Grounded: A Journey into the Landscapes of our Ancestors
James Canton
(Canongate, £18.99)
THE author is a lecturer in ‘wild writing’, which suggests opium-fuelled poems by Thomas De Quincey or Woolfian stream-of-consciousness novellas scribbled in wind-blasted lighthouses. Rather, the discipline studies the links between literature, landscape and the environment. James Canton writes of what he teaches, Grounded being a personal exploration—both the literal act of journeying and mental voyage—around sacred spaces in Britain.
The obvious question is: what is ‘sacred’? He generally means somewhere ‘numinous’, divine or spiritual. Churches are obvious cases, and he duly starts in musty, silent St James’s, Lindsey, Suffolk, where he also gives us the direction of travel of his thesis: the need for ‘a keen sense of calm’, relief from the hurly-burly of modern life, connection with Nature, the wanting to be ‘grounded’.
Dr Canton is not religious, but he is possessed by a
