Sarn Helen: A Journey Through Wales, Past, Present and Future

Product Information

I read an article once, in which Jan Morris wonders how her life might have been had she remained in Wales – had she kept her attention on the things around her, not on the full expanse of the world. It was a reflection that returned to me often as I was working on Sarn Helen: it is, after all, a travel book. In the end, of course, Jan Morris was not that writer – for all that she wrote of Wales as well. In the end I am, if I like it or not. Wales alone has the hold on me that, now and then, blesses my work with life. Bullough speaks to a series of environmental scientists, mostly based in Welsh universities. Some are so sad that they seem about to weep in the middle of their Zoom calls. Others are frustrated by a continuing misapprehension among the public. While thinking about Wales in relation to global heating can sound funny – what could be nicer than turning up the thermostat on the country’s habitual chilly drizzle? – it turns out that the results will be nastier than anyone anticipates. As Prof Mary Gagen of Swansea University explains: “We can expect a lot of very, very wet summers and winters and the crop failures that accompany that will cause severe food shortages.” Ongoing Covid restrictions, reduced air and freight capacity, high volumes and winter weather conditions are all impacting transportation and local delivery across the globe.

The joy of the book is in its attention to smaller things, from the flight patterns of birds to the gleaming Subaru Imprezas on housing estates... Bullough is a master craftsman * Prospect * Sarn Helen is a beautifully downbeat travelogue that’s full of love, rage and humour. A brilliant, pivotal book by one of the most engaged and engaging writers around, it will change you” Morris’s illustrations inhabit movement and life – a puffin in torpedo dive, an inquisitive otter, a sand lizard, feet splayed and tail hooked. But as alive as they appear, these are just several of the 666 species ‘threatened with imminent national extinction’. The very thought is heartbreaking.All of these things pertain today, except that the baby is almost my height and has an even more vocal sister. And yet, had I walked Sarn Helen then, rather than in 2020-2021, and decided to write about that, the resultant book would have been something quite different to Sarn Helen as it is now. Bullough is best known for Addlands, a novel set over 70 years on a Welsh farm. His new, non-fiction book tells of his south-to-north walk along the line of Sarn Helen, a Roman road which spans the country and gives the book its title. With the pacing and economy of a novelist, Bullough conjures up a history of Wales both intimate and epic, encompassing the lives of the saints, Welsh language, coal mining and cultural myths, alongside the vivid present day. Here he finds dystopia – a people-less village where robot mowers prowl – and moments of wonder such as the “tenderness” of a late-afternoon view in mid-Wales from Snowdonia to the Brecon Beacons. “It is like watching somebody you love in sleep,” he writes. As Tom walks the route, sometimes alone, sometimes in company, he describes the changing landscape around him and explores the political, cultural and mythical history of this country that has been so divided, by language and by geography. Sarn Helen: A Journey through Wales, Past, Present and Future is both a beautiful and a terrifying book: a poignant love letter to the endearing beauty of the landscape and history of Wales laced within a starkly painful eulogy for what we are set to lose in the climate and ecological emergency. Sarn Helen: A Journey through Wales, Past, Present and Future by Tom Bullough is published by Granta. It is available from all good bookshops.

And yet, by and large, this is how stories work. There is an individual protagonist, and the techniques of writing allow a reader to care about them and their individual concerns. It might be preferable, given the CEE, for us to develop a new sort of narrative – ‘an account of collective agency’, as Martin Puchner writes in Literature for a Changing Planet. But for now we face an urgent, an existential threat, and we can only marshal every tool and skill we have to the cause of heading it off. There is a particularly telling passage about the general misinformation about Extinction Rebellion as supplied by the British mass media (the newspapers being largely owned by extremely rich men who manifestly don’t want things to change any time soon): Sarn Helen is accomplished and stunning in every one of its many personalities: as history, as memoir, as eco-parable, as impassioned call to arms” Thrilling. I was bewitched by the experience of seeing as Tom Bullough does, with such insight, such deep learning, such humour and such urgency. This is the finest kind of travel writing: a book that makes you see what is really there, and fills you with the author's passion to defend it -- Horatio ClareThe reader is welcomed on his journey through a language of wonder and adventure, ‘now we arrive in a dell… now we meet a stream of pools…now we scramble over a moss-swaddled wall’. He draws us in. We listen. We are on his side. Part love-letter, part lament, part call-to-action, Sarn Helen is one man's passionate attempt - in prose that's at once lyrical and forensic - to put into words what's at stake for us all in our present moment -- Carys Davies We recently joined a coachload of local people travelling up to London for the XR Gathering. It was peaceful, organised, with upwards of 60,000 very nice people attending of all ages, hardly terrorists. What has changed, I think, is awareness – a question of degree. Age and experience come into it, no doubt, but the change I mean is a wider change, the (very slow) awakening of society at large to the single, central question: how do you make sense of yourself in the face of the Climate and Ecological Emergency (CEE)? After all, on our current course, we will leave to our children a world whose average temperature will have increased by 3°C or more: a world of conflict and starvation, mass displacement and mass extinction. What, then, is there left to discuss except how we change that course? However hard this is to face, and despite the many times I have wept inconsolably whilst reading, this book is an absolute must. It has left an imprint upon my soul. We must talk about this fight, because fight it is.

