Neil Ansell

DISAPPEAR INTO NATURE WITH A LATTER-DAY THOREAU 'A beautiful, translucent portrayal of mid-Wales' Jay Griffiths 'Touching. Through Ansell's charming and thoroughly detailed stories of run-ins with red kites, curlews, sparrowhawks, jays and ravens, we see him lose himself . . . in the rhythms and rituals of life in the British wilderness' Financial Times 'Remarkable, fascinating' Time Out 'A gem of a book, an extraordinary tale. Ansell's rich prose will transport you to a real life Narnian world that CS Lewis would have envied. Find your deepest, most-comfortable armchair and get away from it all' Countryfile

Deep Country

Jake Williams

I have disappeared entirely from my own narrative; my ego has dissolved into the mist. I came to the hills to find myself, and ended up losing myself instead. And that was immeasurably better.

Ed Kay

Beautifully written, idyllic, calming. Wish I was there myself.

Lucy Hacker

“One late-autumn day I opened the back door to fetch some water, and there was a young hare sat on my back step. Save for the twitching of its nose, it froze in position as if I had surprised it as it was about to knock. It was already the size of a full-grown rabbit, and its black-tipped ears were longer than any rabbit’s would ever be. I stood there and waited for it to flush. After a while I began to doubt that it would, and squatted down to its level for a closer look, eye to eye. It stared at me apparently unconcerned, chewing silently, with bulging eyes that were such a rich golden colour they were almost orange, with black depths like the keyhole of a door to another world.”

Nature memoirs are one of my favourite genres, and the idea of disappearing off-grid and into the wilderness is something that appeals to me more and more with every passing year. I approached this memoir with high hopes, and on the whole it didn't disappoint. In 'Deep Country,' Ansell details the five years he spent in the unforgiving isolation of the hills of mid-Wales, staying at Penlan - a tumbledown cottage with no electricity or running water. As he starts to explore his surrounding area, he details the wildlife that share this rural idyl with him at varying points throughout the year.

The book itself is a soothing, immersive read, taking us through the rugged, harsh, unspoilt hills of mid-Wales, and snapshots of what it's like to live for five years alone, with no modern conveniences. If I'm completely honest, I did want to learn more about the cathartic process of living like a hermit, with no technological distractions. I wanted to hear about the domestic side of living with no electricity and running water: rather frustratingly though, a huge part of Ansell's writing concerns itself with identifying and describing the birds he documents. I notice that many of the other reviews also saw this, and found it dull. In all fairness to the author, he does concede in the epilogue that when he looked back over the diaries he kept that spanned the five years he lived at Penlan, he noticed that as the years went by, his entries became less and less self-absorbed, and more concerned with the natural world around him; his final year reads as "almost an Almanac" - no arrogance or hubris, the birds are all that mattered. 

While I can appreciate and admire this kind of commitment to conservation, it doesn't read as smoothly as the prose he writes earlier in the book. Having said that, I found the final section where he describes his time at Penlan coming to an end utterly heartbreaking - I can't describe why, but I wanted him to stay there forever, living the life I could only dream of. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book; it's a lovely, soothing read before bed, but definitely not a thriller.

Neil Ansell spent five years living between the back of beyond and the middle of nowhere, on his own, with no electricity, gas or water and effectively only the wildlife around him for company. His dilapidated cottage, rented for �100 per year, is so exposed to the elements that it appears to rain uphill, and so remote that you can walk for twenty miles west without seeing a single other dwelling. As the years pass he feels himself dissolving into, and becoming, just another part of the landscape.

Deep Country

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