5 out of 5 stars
The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.
If you are a regular reader of my reviews on my blog or Good Reads, then you’ll know I like spending time in the woodlands. They are cool at the height of summer, stark and still beautiful in the depths of winter, and listening to the susurration of the leaves in the wind in the autumn is as calming for me as hearing the sound of waves of the burbling of a stream.
A wood or coppice can provide in a multitude of ways, food, fuel and timber for structures, poles for barriers for us. But they are a habitat that can support thousands of other creatures, in particular ancient woodlands. They are also home to the entities that inhabit our imaginations and folklore and that liminal space in between.
Menmuir also has a thing about woodlands in the same way that he was attracted to the water as I read about in The Draw Of The Sea. This book does a similar thing to that previous book, he uses it to explore how other people use woodlands in their lives to nourish their souls, provide an income, as a source of materials for the beautiful things they are making and for those that are seeking the otherworldly.
He begins at the trees that his father planted nine years before, in a small village in Wales. He planted them so he could create something that would outlast him, would offer his descendants shade and be his small contribution to address the dramatic loss of biodiversity that we are seeing. Menmuir watches his father and son, who is virtually the same age as the wood, collecting oak galls. He would be finding the gall in pockets and around the house for ages after.
Death is one of the few taboos left in our society, probably because we think if we ignore it, it won’t happen to us and it might go away. Spoiler alert; it won’t… People now have more choice as to what happened to them after death and more are choosing to be interred in a woodland cemetery. The thought of my body benefiting an oak is quite appealing. He goes to visit Ele and Anthony who live in a 27-acre woodland in Cornwall. The day they moved there they buried a lady and another soon followed and before long they were custodians of a natural graveyard. He then heads over to meet Jessie who makes willow caskets and learns of the stories behind their creation and how people make their own and those for their spouses.
He attends a festival of bodgers. These are people who carve wooden spoons and other simple items. He visits a couple of boat builders, one in Cornwall and another in Glasgow. He is lucky enough to visit Japan to see the work of the traditional woodworkers in Takavana and visit a sacred forest.
The spiritual links that people forge with woodlands are well covered in this book. He participates in wassailing, visits the Sycamore Gap before those bastards cut it down, takes a walk through a fictional wood in Shropshire and travels a long way back in time in an ancient yew grove.
Like his previous book about the sea, Menmuir is seeking people whose stories are intertwined with woodlands. He is an engaging writer whose fascination with the things people have to tell him and a desire to learn from others makes this a brilliant book. It is a gentle story too, he writes like he has all the time in the world to discover a new thing about woodlands. I thought it was excellent and can highly recommend it.
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