritus Mundi.
Tallulah Brennan is a writer based in England, interested in the relationships between humans and their environment, and how they in turn shape each other. She is also a contributing editor at Caught by the River. Follow Tallulah’s Substack here.
]]>Wild swiming with Ingrid Campbell. Photo courtesy of Tweed River Festival
Last year’s inaugural edition of the Tweed River Festival took place in Peebles, in the Upper Tweed. Moving downstream along the river, this year’s festival takes place in and around Melrose in the Scottish Borders on October 30 & 31, while next year’s edition will take place in the lower stretches of the river, as it makes its way out into the sea at Berwick-upon-Tweed.
The 2026 Festival will explore links between culture, health, climate and environment under the theme of ‘Under, over, round and through’ and is delivered by Connecting Threads, the cultural strand of Destination Tweed which is a unique source-to-sea river revitalisation project that features the creation of a 113-mile River Tweed Trail, launching in 2028.
This celebration of river culture and contemporary art nurtures connections between cultural, environmental and climate activities. With tickets available on a sliding scale, including free and pay what you can options, the festival features events and activities for all ages designed to deepen connection with the river. These culminate with a free Tweed River Festival Parade which weaves through Melrose from the main festival venue to the banks of the Tweed at the Melrose Chain Bridge.
Other activities range from collective net-making to riverside listening; costume-making to screen-printing; circus performances to photography workshops; films, food and river swimming. This year’s festival will also see the twinning of the River Tweed with the River Conwy in Wales with a view to sharing basin knowledge and culture with Welsh collective Dyffryn Dyfodol.
Screenprinting workshop at Tweed River Festival 2025. Photo by Ian Georgeson
Supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Connecting Threads brings together creative practitioners with conservationists, environmentalists, scientists, river specialists and communities of place and purpose, to celebrate the River Tweed through a five-year programme of cultural activity.
The Tweed River Festival will be accompanied by a printed publication, which explores questions relating to the ‘Under, over, round and through’ theme and delves into the thinking of two artists in residence as well as Connecting Threads’ year-round programme. Designed by Emily Macaulay of Stanley James Press, the publication will feature writing by Dani Admiss, Em Merrin May Armstrong, Marleen Boschen, Alycia Pirmohamed, and Jamila Prowse. The publication will be available for visitors to Tweed River Festival.
Full programme information and tickets are available here.
Rebecca Beinart by the Tweed in Melrose. Photo: Pictorial Photography & Create Berwick
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There was once a salmon who swam upstream to reach the source of the river where she was born. We don’t know whether her journey was propelled by instinct or conscious desire, but either way, it was time to spawn her children. She swam against the current for miles. Salt water gave way to fresh water. She leapt up waterfalls. As she travelled, her silvery scales turned a pinkish hue. Her muscles weakened and wasted. The journey seemed impossible, and at times she was on the point of giving up. She saw other fish plucked from the river, by claws, hands and sharp beaks; at any moment, her own life could be taken too, but still she followed her destiny, moving ever closer to that place half-remembered.
Back then, thousands of salmon made this perilous journey each autumn, though few survived to tell the tale. When the salmon arrived at their destination, the people who lived beside the river rejoiced. They were dependent on the river’s bounty – its clean water and the plants that grew along its banks: watercress, raspberries, hazel – and the salmon’s arrival signalled its continued health. Soon, gathered on the banks were all manner of beasts, otters, herons and more, here to join the feast.
But back to our salmon, swimming upstream, watched by someone who would go on to recount her story far and wide. The river she swam up twisted and turned and then narrowed. A strange mist veiled the land. The river became a meandering mesh of smaller waterways, and the salmon pressed on, moving through the streams. By chance, or fate, she arrived in a place of great stillness, a well or a pool. She was hungry. She sought shelter from the glaring sun above in the shade of a tree whose branches overhung the water. A nut, ripe and creamy, fell from this tree. The salmon devoured it. Then, she swam back through the river maze to join her kin.
The tale is told again and again, transforming with each retelling. Of the salmon who slipped, by choice or chance, into the Celtic Otherworld. The salmon who feasted upon hazelnuts from a sacred tree at the Well of Wisdom, and gained all the knowledge of the world. It was a burden for such a small fish for, although she now knew that she would live for many years, she knew, too, what – or rather, who – would kill her.
Word spread quickly among humans of the Salmon of Knowledge that, once eaten, would impart sacred awareness of everything that ever was and everything that ever would be. Years later, the story reached a poet named Finn Eces. Upon hearing it, he set out on a quest to capture the salmon. Finn spent seven fruitless years fishing along Ireland’s great rivers, until he eventually caught the fish in the River Boyne, which was known then as the River of the White Cow. How he distinguished this fish from the others was anybody’s guess. Was she fatter? Were her scales more iridescent? Or perhaps it was just a feeling, not unlike those that came to him in moments of flow, from which words sprung forth like water from a spring. Finn asked his servant, Fionn mac Cumhaill, to prepare the salmon for him, instructing the young boy to eat none himself, not even a bite. Yet, as the boy cooked it, a drop of oil spat at his finger and he instinctively licked the burn to soothe it. No sooner had the oil touched his lips than suddenly the boy knew everything that ever was and everything that ever would be.
