Sarn Helen: A Journey Through Wales, Past, Present and Future

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The final stage is a short 19 mile (30.6 km) ride to Swansea, which should give you plenty of time to enjoy a celebratory meal by Swansea Bay and arrange any onward travel. You’ll mainly be off the roads too, as there’s a brilliant traffic-free cycle network into Swansea from the Dulais Valley. Morris’s illustrations inhabit movement and life – a puffin in torpedo dive, an inquisitive otter, a sand lizard, feet splayed and tail hooked. But as alive as they appear, these are just several of the 666 species ‘threatened with imminent national extinction’. The very thought is heartbreaking. However hard this is to face, and despite the many times I have wept inconsolably whilst reading, this book is an absolute must. It has left an imprint upon my soul. We must talk about this fight, because fight it is.

There is Idris, proud and insular, a man of the plough and the prayer sheet, haunted by the First World War. Then there is the boy Oliver, who grows to be a near mythic giant in the community, a fighter, a drinker, inescapably rooted in their hard, remote valley. And there is Etty, Oliver’s mother, the centre of this close constellation, who navigates old ways and new technologies as she struggles to ensure her family’s survival.Just on that first day, Sarn Helen brought communities struggling to recover from Covid-19 and from flooding caused by unprecedented rainfall – both, of course, symptoms of the CEE. It brought mountains reduced to a virtual wasteland, but it also brought relics of the Age of Saints – of the 5th and 6th centuries, the roots of Wales, when the natural world inspired a divine awe. To write about the CEE, really, you have to do little more than observe: the crisis is no less than everything we are. What that first day provided was the shape of the book, but also (as it seems to me) its basic music: the disjuncture between who we were and who we have become. From coastal castles to the steep pitches of Snowdonia National Park, mountain passes to the UK’s first trail centre at Coed-y-Brenin, traversing the ‘desert of Wales’ through the Cambrian Mountains and spectacular Elan Valley and lastly crossing the rough and wild Brecon Beacons National Park into the valleys of South Wales, there are few long-distance routes that rival the variety of landscapes that you’ll find on Sarn Helen.

In the same way, the landscape itself contains multiples. You can be walking past a cluster of yews that are older than Christ, turn a corner and find yourself in a standoff with a herd of alpacas. As Bullough presses on through the guts of the country he encounters Roman hill forts guarding post-industrial villages and natural springs bubbling up in the middle of housing estates. Sometimes the timeshifts are crammed into a single building: a nonconformist chapel is turned into a bijou domestic home by the incongruous addition of a front porch that appears to have been filched from a county hall.Thrilling. I was bewitched by the experience of seeing as Tom Bullough does, with such insight, such deep learning, such humour and such urgency. This is the finest kind of travel writing: a book that makes you see what is really there, and fills you with the author's passion to defend it -- Horatio Clare South of Dolgellau the route passes over Waen Llefenni into Cwm yr Hengae to Aberllefenni. Part of the narrow-gauge Corris Railway between Aberllefenni and Maespoeth Junction may run along the line of the Sarn. [2] A minor road running along the east bank of the Afon Dulas near Esgairgeiliog, Powys might be Roman in origin. [3] Although potentially the Roman road remained on the west bank of the Dulas between Corris and Ffridd Gate. [4] Wave a fond farewell to Snowdonia National Park as you exit to the south on stage three, heading deep into the Cambrian Mountains via the bustling town of Machynlleth, and along one of my all-time favourite gravel roads.

In 2020 the writer Tom Bullough set out to walk along Sarn Helen, the old Roman Road that runs from the south of Wales to the north. From that journey he wrote a state of the nation book of non - fiction, Sarn Helen, filled with a fascinating mix of ancient history, observational nature writing and environmental activism. Johny Pitts talks to Tom Bullough about how he sees his role as a writer in the midst of the climate emergency and his deep connection to the changing landscape. Sarn Helen is accomplished and stunning in every one of its many personalities: as history, as memoir, as eco-parable, as impassioned call to arms. The world of this book is one of awe and joy and one which we need to protect from human predation until our last collective breath -- Niall Griffiths Sarn Helen" is the title of a song by Welsh band Super Furry Animals, appearing on their Welsh language album Mwng. It is also the title of a 1997 sequence of poems by English poet John Wilkinson and a 2023 travel book by Tom Bullough, who walked the route in 2020. Vital, and urgent with concern. You cannot leave this book without its message thundering in your head. It is not enough to walk old routes. This was. Now what? -- Cynan JonesSarn Helen is a beautifully downbeat travelogue that's full of love, rage and humour. A brilliant, pivotal book by one of the most engaged and engaging writers around, it will change you -- Toby Litt And yet, by and large, this is how stories work. There is an individual protagonist, and the techniques of writing allow a reader to care about them and their individual concerns. It might be preferable, given the CEE, for us to develop a new sort of narrative – ‘an account of collective agency’, as Martin Puchner writes in Literature for a Changing Planet. But for now we face an urgent, an existential threat, and we can only marshal every tool and skill we have to the cause of heading it off. Sarn Helen: A Journey through Wales, Past, Present and Future is both a beautiful and a terrifying book: a poignant love letter to the endearing beauty of the landscape and history of Wales laced within a starkly painful eulogy for what we are set to lose in the climate and ecological emergency. Bullough is best known for Addlands, a novel set over 70 years on a Welsh farm. His new, non-fiction book tells of his south-to-north walk along the line of Sarn Helen, a Roman road which spans the country and gives the book its title. With the pacing and economy of a novelist, Bullough conjures up a history of Wales both intimate and epic, encompassing the lives of the saints, Welsh language, coal mining and cultural myths, alongside the vivid present day. Here he finds dystopia – a people-less village where robot mowers prowl – and moments of wonder such as the “tenderness” of a late-afternoon view in mid-Wales from Snowdonia to the Brecon Beacons. “It is like watching somebody you love in sleep,” he writes. A wondrous and arresting journey teeming with wisdom, insights and humanity. Walking through Wales with Bullough is to see the nation - and the UK - with new eyes -- Ben Rawlence

A couple of days later, I gave a short talk for Writers Rebel in Trafalgar Square, urging other writers to leave their desks and take direct action because, as Jay Griffiths explains in This Is Not a Drill, ‘words (and this is a heavy heresy for a writer) are not enough’. Their footsteps merge as Bullough finds awe and tranquility in the wild, ‘sometimes it will bring me such a sense of uplift that I find I have forgotten to breathe. Sometimes my mind will clear for minutes at a time, seeming to leave nothing but a blazing light’. Sarn Helen is not just the line of a road but a line through time connecting us to the past people of Wales.Sarn Helen is accomplished and stunning in every one of its many personalities: as history, as memoir, as eco-parable, as impassioned call to arms” The joy of the book is in its attention to smaller things, from the flight patterns of birds to the gleaming Subaru Imprezas on housing estates... Bullough is a master craftsman * Prospect * Tom Bullough gives an impassioned plea in this book for all of us to sit up, take notice, and action. There are excellent chunks of scientific facts provided by academic experts who are interviewed for the book by Tom, and also an extremely affecting speech which he gave to the judges at his trial following arrest on a peaceful Extinction Rebellion protest in London.