The Restless Naturalist

On the Soft Wings of the Night

Anna Welch — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:50:57 GMT

The tubular bulb glows wan in the early daylight, the extension cord damp in the grass like a thin snake, pulsing invisibly. I flick off the switch by the window and walk over to the peculiar contraption, curiosity substituting caffeine in my sleepy head.

I had set the moth trap outside before I went to bed, near the edge of the woodland with its fresh green oaks and knotty birches. Moth traps come in various designs and dimensions, but all with a basic principal: a light to attract the moths and some form of structure to capture them. This one was an aluminium box, slightly larger than a foot cubed. A stand with a fluorescent light fitted into the centre, and inside it was filled with the ripped off bottoms of egg cartons, to give the moths a safe place to hang out.

©Anna Welch CC-BY NC 4.0

I had been given instructions by my boss, who loaned me the trap, to empty it before it was fully light, as early as I could face shuffling out into the morgenceald,1 cocooned in several woolly layers. This was to give the moths the best chance of survival after release, time to find shelter in the secret hollows of the vegetation, before the birds awoke to hunt their fragile bodies for breakfast. But that’s more challenging than it sounds, in the fleeting darkness of a Scottish summer night.

So sometime before 5am, I remove the lid and gently extract the egg cartons, turning them over quietly, waiting, hoping, for a whisper of moths inside.2 They are there, in the shadowed crevices; and they are sleepy, so sleepy in the dawn. They climb patiently onto my finger, or the stem of my glasses, fronded antennae exploring the air with languid waves.

©Anna Welch CC-BY NC 4.0

While they drift half-awake, ambling too and fro, I begin to search for them in the moth book spread on the porch table, begin to put names to furry faces. The heavy book is more than twice the thickness of its butterfly equivalent. Moths outnumber butterflies at greater than ten to one, and had been filling the air with the vibration of their wings for about 200 million years before some of them began to evolve the more particular characteristics that distinguished them as butterflies.

Butterflies, with their bright colours, and generally diurnal habits that make them more noticeable to the generally diurnal humans, are good at attracting our attention, at feeling compliments come to rest on their beautiful scaled wings. But for me it’s the moths. It will always be the moths. Why? Because of their names.

Who needs a fritillary or a monarch, a painted lady or a red admiral, when you could have creatures with names like the apple leaf skelontizer, the case-bearing clothes moth, the cloaked minor, the red-necked footman, the dingy shell, the feathered gothic, the setaceous Hebrew character, the lesser treble bar, the lichen button, map-winged swift, scarce vaporer, satellite, or twin-spotted Quaker.

Moths may not be as gaudy as butterflies, but many of them are still visually impressive. My most treasured visitor was a poplar hawkmoth. On the multiple mornings that I went to inspect the trap, there he was waiting for me. I convinced myself it was the same moth, returning again and again, which was probably unlikely since poplar hawkmoths are very common. They live for a matter of weeks in their winged incarnation. That is apparently all that is needed to mate, lay, and die, to preserve the future with a generation of offspring you will never meet.

I would stare at these moths, turning them around on their cardboard perches, finding more ways to love them with each new angle. I doubt it was a feeling they reciprocated; there was nothing mutual about this interaction. I had tricked them, lured them with the promise of light that brought them no benefit. I struggled with the moral implications of studying other creatures in a way that altered their behaviour. Those hours spent in a tin box, exploring the intricacies of a torn egg carton, were hours that could not be spent feeding, or finding a mate. (Though maybe in my more absurd moments I entertained the idea of the trap functioning like some sort of speed-dating venue for moths.)

But citizen science has also been hugely beneficial in broadening our knowledge of species dispersal, providing data that can be tracked across years to indicate population health. General moth abundance in the UK has decreased by around 30% in the last fifty years, though a minority of specific species have seen an increase.

I set the hawkmoth on a birch tree, where he blended against the cracking bark, and left him to find his hide for the day. His waking hours were ending, had ended with my strange face inches from his own, as my day had begun with his. I went inside to make coffee and wake my body up properly, but in other ways I was already awake, fizzing from the filaments of life that had briefly grazed my fingertips.

©Anna Welch CC-BY NC 4.0

If you’re in Scotland, England, Wales, or Ireland and have identified moths (or their caterpillars) in your area, you can submit the data to the National Moth Recording Scheme or on iRecord.

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An Anglo-Saxon word often translated as dawn-cold. Used in Beowulf to describe the temperature of a spear.

When researching collective nouns for moths, I also came across an eclipse, a universe, a flutter, and a swarm.

Finding My Political Voice

Anna Welch — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 23:14:39 GMT

The Conservation Amendment Bill was introduced to the New Zealand Parliament in early May of this year. It proposes drastic and fundamental changes to the way Public Conservation Land is prioritised and managed in this country. Following the bill’s reading, submissions were opened to members of the public to have their say before it went before a select committee in July. I’m not going to try and explain or analyze the amendments. Others more qualified have already done so and are linked below along with other resources that I used in putting together my submission. This is a personal narrative about the process, and why it matters.

I grew up the daughter of a political journalist, my teenage rebellion expressing itself in part in a complete disavowal of politics. Politics were for other people, I was more interested in the sea, and reading fantasy novels.

But I had the luxury to opt out of caring. I was privileged to live in a country, and a socio-economic bracket, from where I could take the government for granted. As far as I could see, there was no quantifiable difference in my life no matter which political party held sway, because to a large extent there wasn’t.

Like many democratic countries, New Zealand is governed by one of two major political parties which fall in and out of leadership according to popular vote.1 I might be imagining this, I certainly have no particular evidence for it beyond my general sense of what’s going on, but it seems as through the divide between the two parties has been growing wider over recent years, specifically the right drifting more to the right.

The Conservation Amendment Bill seems born of the (perhaps new-found) aggression of the present conservative government. This wasn’t a bill affecting some distant industry I was only passively connected to, or arguing for educational reforms for a system of which I was no longer a part. This bill threatened something that I realised I had always considered an inviolable part of New Zealand’s identity: our Public Conservation Land, our wilderness. It threatened it by proposing to turn that land into an economic proposition, something that was valued according to the money that could be made from it, and not for the fact that its value was beyond price.

So I engaged. And the more I learned about the bill, the more frightened and angry I became that many of the places I loved were at risk of losing the protections placed upon them by prior legislation.

In 1960, the American novelist Wallace Stegner wrote to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission a missive which came to be known as the Wilderness Letter. The commission had a view to boosting access to public lands through increased infrastructure. Stegner argued that the value of wilderness was not in its accessibility or its economic potential, but in its presence, essentially suggesting that the more accessible wilderness became, the less it could be called wilderness. “Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed,” he wrote.

I kept thinking about that letter as I was researching and writing my submission. The amendments to the NZ Conservation Act had a taste of something like American conservation practices to them, a concentration of power that invested one individual with too much authority, and placed insufficient safeguards around the decision making process.

Stegner’s letter wrote itself into history, as part of the argument in favour of the Wilderness Act which passed into law four years later. I’m not trying to compare myself to Stegner, this is not about the impact of one individual submission, but about the importance of engagement. Standing up against legislation that doesn’t sit well with us matters, exercising our right to participate in democratic process matters. If we are silent, nothing changes; if enough of us speak, maybe our collective voices will piece the sound barriers created by the egos of money-hungry politicians. Maybe.

What follows is my submission. I hesitated about posting it here, it obviously wasn’t written with this platform in mind, but all the submissions are made public anyway, so why not?

I hereby declare that I do not support the changes proposed to the Conservation Act 1987 by the Conservation Amendment Bill 2026 (The Bill). The amendments proposed radically and detrimentally undermine the ethos and the framework that the Act was constructed to preserve. My specific concerns are as follows.

I do not support the re-definition of the function of The Department of Conservation to enable economic opportunities to the greatest practicable extent. The Department of Conservation is not, and should not be, an economic institution. The Bill fundamentally undermines the role of the Department as the guardians of New Zealand conservation land by requiring it to prioritise its economic capacity. Some things, the wild, ancient ecosystems of our Public Conservation Land being one of them, are beyond monetary value. To require the authority responsible for their continued well-being to consider the economic potential of these lands, is to re-write New Zealand’s relationship with its irreplaceable heritage and unique identity.

