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

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The trail passes through some of the most beautiful and breathtaking scenery in Wales. You will traverse the crags of Eryri, ride the spine of the Cambrian Mountains, pass over Bannau Brycheiniog, and cross The Gower, a ll in one week. A Roman road once connecting the north and south coasts of Wales, Sarn Helen is a ‘perfect spine from which to flesh out a picture of the country’. Despite no trace of it on the OS map, Bullough manages to walk the entirety and, in doing so, is able to juxtapose the past, present and future of Wales. And quite literally by his side are friends Christopher Meredith and Jay Griffiths who accompany Bullough for stretches of the walk, providing an insight into character as well as humoured light relief in the naming of sleeping bags and sharing of food in the dark. 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. I read an article once, in which Jan Morris wonders how her life might have been had she remained in Wales – had she kept her attention on the things around her, not on the full expanse of the world. It was a reflection that returned to me often as I was working on Sarn Helen: it is, after all, a travel book. In the end, of course, Jan Morris was not that writer – for all that she wrote of Wales as well. In the end I am, if I like it or not. Wales alone has the hold on me that, now and then, blesses my work with life.

Sarn 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

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The Sarn Helen is no easy multi-day adventure. Riding the length and breadth of Wales will push your body and mind to the limit day after day as you climb nearly 30,000ft (8500m) over six days riding through some of the most challenging, wild and remote landscapes in the UK. Ongoing Covid restrictions, reduced air and freight capacity, high volumes and winter weather conditions are all impacting transportation and local delivery across the globe.

An impassioned book that rings with beauty, grief and urgency. As he journeys through Wales' past, present and future, Bullough sounds a clarion call for us all to play our part in averting global catastrophe -- Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent 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 There is a particularly telling passage about the general misinformation about Extinction Rebellion as supplied by the British mass media (the newspapers being largely owned by extremely rich men who manifestly don’t want things to change any time soon): 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. During his research for this book he hiked its full length as best he could (parts of the exact route are disputed by historians). The result is a state-of-the-nation portrait of Wales, encompassing its past, present and future. “The road,” he says, “was the perfect spine from which to flesh out a picture of the country.”

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A long-distance mountain bike route named the Sarn Helen Trail follows parts of the road's course. [5] The 270-mile (430km) trail, which was devised in 1996, runs between Conwy on the North Wales coast and Worms Head on the Gower Peninsula. [6] Fell running [ edit ] 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. It is a triple view of Wales, he is very much in the present when walking up hills and along the 2000-year-old road, parts of which are still visible. But inevitably he explores the past of the landscapes and the people that inhabited the villages that he walks through. The third aspect of the book is the future of the country as the spectre of climate change looms ever nearer. I thought this mix of travel, nature and environmental writing was really good. Bullough gets the balance between each element right. Bullough is convinced that adapting to the climate crisis depends not simply on technical fixes but on new stories and principles for how to live better with the natural world. Christianity took hold in Wales so strongly, he argues, because it fitted its values and places of worship into pre-existing religious systems. In an era of climate crisis, “we can’t just conjure these stories up out of nowhere and expect them to take hold. If we are to remake ourselves, we have to do it around indigenous stories and traditions,” he says. “To a large extent, we’re talking about adopting a new moral code. What precedent do we have for that but the transition between different religions?”

Tom Bullough lives in Bannau Brycheiniog (the Brecon Beacons) and is the author of four novels including, most recently, Addlands. Sarn Helen, his first work of non-fiction, was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for writing on conservation.

The road gives its name to the annual Sarn Helen Hill Race that starts and finishes in Lampeter in mid-Wales. The 16.5-mile (26.6km) multi-terrain race, founded in 1980, takes place in May each year. It claims to combine "the speed of road racing with the rigours of cross country and fell running over a challenging picturesque course". [7] In popular culture [ edit ] Part love-letter, part lament, part call-to-action, Sarn Helen is one man's passionate attempt - in prose that's at once lyrical and forensic - to put into words what's at stake for us all in our present moment -- Carys Davies I recount all this to illustrate just how far my concerns had come over the course of the previous decade. As I detail in my 2021 defence statement (following a second arrest), there was evidence that this type of direct action had affected UK government policy and, to me, this made it a moral imperative. To remain beneath the ‘safe upper limit’ of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average – a global necessity on countless counts – required drastic and immediate changes from government, and, like so many others, I was willing to do anything that might make these changes come about. 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

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