The Quiet Moon by Kevin Parr

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

If you go back a couple of thousand years, the people that inhabited this country are often called Celts. Very little is written about them, but what there is was written by the Romans and they took a dim view of their customs and habits. It is thought that they lived using a lunar calendar and no doubt use the four pivot points of solstice and equinox to frame their lives. But the truth is no one knows.

One man who has found that following a lunar cycle helps him deal with modern life and all the crap that it throws at him is Kevin Parr. He has slowly come to the conclusion that this less regimented way of marking time helps him become more in tune with the natural rhythms of nature and as a bonus, it has helped him no end with his mental health.

This is more than a gentle meander around the Dorset countryside though. Parr uses nature as a crutch to get him through the tough moments in his life. The book is split into twelve chapters each with a title of a moon, with wonderful names such as The Moon of Ice, The Moon of Dispute, The Bright Moon and it begins with the Quiet Moon.

In each chapter, we join Parr on his walks in his part of West Dorset. It is partly a history book and partly a natural history book and interwoven with these two main threads is a dusting of folklore, travel, memoir and musings on modern life. At times it feels like a confessional as he opens up about personal matters and other things that have been troubling his mind. As he immerses himself in research about the Celts way of life he realises that there is no clear definition of them and he fills in the gaps in a way that makes sense to him.

This in some ways is incredibly difficult to review. I can’t really put my finger on the exact reason why, but I really liked this book. But, I think it is because he is forging his own philosophy in his local landscape. There are things he writes about that I haven’t contemplated yet and need time to go away and think about them.
However, there are other subjects that he writes about that I felt like I was looking into a mirror ball, where I would sometimes glimpse my own ways of interacting with the landscapes around me. It might not be everyone’s thing, but if you want something different to read about landscapes and one man’s place in the world, then I can recommend this.