I do not support Public Conservation Land being made eligible for sale to a greater extent than it currently is. Procedures already exist to enable the disposal of low value conservation land. The Bill is not simply making this easier, it is putting millions of acres of irreplaceable ecosystems at risk. If there is a need to sell off a derelict borstal home in Levin, or a section of urban property in Reefton, then it is entirely feasible to make provision for such, without simultaneously jeopodizing ancient forests, and crucial habitats such as native tussock grassland. Once that land is sold, there is no going back, and it will be at the mercy of private interests who are bound by no constraints beyond their bottom line. I note the Minister’s recent declaration that this amendment will be withdrawn from The Bill, and I expect to see this followed through.

I do not support Schedule 5, which fails to provide protective exemption from eligibility for sale for a number of habitats or areas which have conservation or cultural value. These include, but are not limited to: World Heritage Areas, land acquired for conservation using public funds, offshore islands, lake beds, river beds, marginal strips, conservation parks, and forest parks. I request that the above are included in Schedule 5.

I do not support the construction of visitor amenities where these fundamentally alter the current state of conservation land. I am concerned that there are insufficient safeguards in The Bill to protect conservation land from human infrastructure. It would be better to concentrate such services around existing areas of habitation where they could increase tourism to these areas that already have the foundations of infrastructure established to support greater numbers of visitors. As a tramper I know and love the New Zealand outdoors. I find incredible joy and solace in having access to land that is protected from the effects of human impact. Land, moreover, which is free to access. Imposing fees to access these spaces discriminates against persons in lower income brackets, depriving them of a resource that is incomparably valuable to personal health and well-being.

I do not support the increased facility of concessions through exemption or pre-approval. No commercial activities should be exempt from the due process of independently accessing the impact of these activities. Different biota have different requirements in terms of protection and it is not feasible to instigate a blanket approach to this sort of authorisation.

I do not support the introduction of section 4A, which diminishes the Act’s accountability to the Treaty of Waitangi. It is vital that the interests of iwi are upheld, especially when we consider that so many areas of indigenous cultural significance exist on conservation land. The insertion of section 4A is both inappropriate and insulting, perpetuating a colonial framework of governance.

I do not support the transfer of decision making power from the Department of Conservation and the Conservation Boards to the Minister. One person in a government office should not have the authority to determine the value of conservation land, particularly when that person has made it clear, through the contents of his proposed bill, that he values money more highly than biodiversity. We only need to look at the way conservation land is suffering in America to understand that such individualised decision making is not a future worth enabling.

We are living through a global biodiversity crisis. New Zealand conservation land is one of the most pristine examples of un-humanized, unprivatised wilderness left in the world. We are fortunate that, unlike so many countries, we have mere centuries of human habitation to overcome (predominantly in the form of predator control). This Bill threatens that privilege. We should be bending over backwards to expand conservation land, to find ways to enrich its biodiversity, and safeguard it for the generations to come. This Bill flies in the face of what we stand for as New Zealanders.

I have spent the last three years living in Scotland, during which time I worked for conservation NGOs and in the private ecological sector. Time and again, I would find myself explaining to people that New Zealand conservation was different. In Scotland, the protected land is fragmented, persisting in tiny enclaves owned by individual charities such as the Wildlife Trust or the RSPB, or by small community organisations, each with their own distinct priorities and systems of management. I always considered the ecosystems of New Zealand fortunate to be protected by a single organisation that could prioritise its collective welfare. I am now faced with the reality that the present government no longer considers that land worth protecting as a whole. It is a distressing time to be a New Zealander when legislation such as the Conservation Amendment Bill threatens the welfare of our conservation land.

What's my favourite book? I don't know, but it's somewhere on this list...

Anna Welch — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 01:30:49 GMT

When you tell people you are are writer or have an English degree, they immediately ask you what your favourite book is. This is an impossible question. The value of a book is measured by the impact it has on you, and this is influenced by so many variables that change over time and have nothing to do with the book itself: your personal experiences, emotional state, environmental context, other books you are reading, or the current thread of your thoughts. Nonetheless, there are books which stand out, or persist in their impact. I recommend them unreservedly to myself, though I cannot promise you will like them.

Links are affiliate. I earn 10% on books purchased through my Bookshop.org store. It is one of many ways you can help to support The Restless Naturalist.

Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ordinary lives attempting to persist through the Nigerian Civil War. Understated, heartbreaking, worth a Booker it didn’t get.

The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood

The novel I wish I had written. A story within a story, within a story. And the best first line I know; it’ll punch you right in the guts.

Poets of the English Language: Volume IV Blake to Poe

Edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson

My copy of this book was part of a set of volumes that hung around the house when I was a child. I don’t know what became of the others, but number four is the only one I still have. It has been with me through almost the entirety of my reading life, and has a burn mark on the cover where I accidentally dropped a match on it once. It also has a wonderful introduction penned by Auden, which is worth reading in and of itself.

The Wasp Factory

Iain Banks

The perfect novel: clever, satisfying, more than a little perverse. One of the best recommendations I was ever given, I took Banks’s story with me on my first long distance cycle tour and finished it amid the sagebrush and the lizards of the Nevadan desert.

The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

Wendell Berry

“People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love, we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.”
I wish they would teach this book in schools. Berry’s treatise remains as painfully relevant today as it was in 1977. We would all be better for having read it.

The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions

Peter Brannen

Robert Frost remarked, “some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.” Peter Brannen will tell you it has ended in both, and more besides. He lists Peter Douglas Ward’s Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future as one of his deepest influences. I haven’t read it, but I want to.

Humankind: A Hopeful History

It undermines what you think you know about the propensity to violence of the human race. Rutger Bregman is a tonic to willful human blindness and capitalist machismo.

Verses of a V.A.D

Vera Brittain

Vera Brittain is known mostly for her WWI memoir, Testament of Youth (which I also recommend), but she was a poet too, and a perceptive one, whose voice stands equally alongside the more well-known war poets like Rupert Brooke or Siegfried Sassoon as a chronicle of human grief and survival.

Collected Poems

Emily Brontë

“Enough of thought philosopher, too long hast thou been dreaming.” I have no particular affection for Wuthering Heights, but reading Emily Brontë’s poetry is like reading my soul written down in someone else’s handwriting: unutterably comforting, and just slightly unnerving.

The Bloody Chamber

Angela Carter

I love fairy tales, myths, legends, the stories that cultures the world over create to make sense of being alive. Carter takes some of the more familiar of the European tales and spins them into something more contemporary, pulling the flawed human threads of them out into the light. Gothic, erotic, macabre, they are the tales of your childhood as you never dared to imagine them.

Raising Hare

There is a notable, beautiful lack of arrogance in Raising Hare. I learned so much from it, and yet it was at no point pedagogical or patronising. Dalton learns with you about the ways of these elusive creatures, as she patiently, and with infinite fascination, molds her life around their habits.

Wind, Sand and Stars

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

One of the most stunning little books I never expected to read, waiting on a shelf for me in a cabin in Scotland where I lived for half a year. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s retelling of the hair-raising adventures of his life as a pilot during the 1930s is landscape writing from the sky.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard was “recommended” to me via a mention in another book. It was a recommendation I took highly, but when I started with The Writing Life, I was underwhelmed. It was certainly well-written, but it had no real effect on me. Only some years later did I pick up Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and I wish I could remember where or why. It was glorious, transformative. Dillard is a marvel, one of the most skilled essayists alive today. Now I go back to read The Writing Life and it too burrows to my marrow as it never did before. Sometimes we are just not ready for a book.

The Rose Trilogy (The Tea Rose, The Winter Rose, The Wild Rose)

Jennifer Donnelly

Historic fiction set in late-Victorian London and New York; family saga; female-driven narratives. Beautifully storied, and richly descriptive. Historic fiction doesn’t get much better than this.

Howl and Other Poems

Allen Ginsberg

My awakening to the limitlessness of poetic expression.