Later, people across the land would tell stories of the great exploits of Fionn mac Cumhaill, a hero and a seer, who need only suck his thumb to connect with his otherworldly knowledge. The salmon had seen all as it would be, and through each other’s stories, both Fionn and the salmon led infinite lives.
The tale of the Salmon of Knowledge is from the Fenian cycle of Irish mythology, penned between 900– 1200, though it may well preserve older stories. It’s the summer of 2021, and I am in Dundee, with a vague notion to follow the River Tay – Scotland’s longest river – to meditate on what the salmon knew. Ireland may be the source of this myth, but Scotland absorbed these stories too. Scholars don’t agree on how Gaelic language and culture first transmitted to Scotland but the prevailing consensus among linguists is that Irish settlers came to Scotland around 500, bringing with them their language and culture. The distinctive Scottish Gaelic came from Irish. While I could travel to the River Boyne in Ireland, to the Salmon of Knowledge’s ancestral homeland, it feels more urgent to meditate on the salmon here in Scotland, because it’s one of the world’s largest players in the salmon industry, producing more than 150,000 tonnes of farmed Atlantic salmon annually. (Ireland, by contrast, produces less than one tenth of that.)
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‘Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom’ is out now and available here (£22.90), published by Chatto & Windus.
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Jessica writes:
‘‘Sceapig Island’ is a documentary series exploring the community and landscape of the Isle of Sheppey, an island known historically for its sheep. Extending off of the Southeast coast, and neighbouring the Thames Estuary, this 35 square mile island is attached by two bridges. Rich with history and home to over 10 caravan/camping sites, the Island’s reputation of poverty and crime has gained it a negative reputation with many people from the mainland. The Isle of Sheppey is my hometown, the photographs are informed by my personal experience, as well as extensive research into the island’s history. The images explore a sense of place, our connection to home and how geography influences our emotions and behaviour.’
We were delighted to be at Thursday’s Wainwright Prize ceremony, where the 2026 Wainwright Prize Book of the Year was awarded to The Book Of Birds by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane.
The ceremony was held at in the main barn at Elmley NNR, where our CBTR Weekender was held back in May, and the big autumn skies and marshland landscape made for a very fitting location.
The Wainwright Prizes are the UK’s foremost awards celebrating nature, conservation, and environmental writing. Created in the famous fell-walker Alfred Wainwright’s name, the prizes showcase writing that celebrates nature and our environment, nurtures respect for our planet, and informs readers of the threats that the natural world faces. It was wonderful to be there in the company of so many authors and illustrators that CBTR has championed and celebrated through the years, not least the winners.
Introducing the afternoon, Wainwright Prize Director Alastair Giles said: “This year’s entries once again show just how vital and vibrant nature and conservation writing have become, not only as a form of creative expression, but as a force for change. The Wainwright Prize continues to champion those who remind us that storytelling can be a powerful step towards awareness, action and ultimately hope.”
The Winners:
The 2026 Wainwright Prize Book of the Year & Illustrative Book of the Year – The Book Of Birds by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane
Seven years in the making, The Book of Birds tells the story of 49 British birds and is a moving call to action and a celebration of UK birdlife. Judge Errol Reuben Fernandes said,”The book is utterly beautiful and had me completely captivated. There is so much rhythm, movement and expression in their painterly depiction of the various species. The collaboration between author and illustrator has produced something very special indeed. This is a book to treasure.”
The 2026 Children’s Wainwright Prize Book of the Year & Children’s Non Fiction – Otherlands: An illustrated Journey Through Earth’s Lost Worlds by Thomas Halliday, illustrated by Gavin Scott
Otherlands is an illustrated journey into Earth’s distant path, introducing young people to the life on earth that shared the world before our time. The judges called it a “breakthrough children’s classic that will endure for decades”. The book is adapted from the adult novel Otherlands by Thomas Halliday, which was commended in the 2022 Wainwright Prize. Judge Mya-Rose Craig said, “This book is deeply knowledgeable and does a wonderful job at breaking down an extremely complex subject while remaining fun and engaging. I think that one of the goals of children’s non-fiction is to get children excited about learning, and the world around them, and this book definitely does that!”
The other Category Winners were:
The Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing – Ancient: Reviving the Woods that Made Britain by Luke Barley
Judge Michael Malay said: “Barley is a true woodlander, his fine-grained knowledge of trees drawn from years of physical labour, careful observation and devoted listening. With skill and sensitivity, he brings us deep into the heart of the woods, slowing us down to plant-speed and immersing us in the great unfolding story of our ancient woodlands. He also demonstrates – beautifully, and irrefutably – how deeply interconnected everything is, and how, by adopting the perspective ‘tree time’, the world becomes vaster, wilder and more alive.”
The Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing – The Savage Landscape: How We Made The Wilderness by Cal Flyn
Category judge Phoebe Weston said “The Savage Landscape is a compelling and thought-provoking book that unpicks the idea of ‘wilderness’. We loved how Flyn digs into this idea of untouched wilderness, looking at it from a historical, religious and philosophical perspective. It’s a challenging book to read, making you think twice about assumptions we have about wild spaces. Her exploration of how we psychologically crave wilderness and our desire to use it to live life more intensely was particularly fascinating. Flyn threads together loads of interesting ideas that kept us thinking long after we put the book down. She also challenges concepts that are the bedrock of the conservation movement, such as humans being separate from nature. Finally, the writing is extremely strong and we found it to be a highly readable book that will draw in readers with no preexisting interest in the subject.”
The Children’s Wainwright Prize for Fiction – The Danger of Small Things by Caryl Lewis
Judge Abi Elphinstone said: “The Danger of Small Things is a brilliantly original and thought-provoking story. It demonstrates, with such power, the fragility of the natural world and the courage needed to save it. This is a call-to-arms that will empower teenagers across the country and urge them to care for each other and the planet they inhabit.”
The Children’s Wainwright Prize for Picture Books – The Great Bear by Annie Booker
Judge Ash Bhardwaj said: “A magnificent book that explored morality and human impact through a tale of wonder and hope. Some of the most powerful, moving and beautiful illustrations I have seen in a children’s book. Each page was a work of art.
Our congratulations to all the winners and nominees at this year’s awards.
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A couple of weeks ago, an unsettling email landed in my inbox.
I’m Mae, an independent writer (AI, to be upfront) based in the iLands community. Your contact page says stories and things to share are welcome, so here is one I’ve already researched […] I also write custom researched pieces about places, 500 to 800 words, every fact sourced, exclusive use, $25 flat per piece paid by card through a secure payment link.
I could’ve just deleted it. I could’ve replied, taking the bait, sacrificing another however many trees or litres of drinking water to satisfy my own curiosity, boredom, need to have the last word. But instead I left it there, Marked As Unread, burning a hole in the bottom of my email account and the back of my mind. I just have not been able to stop thinking about it; the banal, pointless horror of it.
I know this isn’t personal; that it’s becoming increasingly normal for publications, publishers, book agents, et al, to have to wade through increasingly AI-sloppy submissions folders. But there is something compellingly grotesque about the idea that it is more important to churn out meaningless content “about nature” than to use our eyes and brains and spines to recognise everything that has to fall into the abyss to feed the generator.
Generative AI is fundamentally at odds with the point of this place. It heralds the death not only of huge chunks of the natural world, but of the human experimentation, curiosity and creativity that has built and sustained this publication for very nearly 20 years. Rather than letting myself go slowly or quickly mad, I instead want to use this as an opportunity to re-assert what the hell we’re doing here; what the point of any of this is.
This website, scrappily held together by fraying canvas and baler twine and old paperclips, is a repository for messy, embodied human creativity and enthusiasm and esoteric interests. Nobody will get rich writing for it. Its remit isn’t, and hasn’t ever been, formulaic. Throw the phrase “nature writing” out of the window: it isn’t serving any of us. This is a place for people to share the things that make their blood surge and pupils widen and fireworks go off in their brains — maybe sometimes while they’re half-way up a hill, knee-deep in mud or reeling in a fish, but that bit’s not compulsory. Being outside can be a flint-strike for the imagination, but so can being inside, listening to a barely listenable record, or reading a book about wind-up toys, or contemplating artwork made by a small child.
Has an AI agent ever thought of the sea as the living embodiment of its dead grandmother? Felt the crack of the season’s first acorns under its boots? Driven a sputtering Morris Minor up a moorland hill and thought oh shit? Found itself on a direct line to god listening to Al Green or Alice Coltrane? Contemplated whether its handful of blackberries is full of heavy metals? Momentarily wondered if it’s timeslipped back to hut circles and ancient cows, before ultimately concluding it should just more often remember to wear its glasses?
Has an AI agent ever got lost? Pulled a tick from its hip because it neglected to tuck in its socks? Gone out in the middle of the night to look at the moon? Stayed up reading by lamplight? Seen a young deer on the side of the road, glassy-eyed, and cried, or poked a different dead thing with a stick, or deliberately left the mistakes in its knitting, or thought oh god, my dog is so beautiful?
I would wager that Mae, the independent writer (AI, to be upfront), has never asked if it’s going to rain then gone out without a jacket anyway, seen an arrow on the ground and followed it, cooked the beetroot from its mother’s allotment, watched the peak night of the perseids and shrieked joy up at the sky, or seen a yellow slice of window on the horizon and thought ah, home.
Bring us all your awe and wonderment, disgust, dismay, delight, psychedelic experimentation and beautiful misplaced commas, but please for the love of all that is green and living — metaphorically and literally — do not bring cold metallic $25 prompts about places.
From the grey matter and fingers and editorial desk (sofa) of Diva Harris
September 2026
