Wayfarer: Love, loss and life on Britain’s ancient paths

"Yes, so this is obviously part of a subgenre that has emerged in recent years, which explores time spent in nature as a balm that allows people to heal after traumatic experiences. It’s an extremely honest and raw self-examination by the writer. Phoebe Smith was already known for her podcast Wander Woman and also for co-founding a charity that helps underprivileged young people embark on carbon negative expeditions. Anyway, it starts with her being sent on assignment. She’s a travel writer by profession and she is sent to walk the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain, a very famous pilgrimage—probably one of the most famous in the world. During it, she has something like an existential crisis and begins to reexamine her life. She gives up a job, ends a long-term relationship, goes back to Wales, where she’s from, and begins to explore some of Britain’s pilgrim paths. She explains from the outset that she’s not a religious soul, but she ends up finding these journeys are a way of confronting and processing troubling moments in her life. These are very serious things—toxic relationships, depression, an eating disorder. So it’s an honest and heartfelt exploration of how place and travel can act as a palliative force. That’s a very important and rich and continuing stream of British writing, which in its current form goes back to books like Nature Cure by Richard Mabey, in the early 2000s. I really enjoyed that."