In the Shadow of Man

Jane Goodall

Goodall is as patient and as curious in her writing as she seemed to be in life. In the Shadow of Man is her account of the early days of the Gombe Research Station and her initiations into chimpanzee observation.

The Wind in the Willows

Kenneth Grahame

A book I love in such a different way now than I did as a child, but no less fervently. It keeps giving new images and revelations with each re-reading.

Wild: An Elemental Journey

Jay Griffiths

I read Wild while I was cycling round the coast of Pembrokeshire in 2022. It was the perfect companion to that Welsh coast with its sea-bitten bays, and spartan islands where the seabirds stand taller than the vegetation. Over the course of seven years, Griffiths travelled to remote parts of the globe, meeting cultures sustained by wildness and questing into its effects on the human psyche. She demonstrates what we lose in our modern, domesticated lives by living counterintuitively to the wildness that we came from.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari’s analysis of where history is leading us this century. He has a way of making history enjoyable to read for its own sake. Sapiens is also excellent.

Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

Kate Harris

This book inspired me to go and cycle across a continent. I’m not sure I can give a higher recommendation. I’ve read it four times and counting. Harris’s narrative, about the wonder of experiencing the wild landscapes of Central Asia from the seat of a bicycle, is infused with history, science, philosophy, literature, and memoir. It blends the whole spectrum on humanity into an adventure story, and I wish there were more books like it.

Songs of Trees: Stories form Nature’s Great Connectors

This book is pure poetry. And also botany, and travel, and humanity. Reading Haskell is an auditory experience that makes you want to slow down and enjoy every minute.

The Godwits Fly

Robin Hyde

Robin Hyde grew up in New Zealand, wishing for England, for a culture that wasn’t hers but pulled at her through the persistent colonial influences that surrounded her. Her novel is a semi-autobiographical account of a girl’s New Zealand childhood in the mid 20th Century. It is poetic, dreamlike and, at least for me, cuts close to the bone.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce

The only book that I can read while listening to music. It is mad and visceral and intended to be felt more than comprehended. You let it permeate you and awaken hours later as though from a chemically altered state.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert’s love letter to some few of the millions of species that are no longer with us; and the sobering reminder that extinction is going on around us every day, silent and invisible.

Bird by Bird

Anne Lamott is the champion of the messy first draft, of being comfortable with the uncertainty of the process and learning to take your time with it. She views stagnation in writing not as writers’ block, but as emptiness ready to be filled, suggesting that the way forward with writing is not found by re-hashing it in your head, but out there, in the experiences of the world.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Robert MacFarlane

MacFarlane said in an interview with Granta in 2017 that “the Anthropocene charges travel literature with new obligations and confronts it with new crises.” He writes to his own philosophy: Underland was the first book to really show me what travel literature was capable of, how it could be a vehicle for stories that were so much more vital and universal than just an anecdote about a person going to a place.

Ring of Bright Water

Gavin Maxwell

I never expected Gavin Maxwell to be so much a landscape writer. His observations of otter behaviour form only part of the story that is the life he and they share on his storm thrashed enclave on the Scottish coast.

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell

From an island in the Pacific in the mid 1800s, to a future, post-apocalyptic Hawaii, and back again, Mitchell is a master of characterisation. He weaves a six part multi-perspectival story that interconnects in clever and complex ways. It’s a book that enjoys catching you off guard and making you wait for explanations (in the best possible way).

The Sea, the Sea

Iris Murdoch

I had a very intense Iris Murdoch phase in my mid 20s. The raw austerity of her writing is probably not to everyone’s taste - and frankly I’m surprised it is to mine - but there is something strangely enthralling about the contrived nature of the worlds she builds. Like vegemite or walnuts: in theory they don’t taste good, but still you like them, and keep returning for more.

Down and Out in Paris and London

George Orwell

Down and Out in Paris and London is emblematic of a certain style of writing which I find particularly difficult to define. It stands in here for many others of its kind, namely I walked Out One Midsummer Morning (Laurie Lee), The Rocks Remain (Gavin Maxwell), Boy (Roald Dahl), and the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry above, among others. The precise quality that these books have is in the voice, a sort of boyish ease with which the narrators speak. The fact that they are men seems significant; I can think of no female writers who are able to pull it off, though I dream of being able to. They all involve travel to some degree; and they are also all concentrated within the first half of the 20th Century. Make of that what you will.

Where the Crawdads Sing

Delia Owens

A nature-writing murder mystery. Another perfect novel. The Carolina marshes that are its setting are another character in the story, with a life and a history that transcends what happens to the humans in them. Delia Owens is a wildlife zoologist as well as a novelist. He first book, Cry of the Kalahari is a memoir detailing the seven years she spent with her husband in the remote desert studying lions and brown hyenas.

The Overstory

Richard Powers

“The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people. The Overstory aims to address its own complaint. It is vast, complex, and gut-wrenching. I have successfully recommended this book more than any other.

Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet is the collection of letters written by Rilke to a young man in a military academy who, dreaming of becoming a poet, had written to the poet he admired for advice. “Ask yourself,” Rilke replies, “in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?” I feel it is one of those books that everyone discovers exactly at the time when they need it most. Maybe now is your time. I recommend the Stephen Mitchell translation.

Roget’s Thesaurus

Peter Mark Roget

When I was 17, I used the book voucher I won at my school’s end of year prize-giving to buy a Penguin edition of Roget’s Thesaurus. Not the modern dictionary kind where you look up a word and simply see its synonyms listed, but the original with its lists of varying nuances for each word in the back that lead you to the collections of meticulously categorised synonyms in the front. If you really pressed me to select a favourite book, this would probably be it. Not because it is the most well-written, or compelling, but because it is the one I open most often.

The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move

This book holds the record for the most pages of notes I have ever taken on a book read (12 A4-sized). Shah is adept at finding the stories in the science. Among other things, learn why, in 1958, the Disney Corporation threw several dozen Arctic lemmings off a cliff in Alberta.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures

Merlin Sheldrake

I found Merlin Sheldrake entirely by chance when he was interviewed on Radio New Zealand during the COVID pandemic. Sourcing a copy of Entangled Life from the local library began a chain reaction that led me to Robert MacFarlane and down a rabbit hole of science communication that I hadn’t even known I was missing. You can also go onto YouTube and watch Sheldrake feeding a copy of his book to a Pleurotus (oyster mushroom) fungus and eating the resulting fruiting bodies.

The Crystal Cave

Mary Stewart

If you know Mary Stewart’s books at all, you will know she has made a large part of her living writing holiday adventure stories with romantic trysts at their centre. The Crystal Cave was my wonderous introduction to Stewart as a teenager and it is in a wholly different league to her other writing. Among my obsession for myths and legends, King Arthur was no exception. This is the most humanising account of the Arthurian legends I have ever come across, told from the perspective of Merlin. There are also three sequels, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment, and The Wicked Day.

The Sun is a Compass: A 4,000 Mile Journey into the Alaskan Wilds

Caroline Van Hemert

The Sun is a Compass exists in the same book niche as Lands of Lost Borders. They are the only two books of their kind that I know (if you know of more, please tell me): a stellar balance of adventure, science, and humanity.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

I meet so many people who know and love Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing. For me, Braiding Sweetgrass is her best, her most storied. It weaves science and indigenous tradition with Kimmerer’s own experiences as a botanist and as a Potawatomi.

Baine’s Bookshop, Appomattox

Did this list resonate with you? Which of these books would make it into your own top 40? I’d love to know.

Puffins This Way: Postcards from Orkney

Anna Welch — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 07:00:50 GMT

Westray

“You want to go down this road until you get to a turning,” the man in the café told me. “You’ll see a sign that says PUFFINS.”

He was right. And I pitched my tent at the end of the road like he had suggested, in the shadow of an old mill, a short walk from a hillside filled with hundreds of black and white birds with brightly striped beaks.

