There are few old growth forests left in Europe, and not really any untouched wilderness at all. But sometimes on my wanderings through our forests I come upon an area that looks surprisingly wild and almost untouched, where a combination of rocks, mossy trees, undergrowth and fallen branches create an atmosphere that seems almost primeval. I treasure these pockets of wilderness, because they resemble an echo of times before industrial and digital progress, when nature was still lush and untamed and a climate crisis unthinkable. Perhaps they also speak to something primeval that is encoded in my genes.
“There is wildness everywhere, if we only stop in our tracks and look around us.”
Roger Deakin
“I was becoming increasingly interested in this understanding of wildness not as something which was hived off from human life, but which existed unexpectedly around and within it: in cities, backyards, roadsides, hedges, field boundaries or spinnies….”
Robert Macfarlane
