Welcome

I don’t know about you, but I’m a typical Brit when it comes to stoicism, brave faces and not getting too jolly well worked up about things. But that doesn’t mean I embrace hardship and thrive on privation. Far from it. I’m against suffering when it comes to my fellow man, and especially so when it comes to myself. Which is to say while this issue is dedicated to things wild, that doesn’t mean we’ve gone horribly hardcore.

Wildness is a pole by which it’s fun to set our compass, but just as we wouldn’t want a bolthole at the North Pole, we don’t aspire to a white-out in a glacial wasteland as the ultimate outdoor high. Give us Derwent Water over Desolation Island any day. Wilderness is seductive for us insomuch as it gives us a way of touching on a natural world much bigger than us; an opportunity to reflect on our own scale and place in it, and to experience a remoteness, isolation or strangeness that’s like a shot of Tabasco in the comfort food of our everyday experience. For a place to feel rewardingly wild for me, it needs to fire up parts of my brain matchingly remote and perhaps primitive. To leave me feeling once again a childish awe at the size of the universe, a primitive wonder about the gods and monsters that might inhabit it; a pride in conquering, and a pleasure in returning (home, in time for tea).