Thirty yards or so off the cliff was a buttress, a castle of standing rock, sentinelled by these compact seabirds who shared their eyrie with the fulmars. The ocean backwashed in around its base, where the rank carcass of a whale rotted amid the wrack and rock. If you sat for hours on the top of the cliff, you could watch the puffins return from the sea, beaks laden with sand eels, and disappear into the burrows where their single hungry chick was waiting to wolf down the meal.

I had come out here partly to avoid the crowds on the Mainland. The Island Games were due to start in a couple of days. A series of sports events, hosted each year by a different participating community, the games draw competitors from over twenty islands including Shetland, the Channel Islands, Bermuda, Gibraltar, Greenland, and the Falklands. Everywhere I went in Kirkwall, people were going around in noisy clusters, decked out in team colours and expositing in a vast variety of accents and languages. Crowds of seabirds had seemed more appealing than crowds of people.

I spent two nights on the island, making forays out to the small community of Pierowall with its post office-cum-general store, and general store-cum-cafe. The view out to the horizon was almost uninterrupted, the sandstone hills scraped down to mere suggestions by eons of corrosive coastal weather. The veneer of Atlantic Ocean that spanned the tidal flats of the bay was cut like fine crystal, suffused with the reflection of the sky.

Pierowall Bay ©Anna Welch CC-BY NC 4.0

Pierowall Bay Closeup ©Anna Welch CC-BY NC 4.0

Outside the town, I scrambled up the abandoned remnants of Gilbert Balfour’s dream. Commissioned by the Scottish courtier in the mid-16th Century as a lavish home inside the six foot thick stone walls of a defendable fortress with over 70 gun loops, Noltland Castle was destined never to be completed.

Noltland Castle ©Anna Welch CC-BY NC 4.0

Balfour was a supporter of Mary Queen of Scots, at one point her Master of the Household, and implicated in the killing of her troublesome second husband, Lord Darnley. Following the queen’s arrest in 1572, Balfour fled to Sweden where he was executed for treason against the king four years later, leaving his ambitious fortress home roofless and alone. Over the next 300 or so years the castle itself, the interpretive sign tells me, was seized, besieged, “occupied by defeated Jacobites,” “set on fire by the opposing government,” and finally in 1910 “taken into state care.”

Rousay

The whole morning, the day was impeccable. After returning from Westray to the main port in Kirkwall, I had cycled fifteen miles of gently curving coastline in the warm summer air, the wind busy elsewhere. I had lain on the Tingwall jetty waiting for the ferry and watched a tiny comb jelly, the rainbow of its luminescence refracting through the sunlit water. The sea was still and open straight to the horizon. As we motored out of the bay, I could see the gentle bulk of Rousay growing closer. All the way from the Tingwall dock, the sky remained cloudless, as cloudless as through clouds did not exist. By the time the ferry had lowered its gangway onto the island, cloud was all there was.

“Sea mist coming in,” said the ferry operator matter-of-factly, as I wheeled my bike off the back of the boat and cycled away into the thick fog.

Rousay had been pitched to me, by the women in the ferry ticket office, as “the Egypt of the north,” but if I was cycling past a profusion of burial chambers and ancient ruins, I was not aware of it. The road climbed steadily into more of the same damp veil, thick with the rime of the smell of the sea that was everywhere on these small islands, though the sea itself remained obstinately out of sight.

I was halfway down the descent when it finally began to clear, and I could see the far side of the island spread out below me. I streamed out of it down the steep descent, glad I had chosen the direction I did, and stood on the beach, watching the mist slip over the slope of the hill and condense back to the sea.

©Anna Welch CC-BY NC 4.0

It was nearly 7pm by the time I found the first cairn. Actually what I found was a sign, directing me down a steep sheep field to the coast. I gave up the idea of returning to the Mainland that night as I had planned, locked my bike to the fence by the road, and started walking down the hill.

What greeted me at the bottom was something resembling a concrete airplane hangar. Inside this half-cylinder structure was the Midhowe Cairn, dating from the 4th Century BC. The hangar had been built over top of the Neoloithic tomb to protect it from elemental degradation, with the result that its conservators now expended their energy in attempting to control the algae which flourished in the damp shelter of the protective building. There were platforms suspended from the ceiling which allowed you to walk above the empty chambers like some kind of touristic deity.

Beside the cairn was the Midhowe Broch, the partial walls of an old fort all that is left visible of the settlement that once persisted on the southern shore of this small island. I sheltered from the unrelenting wind in the lee of its uncemented stones, eating the lunch I still hadn’t stopped for.

The whole southern coastline, it turned out, was a medley of chambered cairns and archeological sites. As I cycled back towards a campsite near the harbour, completing my island circuit, I stopped repeatedly to scramble up hills, only to clamber down inside their damp bellies, dug out by grieving humans millennia ago.

Mainland

The Rousay ferry dropped me back at Tingwall the next morning. I had a four o’clock sailing booked back to mainland Scotland from Stromness, and multiple routes to chose from, some more guaranteed to get me there in time than others.

The fastest way would be to backtrack to Kirkwall via Finnstown and then cut straight across the south of the island to Stromness (17 miles). This was easily doable in the time and I would make my ferry without stress. But I wanted to cycle something new, and the road from Kirkwall to Stromness was the main “highway” and I would be sharing it with the bulk of the island’s traffic.

Option two was the long route, circumnavigating the entire northern and western coasts (25 miles). The third possibility was a curtailed version of the second, cutting off the northwestern corner via Dounby (18 miles), or via Kirbuster (23 miles). I wanted to take the second option and I calculated that I would need to average at least 6mph to make the ferry. This may not seem like much, but I am a slow cyclist: I frequently walk up hills, even when my bike isn’t loaded with camping equipment, food and water as it was now. I am also particularly sensitive to fluctuations in energy based on so many factors like food, sleep, or mood: some days it’s easy, some dIf I took that route and it was steeper than I expected, or my energy levels were low, I would miss the ferry. If I missed the ferry, I would miss my train from Thurso, and if I missed the train, a whole domino effect was set off, leading to commitments I had already made in the Outer Hebrides.

I took the route anyway, reasoning that I could use option three as a fallback if I wasn’t making good time.

Googlemaps demonstrating the total inaccuracy of their time estimates for me on a touring bike.

I flew along. It was glorious undulating terrain, the kind that is varied enough to be interesting, but not so hard I ever had to walk the bike. The sea was visible almost constantly on my right. I passed the turn at Evie, the first shortcut, then at Abune-the-Hill, and kept going. When I arrived at Skaill Beach, only seven miles from Stromness and with time to spare, I couldn’t resist the gentle, crystalline sea.

Sometimes we take a chance on a new road, trusting to abilities we are not really sure of, and it pays off. It pays off in the adrenaline of making it up the long sustained climbs, in the kiss of the cold, clear ocean on hot skin. It pays off in the conversation I had with a man as we stood at a lookout over the harbour, watching the Island Games prizegiving in Stromness later that afternoon, who said he was setting off on his first cycle tour in just a few weeks.

This article took 3 hours 50 minutes to research, write, and edit (not including cycling time).

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Trip File:

The full itinerary, including information on route, campsites, amenities and costs.

*This trip was completed in June 2025. Ferry times and prices are correct at June 2026. Availability of services may vary during Winter.

Westray

Map(s): OS Landranger 5

Day 1: Lerwick - Kirkwall

Northlink Ferries Lerwick - Kirkwall. Dep. 1730 - Arr. 2300. Runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday. (From mainland Scotland, sailings are from Aberdeen - Kirkwall or Scrabster - Stromness with Northlink, or Gill’s Bay - St Margaret’s Hope with Pentland Ferries.) Peak season fare GBP26.50. Bikes sail free, but you need to add them when booking. Northlink timetable. Pentland timetable.
Camping at the Orkney Caravan Park at the Pickaquoy Centre. Peak season tariff GBP15.35pp/night with tent. Showers, coin-operated laundry, common room, and limited kitchen facilities, free WIFI. Approx 10 minute cycle from ferry terminal.

