Sunday book review – The Book of Bogs edited by Anna Chilvers and Clare Shaw – Mark Avery
This book grew locally in West Yorkshire in response to Walshaw Moor’s landscape and wildlife and to the threat to it from a proposal to build an enormous windfarm on its deep peat soils. But although many of the writings collected here, some previously published elsewhere, relate to this moor, most famously the Wuthering Heights of Emily Brontë’s only novel, the book reaches out to other peatlands across the UK and a very few even further afield.
Over 40 authors have given peatlands a voice in this book through prose and poetry, science and personal experience, fact and fiction. Contributors range from well-known names such as Robert Macfarlane, Nicola Chester, Amy Liptrot and Guy Shrubsole to names you won’t have encountered before.
To read more about the campaign to prevent the destruction of Walshaw Moor (which is not really a feature of these contributions) see the long and ongoing, and brilliantly written series of blogs by Nick MacKinnon – click here.
The cover? That looks just right for Walshaw Moor on a day of decent weather and is by Angie Roberts. I’d give it 8/10.
The Book of Bogs: stories from a Yorkshire moor and other peatlands is edited by Anna Chilvers and Clare Shaw and published by Little Toller books.
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