I've been thinking about an essay by Nick Hunt called "Return of the Foreigners" in Emergence Magazine, which is about the return of boar to the Forest of Dean. It's a work in which eerie, beautiful scenes like this:
Up the slope, something moves—too pale for what I’m looking for. A human form, seemingly naked, stoops and vanishes behind what looks like a low stone wall, then rises again, stoops again. I think I can hear singing…The next morning I return to that spot to find a natural spring; my map marks it as St. Anthony’s Well—a stone cistern with worn steps leading down into clear water. Someone has placed candles here and a single long-stemmed rose.
Coexist with natural history that is both human and animal:
Unlike the last wolf in Scotland, famously killed in 1680 by Sir Ewen Cameron, the last wild boar in Britain departed without record…Whether they went extinct in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth centuries, the oak, beech, and pine forests in which they had lived for thousands of years—whose ecosystems they had shaped with their industrious rooting and wallowing—were now as free of boar as they were of wolf or bear, emptied of any large mammal that could possibly be called dangerous.
I've read Katherine May, Kathleen Jamie, Helen MacDonald, and Rob MacFarlane. I'd love to read something else in that vein: eerie, beautiful, personal, rich with natural and human history.
Thanks for any suggestions!
by Shirebourn