Day 2: Kirkwall - Castle O’Burrian

Supply run to supermarket. Kirkwall has Tesco, Lidl, and Co-op. There are only small general stores with limited range and higher prices outside the town.
Orkney Ferries Kirkwall - Westray. 1 hour, 25 minutes. Morning, afternoon and evening sailing, no afternoon sailing on weekends. GBP6.75/adult. Bikes sail free.
Tea and cake at Richan’s Retreat, just left of the harbour. Chat with the local owner who recommended that night’s campsite.
Cycle 1.6 miles from harbour along B9066. Take 4th turn on right at PUFFINS sign.
Wild camping at Castle O’Burrian carpark. Flat grass area with picnic table. View of bay and one minute walk to puffin colony on the “castle” (a large rock buttress).

Day 3: Castle O’Burrian - Pierowall - Noltland Castle - Castle O’Burrian

Take morning coffee and binoculars down to cliff edge to watch puffins.
Cycle 6 miles to Pierowall. Supplies can be purchased from either the post office or general store.
Cycle 2.5 miles to Wheeling Steen Gallery for coffee and ice cream. The modern café and gallery have been built around a restored deck cabin which was relocated to the site from the wreck of a 19th century sailing ship.
Cycle 2.8 miles to Noltland Castle and explore ruins.
Return to Castle O’Burrian via Pierowall to camp for second night. Spend the rest of the evening watching puffins.

Rousay

Map(s): OS Landranger 6

Day 4: Westray - Rousay

Return Westray - Kirkwall on Orkney Ferries. 1 hour, 25 minutes. GBP6.75/adult. (You can buy return tickets, but there is no economic advantage to doing so.)
Coffee at SunBean Coffee House.
Cycle Kirkwall - Finstown along coast on A965 and Finstown - Tingwall via Isbister. 15 miles.
Orkney Ferries Tingwall - Rousay. 30 minutes. GBP3.45. Bikes sail free. Six sailings per day, five on Sundays.
Circumnavigate the Rousay ring road. 13 miles. Archeological sites along route include the Midhowe Cairn and Broch, Skaill Farm, Knowe of Lairo, Knowe of Larso, Blackhammer Chambered Cairn, Traversoe Tuick chambered Cairn.
Camping at Trumland Organic Farm. [The campsite was closed when I was there to accommodate a group of archaeologists, but the woman running it directed me to camp outside Shore T’s self-serve café at the harbour and leave a donation. Freedom camping is also permitted in the Orkneys, provided that you follow the Scottish Outdoor Access Code.]

Mainland

Maps(s): OS Landranger 6 and OS Landranger 7

Day 5: Rousay - Thurso

Orkney Ferries Rousay - Tingwall. 30 minutes. GBP3.45.
Stop at Betty’s Reading Room to browse the library that was established in an old out building near the harbour in memory of teacher Betty Prictor.
Cycle 25 miles to Stromness along the coast.
Northlink Ferries sailing from Stromness - Scrabster. 1 hour 30 minutes. Dep. 0630, 1100, and 1645. Peak season fare GBP26
Cycle 3 miles to outskirts of Thurso, and wild camp in a disused corner of the cemetery.

Amenities

Supermarkets:

Kirkwall has Tesco, Lidl and Co-op, as well as a wholefoods store and smaller convenience stores.
Co-op in Stromness.
Tesco, Lidl, Co-op in Thurso.

General stores:

J C Tulloch Licenced Grocer and Post Office, Pierowall, Westray.
W I Rendall grocery store and café, Pierowall, Westray.

Cafés

Richan’s Retreat, Rapness, Westray.
W I Rendall grocery store and café, Pierowall, Westray.
Wheeling Steen Gallery, Aikerness, Westray.
Shore T’s, an honesty-box, self-serve café at the harbour on Rousay with snacks and tea/instant coffee.
SunBean Coffee House, Victoria Street, Kirkwall
Pomona Cafe, Albert Street, Kirkwall
Archive Coffee, Laing Street, Kirkwall

[There are many other cafés in Kirkwall, I’ve only listed those I’ve personally tried at some point.]

Laundry

Launderama, located on Albert Street, Kirkwall

Extra Resources

UK Cycle Camping Map

Total Mileage: 77+ miles

Total Transport and Accommodation Cost: GPB93.25

Befouling the Global Nest

Anna Welch — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 10:34:52 GMT

“No sane creature befouls its own nest”

So wrote Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America,* his 1977 masterpiece about the broken systems of modern agriculture that is still unnervingly relevant nearly fifty years later.

This is borne out biologically by the birds.

Blue tits, in fact most songbirds, spend their nestling days producing their waste in a fecal sac, a white caul excreted soon after eating, which the parents remove and either eat, or deposit far from the nest. This has the double benefit of not only maintaining a sanitary space, but of deterring predators which might discern the nest location based on smell.

Baeolophus inornatus Oak Titmouse on poop duty ©Alan Vernon CC BY 2.0 www.flickr.com/photos/32541690@N02/4589735668

Osprey will conduct poop flights, circumnavigations of their treetop eyrie during which they perform an aerial drop. Meanwhile their unfledged chicks jettison bodily waste off the side of their twiggy cradle.

Juvenile puffins, confined entirely to their burrows until they fledge, once and forever in the night, reverse up to the entrance and spray the remains of their sand eels over the sandy cliffs, where it nourishes the earth with nitrogen and may even be helping to cool the Arctic.

Humans, unfortunately, are not so sane

Berry was of course speaking in the context of mid-late 20th century agriculture, when untold damage to biodiversity and nutrient cycles was being wrought by the excessive use of pesticides and fertilizers. But people have been saying something similar since Egbert von Lüttich declared (in Latin) that “it is an ill bird that fouls its own nest,” more than a thousand years previously, and things are only getting worse.

Part of the problem is that, unlike the birds, our waste is not restricted to what our bodies produce (which is a separate issue in itself). Between us, we generate 2.56 billion tons of municipal waste every year.1 That’s everything you throw into your bin and put out for collection each week, or what you toss in a trash can on the sidewalk, or the batteries you drop at a local hardware store for recycling. Two and a half billion tons is heavier than the Great Wall of China (generally considered to be the heaviest manmade structure on Earth). And when I say heavier, I mean that we could be building 44 Great Walls of China out of our trash every single year. Or two and a half teaspoons of a neutron star, if you’d prefer to think of it like that.

An osprey is not buying its fish on a plastic tray, there is no packaging to dispose of. And even birds such as owls which do create something we might analogise with packaging waste, in the pellets of bone and fur that they regurgitate, do so in a form that is biodegradable where it lands. Further, a lot of our waste is not actually waste in the definitive sense at all. Instead we use ‘waste’ as a synonym for ‘thing which is no longer fit for purpose,’ or ‘the part of the thing which is extraneous to the purpose for which it was acquired.’

Most of the food that is thrown out is edible, or at least it was until it became the moist breeding ground for a colourful fungal colony in the back of your refrigerator. Disposable packaging is a modern acquisition that reflects our growing distance from the sources of the products we consume, something Berry was only too well aware of when he observed that the aim of our economy “is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life…to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to sell them to us at the highest profit.” And while we continue to individually grow less and less of our own food, municipal waste is projected to almost double in the next 25 years.

The further problem that we face now is that our waste is increasingly less biodegradable. Prior to the industrial revolution, virtually all human-generated waste was, or could be, processed organically by the individual humans producing it. Little, if anything, has changed in terms of avian waste disposal habits in that time. For us humans, the opposite is true. Today, few of us possess either the means or the technology to process the waste we produce. We press ‘flush,’ put out the rubbish, put out the recycling, and then it is gone. By and large we do not use composting toilets, most of us do not even have compost for our food waste. Nor do we have landfill facilities, or plastic processing plants in our back gardens.

I’m fortunate to have the space at home to manage my own food waste. Everything biodegradable goes into the compost bins, even the dead possums out of the trap. Within only a few months, there is nothing left but the bones. Food waste that ends up in landfill is not going to compost so easily. It is a myth to think that throwing your apple core or your onion skins into the general trash is in some way ‘good.’ These landfills operate anaerobically, with the result that food is slow to break down, and while it does, the bacteria consuming it are releasing toxic methane into the atmosphere. Studies conducted on old landfill sites indicate that a single head of lettuce can persist for 25 years.2 Who remembers that manky lettuce they threw in the trash in 2001? It might just be gone by now.

