Return to My Trees: Notes from the Welsh Woodlands

Within the contemporary walking-memoirs genre, this book sits somewhere between Robert Macfarlane’s cerebral The Old Ways and Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Yeomans (Oil: Anatomy of an Industry) hikes Wales—300 miles, 29 trails, and 100 forests—to plot an “imaginary route” around its planned National Forest. A personal goal is to walk out his COVID lockdown–related anxiety, but he also seeks to mull societal issues, such as humanity’s vital relationship with trees and forests, to understand how Wales’s woodlands became so diminished, and to consider humanity’s disconnection from nature. If the book suffers from a lack of detailed evocations of flora and fauna, it gains in authenticity as the author admits he has forgotten much of what his younger self knew about nature. Tongue-twisting Welsh location names may challenge some readers, but most will quickly hit their stride with this book as the author treks some fabulous landscapes—generally in a clockwise direction, starting in the southeast’s Chepstow and ending at Chirk Castle on Wales’s northeast border with England. This book offers an uncanny mix that looks back to Wales’s rich history and legends and forward to its aspirational green future.