There was more praise at the weekend for Cal Flyn’s The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness (William Collins). In a review in The Guardian, Edward Posnett (author of Strange Harvests: Giving and Taking from the Natural World) said it was a “carnival of a book, a wondrous personal journey to locate and understand wilderness. It’s a work of extraordinary physical and narrative movement that takes us from the depths of the ocean to volcanoes and icebergs, but is also a journey into our own psyches, and the stories we tell ourselves about ‘wild’ landscapes. Above all, it is a reminder that the places we might conceive of as empty or barren are no such thing; that within wildernesses there is abundant life, both human and non-human.”

Flyn’s book was also reviewed in The Observer, by Kathleen Jamie, who served as Scotland’s Makar, or national poet, from 2021 to 2024 and has herself written acclaimed books on the natural world. She considered it alongside Borrowed Land: A Highland Story by Kapka Kassabova (Jonathan Cape).