We also move our waste to such an extent that it generates more waste: atmospheric waste in the form of carbon emissions. New Zealand, for example, ships over 20,000 tons of waste (primarily plastic) to South East Asia every year.3 Avoiding waste can be wasteful too: recycling facilities, for example, utilise enormous quantities of water and power in order to prolong the life of an item before it reaches landfill. And reach landfill it will: very few substances, with glass being a major exception, are infinitely recyclable.

Some years ago, Derek Muller, the science communicator behind the YouTube channel Veritasium, went round surveying people on the streets about what they were doing to combat the climate catastrophe. I recycle! they repeated. I’m sorry if this comes as news to you, but recycling is not the solution, as the video went on to point out. It is a good thing to do, and we should keep doing it, but we are bleeding from our femoral artery and ‘recycling’ is the sticking plaster with the picture of Mickey Mouse on it that we have stuck over the wound it make ourselves feel better. Nobody, from the humans to the Helmeted Hornbill, is going to be spared extinction because we recycle. It simply is not enough.

The true threat comes from the waste that we do not see, either because it is released as a gas, such as from the exhaust of our car, or because it is tied up in the supply chain. The carbon emissions every time a parcel is delivered to our door, the nuclear waste for those of us reliant on that as a power source. Anyone who grows vegetables will tell you that the head of broccoli you eat is only about a third of the whole plant. We buy leeks with the green part cut off, and carrots without their tops, even though both of these are entirely edible.

But even if recycling was the ultimate panacea for waste management, at an optimistic estimate it only channels 20% of jettisoned material. The vast majority of recyclable content still ends up in landfill or in an incinerator, either because it is contaminated, poorly managed, not physically designed to be recycled, or it is simply cheaper to trash.

Incinerating causes a raft of its own issues, mostly related to the toxins and particulate matter released in the process, which cause numerous health problems that are then paid for out of the taxpayer dollar (if you are lucky enough to live in a country which state-funded healthcare that is). A single incinerator facility in Baltimore generates more than US$50 million in health costs every year.4

Meanwhile, what reaches landfill doesn’t necessarily stay there. The timescales given to the breakdown of waste deceive us into thinking that landfills are hermetically sealed safe deposit boxes that protect the planet from our trash. They are not.

In 2019, massive flooding took out a bridge between two small towns on the West Coast of New Zealand. That bridge was part of the only road running down that side of the Southern Alps. Under normal circumstances it would take about 25 minutes to drive from Franz Josef to Fox Glacier. During the weeks that the bridge was out of commission, it took over twelve hours to circumnavigate the mountains the long way round. What that same flood also took out was the side of a landfill that had been closed up since the 1970s. The 40+ year old trash surged down the river and blanketed the coastline.

Disastrous weather events aside, landfills are still not necessarily permanent resting places. If a head of lettuce can take over two decades to break down, the life span of a plastic bag can be measured in centuries, but break down it will. And during this time it is not decomposing but fragmenting into smaller and smaller particles which become impossible to contain, leach into the ocean and are consumed by fish. These fish are then caught, and their repositories of microplastics sold back to us on plastic trays; plastic trays which then slip through the recycling net and end up being eaten by the next fish to repeat the process.

The case for the Anthropocene

What is a landfill when you break it down? It is land that is filled; and we are filling the land with substances that do not easily break down, or that break down with disastrous consequences. Geological time is divided based on information contained within the Earth’s layers of rock that tell geologists about the ecosystems that once existed, the climate, and species of plant and animal.

The Anthropocene epoch would appear at the top of the forth column, above Holocene, should it be officially accepted

The case for the Anthropocene argues that Homo sapiens is currently producing an amount and type of waste so durable, and so distinctive, that it will be discernible from the layers around us, millions of years from now, by future geologists, if such exist. “Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love,” noted Robert MacFarlane in his 2019 book Underland. “Wrong,” MacFarlane says. “What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.”

Anthropocene was a term first used by Eugene Stoermer in the 1980s, but did not come into popular use until its reference by Paul Crutzen at a conference in 2000. The Anthropocene Working Group, established in 2008, has been petitioning the International Commission on Stratigraphy, so far unsuccessfully, to have the Anthropocene officially recognised as the current epoch. They argue for a starting date of c.1952, as the point at which plutonium isotypes from nuclear testing would be sufficiently concentrated to register within the rock strata.

The birds have been managing their waste for millions of years without negative consequences to their environments. But in the space of only a few centuries, industrialised human lifestyles have reached a point of impact where we are now seriously talking about a new temporal geologic division, the kind of division that has previously been used to mark cataclysmic events in the planet’s history such as the mass extinction of millions of species.

Between the Music and the Mind

Anna Welch — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 07:00:51 GMT

By the time I leave the house the sun has already left the valley. I settle the woollen headband more firmly over my ears, headphone chords dangling against my cheeks, and pull the sleeves of my fleece down around my hands like mittens. It is not the inconsistent cold of the day, the staccato splashes of sunlight between clouds, temperature fluctuating with the gusts of wind, nor the stinging edge of the setting frost, it is still too early for that. This cold has no edges; it is as still and absolute as the evening air. But it is cold nonetheless. Six months ago I wouldn’t have done this. I begin walking briskly towards the river, and press play.

When we are children we run for sheer joy, for play. Into the ocean, towards the ice cream van, after or away from each other in the twisting dance of a game of tag. We do not run because our cholesterol is too high, or because our favourite pair of jeans has stopped fitting. We do not run because we have been told to; in fact we run in spite of the grown ups in our lives telling us to slow down, walk don’t run, you’ll hurt yourself.

Beyond the bridge, the trail curves south along the wide riverbank of yellowed grasses, damp. I pad down the track onto the flats. As I hit the fork in the trail, I lean forward and begin to run, building the cadence of my footfall towards the drop of the beat. Towards the rhythm, towards the river, then south along its course. There it is, the sync of music, mind, movement: three energies pulsing together.

As we grow towards adulthood (whatever that is), for most of us running becomes at best a healthy routine, at worst a means of escape from terrors physical or emotional. “I don’t ‘run’,” I would reply if the subject ever came up. Or if I did run, it was only as a kind of last ditch attempt to make myself feel better if I had been unhappy for too long. It was the thing you did when you were angry at life. It wasn’t fun, it was an unpleasant necessity, a way of breaking the pressure seal on your discontent. The association of it was: if I am doing this thing, something else has gone very wrong. The fact that I felt better afterwards only compounded its role in my life as a solution to something else.

My body starts to warm, muscles remembering their reason for being, breathing through my mouth to heat the air. I dance round tree roots and hedge potholes in the flood-gutted track. When the river is really high, it will make a pond of this trail all the way to the embankment. I push myself up the slope now, toe tips gripping, arms pumping like fulcrums against the empty air, and turn the bend into the forest.

In late 2025, I finished a cycle tour round Scotland and prepared to head back to New Zealand. I was on an athletic high after a month on the road. My bicycle trip was over, but I wanted to keep that momentum going. So I started running: around London in the days before my flight, back in Auckland staying with family before heading south. I loved it.

By now I am in my zone, hypnotised by thoughts so that I will catch myself on a corner, or a piece of tricky footing, and realise I had forgotten I was running at all. My body hasn’t. It knows the twists and turns of the path, hedges the mud hole in the centre of the track, and the tentacle of bush lawyer reaching towards me from the understorey with its thorny hackles raised. I slow as I reach the side creek, rock-hopping its rough channels that change with every storm. I scramble up the far bank and onto the four-wheel drive track. Ahead of me the expanse of river stretches away into the imminent dusk, towards another river, and from there towards the sea.

Cycling had long since taught me the joy of that endorphin-adrenaline cocktail that it sends coursing through your body. Now I found running could do the same, if not quite to the same degree. But it was a portable high: all I needed was a pair of cushioned shoes, and if I could find a sandy beach, even less than that. I stopped running only when I felt bad, and started running when I felt good as well. That shift altered my whole perception of it. It became an expression of joy, not only a means of getting to something like it.

