He set out to find what wildness is left in Britain and Ireland, expecting remoteness — islands, summits, moors — and slept out in fifteen of them over a year. Then Roger Deakin, his friend, kept pointing him back toward the hedgerow and the holloway, and the book turns partway through: The wild isn’t only up north, it’s in the verge and the storm drain and the beech wood outside town. Deakin died while he was writing it and the last chapters carry that. The chapter on the storm-beach at Coruisk and the one on the holloway are the ones people remember.
The Wild Places