A heartwarming spectacle of desolation

In 2008, the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie characterised the typical exponent of modern nature writing as ‘the lone enraptured male’. This was a more solemn, grown-up Basil Fotherington-Thomas, the effete schoolboy of the Molesworth books who prances about in puerile pantheistic ecstasy, saying, ‘hullo clouds, hullo sky’. Ten years on, there is barely a British landscape that has not been visited by the species. He sits in a car until he reaches the chosen spot. Then, winding down the window, stunned by emptiness and silence, he savours the momentary disconnection from global networks. The void is soon filled with childhood memories, poems learnt at school and Wikipedia articles. Wordsworthian plangency is provided by climate change or some ghastly development in the writer’s life — sickness, bereavement, midlife crisis or divorce — which leads him to consider all of Nature as a gigantic emotional support animal.

Donald Murray’s spartan trudge through peat bogs and moorland — mostly Scottish but also Irish, Dutch, German and Australian — has not a hint of Molesworth nor even of Wordsworth.