I could keep running the riverbed as long as the light, and my ankles, held out; but instead I turn into the culvert under the road. It is big, taller than me, dark, and echoing, and bottomed with water after recent rain. I hesitate for only a moment, then plunge into the more-than-ankle-deep runoff, lifting my feet high with each stride to minimise the drag, charging through the sloshes of spray with a stupid grin on my face, playing. I turn out of the culvert and run back alongside the road, cutting across the field and up through the sharp bush-track to the quiet eddy of the back street, feet slipping in the layer of leaf-mulch.

A friend of mine, an ultra trail runner, once said to me that she had been running for years before she began to actually like it. I understood what she meant now, even if I still couldn’t quite explain it. What is it that makes a person persist for so long through that? Is it that we cannot always see what we need, but we may sense the impulse of it, buried deep within us? Now I want to leave the house to go running; I grizzle if I can’t go, rather than because I have to. There is no tracking, no personal best. I have no precise metrics for how fast, or even exactly how far, I run. I run simply for that playful joy, that stupidly happy grin.

The river flats spread in front of me again, the bridge visible at their far end. I drop off the embankment. There is a moment approaching in the music, I know it’s there. I ready myself for takeoff. Then I begin to sprint. I belt down the trail as fast as I can, stretching my legs further than I thought them capable of going, every particle of my body opening outwards, towards another dimension, another self, another form of ecstasy.

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

Disclaimer: This is my personal experience. It does not constitute advice regarding either physical or mental health.

If you have any thoughts, or similar experiences to share, let me know in the comments. I look forward to hearing your stories.

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You might also like…

If you’d like to know more about the concept of play and how you can apply it in your own running, check out Marcus’s piece here:

Marcus Scotney

Who Told You to Stop Playing?

Think back to running as a kid. You didn’t run to train. You ran because someone was chasing you, or you were chasing them, or there was a hill there and getting to the top of it first mattered enormously, you and your mates falling about laughing over who was quickest. It was fun. No watch. No plan. No purpose beyond the running itself…

9 days ago · 8 likes · Marcus Scotney

The Shrew in the Shirt

Anna Welch — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:00:39 GMT

The sound amplified, a definite squealing. I peered amidst the branches for the denser cluster of a bird’s nest, wondering if the noise came from a fallen chick. There was no sign of bird habitation or a lost nestling, but still I could hear something calling persistently.

Human hearing exists within a range between approximately 20-20,000Hz, a Hertz being a measure of frequency per second of a periodic event. In the case of sound it indicates the number of wave cycles. Birds and amphibians tend to have lower, narrower frequencies, while some bats, by contrast, can echolocate at frequencies in excess of 100,000Hz. The greater wax moth, meanwhile, can hear the world at 300,000Hz. This is primarily so it can avoid being eaten by the bats. Accidental damage to our ear drums, or wear and tear over time can limit this range, particularly in the higher frequencies, meaning that as we age, our means of communication with the world around us must adapt too, or be lost.

Beside my feet, there was a length of drainpipe that had been set upright into the ground to house the tap for the water mains. I looked down. Two shrews were leaping up the sides of the pipe, and racing around the bottom of the cavity, like forgotten coins in a washing machine, spinning on a fast cycle, and squeaking their cries of protest.

The common shrew, Sorex araneus, can reach maximum speeds of nearly two metres per second. They eat almost a hundred percent of their bodyweight in insects each day, and have such fast metabolisms that they can die within a few hours if food is not available.

Die Säugthiere in Abbildungen nach der Natur, mit Beschreibungen, 1774. Plate CLX. Johann Christian Daniel Schreber, 1739-1810; Georg August Goldfuss, 1782-1848; Andreas Johann Wagner, 1797-1861

I ran to the shed for a trowel, thinking I could scoop them out. This failed immediately since the diameter of the pipe was too narrow to tilt the trowel. Ah well, I thought, reaching my hand in directly to pick up the first shrew.

When young shrews leave their nest, either through disturbance or on exploratory forays, they go in caravan behind their mother, biting on to the shrew in front by the base of the tail to avoid becoming separated. I wondered if these were youngsters, newly weaned adventurers barely a month old, who had followed their long, sensitive noses to the rich feeding grounds that must have been wafting up to them from the damp earth around the pipe, like the smell of fresh toast drifting up the stairs from the kitchen.

The shrew, perceiving my arm not as an elevator that would lift him to safety, but as a ramp by which he could make a swift getaway, fled from my hand, across my wrist, and immediately inside the sleeve of my shirt, its open cuff hanging loosely down.

Shrews are built for digging insects out of the earth, their claws primed to excavate more than 10cm below the ground for the earthworms that comprise part of their diet. They can also navigate by echolocating their surroundings using ultrasonic frequencies, far beyond the range of my hearing, although to the bats they are probably shouting. Their hearts can beat faster than a hummingbird’s, and their sleep cycle consists of a series of power naps taken throughout the day and night, with periods of frenzied hunting in between.

Common shrews, like the one that was clawing its way rapidly up my arm, have been digging insects out of the Scottish, English, and Welsh soil since the last Ice Age; and have spent much of recent history being maligned by literature. When Shakespeare wrote in c. 1591 that “a meacock wretch can make the curstest shrew,” he was conforming to a picture of these tiny creatures as devilish and gluttonous that stretched back through Chaucer to the Roman conquest, when they were believed to be venomous. In fact, of the three native species, only the water shrew (Neomys fodiens) has a toxic bite; although the common shrew is known to produce secretions which make its skin taste unpleasant to predators like owls.

Edward Topsel, writing in 1658, dedicated six pages to what he called the “shrew-mouse” in his succinctly-titled, History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents: Describing at Large their True and Lively Figure, their Several Names, Conditions, Kinds, Virtues (both Natural and Medicinal), Countries of their Breed, their Love and Hatred to Mankind, and the Wonderful Work of God in their Creation, Preservation, and Destruction[,] Interwoven with Curious Variety of Historical Narrations out of Scriptures, Fathers, Philosophers, Physicians, and Poets: Illustrated with Divers Hieroglyphics and Emblems etc Both Pleasant and Profitable for Students in all Faculties and Professions.

He posits that its species name araneus is taken from its similarity to venomous spiders, and spends the majority of the six pages referencing ancient writers and their many and varied cures for those men or beasts unfortunate enough to experience the black puss, green corruption, rotting flesh, and “marvellous great pain, anguish and grief” occasioned by a shrew bite.

Pliny thought that to keep them away from cattle, a dead shrew should be hung around the neck of the cow in question. Hippocrates suggests that a salted shrew rubbed into a wound of its own making will occasion an immediate cure; and Aelianus would have you run the biting shrew over with a cart and thereafter sprinkle the dust from the cart furrow on the affected area. Among calls for pomegranates (baked or unbaked), sheep’s hooves, and hare’s genitals, there is a particular preference for both vinegar and cumin. Almost all of the cures involve some sort of wine, including one recipe which suggests it be first steeped with a young weasel (Pliny again); and still more requiring the capture of the offending shrew, whereupon it was killed and either eaten (usually with wine) or applied to the festering sore. Otherwise it was kept alive and made to walk in specific directions. Through precisely how this was to be achieved with an animal the size of a ping pong ball running at four miles an hour is not made clear.

The small claws of the "‘venomous beast” scrabbled onto my shoulder. I froze. He froze too. He was so light I couldn’t even feel where he was any more. Common shrews are about +/-10g, or the weight of a squeezed Yorkshire teabag. I tried pulling the back of the shirt away from my body, but he misunderstood the gesture and began clambering frantically over my skin again. Slowly I unbuttoned the shirt and calmly took it off, much to the confusion of my colleague who had come over to see what was going on.

South of the Mediterranean, the story is rather different (through it still didn’t work out so well for the shrews). Sculptures and figurines from Egypt date back to at least the 12th Dynasty (c.1991-1802 BC). They knew the shews as amam, or arar, one who devours, voracious one, glutton.

Figure of a Shrew, Ptolemaic Period 304-30 BC Metropolitan Museum of Art.