In the same way, the landscape itself contains multiples. You can be walking past a cluster of yews that are older than Christ, turn a corner and find yourself in a standoff with a herd of alpacas. As Bullough presses on through the guts of the country he encounters Roman hill forts guarding post-industrial villages and natural springs bubbling up in the middle of housing estates. Sometimes the timeshifts are crammed into a single building: a nonconformist chapel is turned into a bijou domestic home by the incongruous addition of a front porch that appears to have been filched from a county hall. The penultimate stage of the Sarn Helen route will take you across the wild and isolate Brecon Beacons National Park, over the Fforest Fawr, along ‘the road to hell’ and through forestry to Crynant in the Dulais Valley. In 2020 the writer Tom Bullough set out to walk along Sarn Helen, the old Roman Road that runs from the south of Wales to the north. From that journey he wrote a state of the nation book of non - fiction, Sarn Helen, filled with a fascinating mix of ancient history, observational nature writing and environmental activism. Johny Pitts talks to Tom Bullough about how he sees his role as a writer in the midst of the climate emergency and his deep connection to the changing landscape. Sarn Helen is accomplished and stunning in every one of its many personalities: as history, as memoir, as eco-parable, as impassioned call to arms. The world of this book is one of awe and joy and one which we need to protect from human predation until our last collective breath -- Niall Griffiths It is a triple view of Wales, he is very much in the present when walking up hills and along the 2000-year-old road, parts of which are still visible. But inevitably he explores the past of the landscapes and the people that inhabited the villages that he walks through. The third aspect of the book is the future of the country as the spectre of climate change looms ever nearer.In the north the route is believed to follow the western bank of the river Conwy from Canovium, a fort at Caerhun, passing through Trefriw, then leading on to Betws-y-Coed, with a branch leading to Caer Llugwy near Capel Curig. The route then passed through Dolwyddelan, running through the Cwm Penamnen valley and past the higher parts of Cwm Penmachno. The route then leads on past Llan Ffestiniog to the Roman fort of Tomen y Mur, near Trawsfynydd before continuing south towards Dolgellau. I love to write, and most of all I love the way that (on those occasions when it works) it can happen almost weightlessly, as if by itself. There is a sense that you, the writer, are aligned with the world in a manner surpassing any conventional understanding. For me, it brings to mind convergent evolution: the way that a pair of unrelated species, such as Smilodon fatalis and Thylacosmilus atrox (respectively, once, an American saber-tooth cat and an Argentinian saber-tooth marsupial), could somehow arrive at a similar form. If there is no mightier hand at work, and there is no Platonic ideal of your book already somehow latent in the cosmos, then it feels at least as if the world comprises some sort of underlying pattern – and as if, for now, you and it have become one seamless thing.

Sarn Helen is a beautifully downbeat travelogue that's full of love, rage and humour. A brilliant, pivotal book by one of the most engaged and engaging writers around, it will change you -- Toby Litt And our Editor’s Tip this month chosen by Emma Herdman of Bloomsbury is In Memoriam from Alice Winn. Sarn Helen also includes alarming scientific detail. Over Zoom, Bullough speaks with a range of experts who provide information about the climate and ecological emergency and what it means for Wales: how best can we use the land so steeped in farming traditions; the upland, lowland and middle grounds; the defence of the coastline and future worries for coastal villages, transport and infrastructure; drought, storm surges, flooding. The statistics are absolutely terrifying.Tom’s passion and intelligence is inspiring and I learnt so much about Extinction Rebelion which he is a member of. His speech when he’s in court is a lesson for us all. A wondrous and arresting journey teeming with wisdom, insights and humanity. Walking through Wales with Bullough is to see the nation – and the UK – with new eyes” Bullough has produced an urgent logical and lyrical call for climate action, using his deep knowledge of Wales, past and present, as a catalyst. This is a stunning book” Sarn Helen is “an attempt to depict what is actually here, who these people are, but also the situation we exist in environmentally. This,” Bullough gestures to the sheep pasture and non-native conifer plantation that surrounds us, “is what we think of as our heritage, we think that this is nature, this is how it should be. It can be very beautiful but it’s a skeletal landscape ultimately.” The transformation of landscape and society is a revolution. What happened in the second world war was nothing compared to this I have much enjoyed reading Tom Bullough’s novels Addlands and Konstantin, and am looking forward to reading The Claude Glass, which a friend recently gave me. My husband and I went along to our local and most excellent library to hear Tom give a Creative Forum reading from his latest, non-fiction book Sarn Helen, and we bought two copies – one for my birthday and one for our son’s.