What’s to become of Wales?

In recent years, more and more nature writers have begun to engage with the climate crisis. On the one hand, they want to raise awareness of the scale of the problem; on the other, they try to make more tangible those apocalyptic visions of the future. In Sarn Helen, Tom Bullough asks how the crisis is affecting Wales, while walking the old Roman road that linked the country’s south coast with the north. As he writes in his prologue, Wales is not the front line of the emergency, but by focusing on the local, he hopes to give meaning to this vast, diffuse and complex threat.

Sarn Helen is several books in one. At its simplest, it describes the long walk the author made in sections over several months between the various pandemic lockdowns. Along the route he describes the places he passes through, and their history in particular during the ‘Age of Saints’ – the centuries after the Romans left Britain when Wales became a centre of Celtic Christianity. Mixed in with this account he records conversations with climate scientists on the declining state of the environment in Wales and the wider world. The book is also illustrated with paintings by Jackie Morris, showing 15 of the country’s endangered species, including the kestrel, the otter and the beautiful pearl-bordered fritillary.

For many years, Bullough ‘made every effort to avoid any information relating to climate or ecology, living instead with an obscure anxiety – which is, I suspect, quite a common condition’. He had two young children to look after, and his life already seemed hard enough. He did not deny the fact of climate change, but was more comfortable ignoring its scale. No doubt many will share this state of anxious paralysis, and the various narrative strands show different ways of confronting the crisis directly.