These were often pygmy shrews, otherwise known as sacred shrews (Crocidura religiosa), a different genus of Soricidae even smaller and more metabolic than their common cousins. The Egyptians believed that shrews were blind - erroneously as it turns out, though they’re not exactly going to pass the eye test for a driving license any time soon. They saw them as representative of one aspect of the god Horus, his blind and nocturnal part, assisting the god of the sun to make his nightly journey and return safely at dawn.

At a temple near Thebes dating from the 4th Century BC, these shrews were found mummified (sometimes in miniature coffins), along with other animals, including a now extinct species of Soricidae, where they are thought to have been votive offerings made by pilgrims. It even seems likely that priests would farm captive shrews near the temples for the purpose of this mummified sacrifice.

The Sorex araneus native to England, Wales and Scotland is now protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, as are the water shrew and the third native species, the (European) pygmy shrew (Sorex minutus). This means that anyone live-trapping shrews - for marking and tracking purposes for example - must account for their metabolisms by ensuring enough food is available within the trap to sustain the captured animal for a full twelve hours between checks.

The shrew on my back leapt for the ground and was gone, instantly hidden in the long grass. I took a stick, thick and rough with bark, setting it in the hole on an angle; and within moments the second shrew had taken the hint and followed. I left the ramp in place, in case the shrews had any thoughts of repeating their adventure. I doubted I would see them again. Sorex araneus only live for about a year anyway. In the meantime, I’ll remain hopeful that I can still hear the shrews calling out from the drainpipes decades from now.

[Poem] Noltland Castle

Anna Welch — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:57:51 GMT

There are places where the light will change the energy

into something Italian.

A Renaissance of Orcadian stone is born from the unroofed

dereliction of time.

We stand beneath the shadows of old lakes, sedimented

and uplifted.

Staircases clamber towards the sky, impressed by patterns

of long fled feet.

Algae downclimb into the depths, where calcium gathers

on the damp floor.

There the silhouettes speak in pigeon tongue, flung upon far walls,

translating the light.

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Confessions of a Biblio-polyamorist

Anna Welch — Sat, 30 May 2026 19:01:11 GMT

Psychologists and neuroscientists will tell you that there is no such thing as multitasking. What we call multitasking is actually the rapid shifting of our brain from one focus to another. It performs these switches in attention so fast that it appears to us as though we are doing many things simultaneously. We are not. We are jugglers, and we only ever have one ball in our hand at a time.

Lady Juggler Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906)

When I tell you that I am reading twelve books simultaneously, what I mean is that I am switching between them, holding one book while the others arc, suspended above me like half-remembered dreams, circumnavigating their course back into my hand, back into focus.

Certain books favour certain times of day. Usually, I want to read novels when I go to bed. David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars* or Sonora Babb’s depiction of dust bowl era refugees in Whose Names Are Unknown are bridges by which I shall slip more willingly into the unconscious night. Yet sometimes all I have wakefulness for are a few poems chosen at random by the fall of the pages of Devotions, Mary Oliver’s final, weighty collection; or a handful of letters from Distant Neighbors, the published correspondence between Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder.

The harder books are for the brightly caffeinated morning, the apocolyptic statistics of climate change in Gaia Vince’s Nomad Century or the ancient accretions of sloth dung that Paul S. Martin dug through to write his Twilight of the Mammoths, a book about Pleistocene megafauna that I have been reading for more than three years, and have every desire and intention to finish.

Mostly I save audiobooks for car journeys, walks, rainy Sundays, hypnotizing my hands with a jigsaw puzzle and leaving my mind free to read, from the jungle of Rwanda in Gorillas in the Mist with Dian Fossey to the Empty Quarter with Wilfred Thesiger in Arabian Sands. And yes, I do count audiobooks as reading. Before there were smart phones and televisions, before there were radios, there were people sitting around open fires and coal ranges, reading to each other, sharing an aural adventure, economising the candlelight. Were those books unread because they were spoken?

Reading in the Home of the Pauli Family Hanna Pauli (1864-1940)

Then there are the books on my computer - I have no e-reader - all, and almost always out of copyright volumes which are expensive to obtain on paper, and freely available online. As research for a project, I am slowly making my way through I Married Adventure, American explorer Osa Johnson’s bestselling 1940 memoir of her and her husband Martin’s lifetime of wildlife film-making expeditions. In the same vein, I have Mark Twain’s Roughing It, though I have now managed to source a physical copy from the library, which is infinitely more pleasant to curl up with, and smells of bitter almonds.

On the shelf in my office is William Zinsser’s witty and relatable guide to nonfiction craft, On Writing Well, which I open when I need some encouragement. I am about four chapters deep in the Grapes of Wrath, and have been for the last two months; and am dipping my toes, sporadically and pleasurably, into the gentle joy of Donald Culross Peattie’s Green Laurels, his ode to the great naturalists who proceeded him.

Each book, each luminescent juggling ball, is a love affair between my desire for belonging and the quality - the particularity, mind you, not the objective merit - of someone else’s thoughts. I am bound to these structures of paper and glue, to these disembodied voices, as surely as I am bound to every person I have ever loved. They do not begrudge me my philandering. On the contrary, it is part of how we relate, how we love best, an alliance of deepening nuances and correlating ideas that might otherwise never have met.

The eagle-eyed among you will have observed that there are actually thirteen books mentioned in this article, not twelve. I only count those books I read cover to cover, which I don’t generally with books of poetry, so in this case the Mary Oliver is simply an extra-curricular flirtation.

*I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and earn a commission on books purchased using these links.

So tell me, how many books are you reading?

Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash

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Beginnings

Anna Welch — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:23:05 GMT

Where do we begin? With birth? With conception? The meeting of our parents? The evolution of our genus? Or something else even more primordial and far less human?

I am currently writing a book, and it is not going well. Occasionally I will stumble onto a towpath of progress, a paved cycle trail of car-free bliss that tends slightly downhill in precisely the direction I wish to go, ground gained with such ease that it feels like cheating. At this point some friend, neighbour, or hapless stranger will ask me how the book is going and I will have to reply, honestly, that it is going well, knowing even as I do that when I arrive the next morning the cycle trail will have devolved into a tangled, rutted, potholed mess that veers off at a right angle directly up a cliff. I have come to notice that how’s the writing going? is a question I both yearn for and dread in equal measure.

It is the beginning that is not going well. I suffer from the luxury of too many choices and an aversion to the act of choosing. I ask myself what is the moment of inertia. What is the force needed to propel the story with the precise momentum it requires to reach the end? Answers fling themselves at me with a wild and disconcerting abandon: the morning I cycle east from San Francisco; the day I take my bicycle into the Pacific, mocked by corvids who watch me drag it through thick sand; the afternoon I disembark the plane and quail at the interrogations of an immigration official whose barking exterior conceals a smile of gentle encouragement; the moment of departure from New Zealand; the decision to leave; the inspiration for the journey; a background anecdote elucidating some vital aspect of my personality without knowledge of which the reader will be lost. Then there are beginnings that aren’t beginnings at all. You can begin at the end and work your way forward to that point; or in medias res, in the middle of things, intriguing the reader with so many questions and so little context that they are compelled to continue.

I have written more than fifteen beginnings and still I am not satisfied. No matter where I start, each one slips into a vaguely comedic, Bill Bryson-esque analysis of my foibles and fallibilities. Don’t misunderstand me, there’s nothing wrong with Bill Bryson’s style, but it isn’t the style of book I want to write. To begin that way would do a disservice to the reader, give them a false impression (for better or worse) of what was to come.

The end, by contrast, is easy and definite. I know not only the moment, but the words that will draw the story to its close, as well as most of what proceeds them. I have little confidence, however, that pitching to an agent or publisher with the offer to read my manuscript backwards would be well received, while I continue navigating the impassable terrain of the beginning, still going spectacularly badly because yesterday I had to tell someone it was going well. But that is, or course, only an excuse.

Are there others out there wrangling with this, trying to scale a cliff on a bicycle? Come forward fellow strugglers, tell me your woes, and let us be mocked by the crows together.

Ocean Beach, San Francisco

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