Sasha Swire’s debut, Diary of an MP’s Wife (2020), gave us an insight into the kind of cliquey people who run Britain, not least one Alexandra Patrusha Mina Swire and her husband, Hugo, since elevated to the Lords. Set in the world of the rich and powerful during the reign of David Cameron, it was gossipy, cruel and score-settling.
What was most memorable about the book was Swire’s hilarious confidence. Call it brave or call it reckless, it allowed her to opine on anything and anyone without regard for the consequences. In Edgeland, her second work, she seeks to harness that same confidence, and do for England’s natural world what she previously did for its politics. But if Diary of an MP’s Wife was in the tradition of Chips Channon and Alan Clark, the model for this follow-up is more like Robert Macfarlane meets Eat, Pray, Love.
Ostensibly an account of a walk along the South West Coast Path – 630 miles, undertaken over a 10-year period – it’s in fact a collection of musings and reflections on various places along the path, and the thoughts and associations to which they give rise. Emerson, Thubron, Sebald, Carson; Edward Thomas, John Berger, Marcus Aurelius, Virginia Woolf – they all get a look in. As does the history of the Bull Point Lighthouse, Clovelly, the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Camelot Castle Hotel, “the enigmatic Enodoc church”, Butlin’s holiday camp at Minehead, and Rick Stein’s Padstow. It’s all here, in a rather scheming and schematic fashion: lots of walking plus lots of thinking equals contemporary nature writing.
But Swire at least knows whereof she speaks. Daughter of Sir John Nott, the former MP for St Ives, and wife of the former MP for East Devon, she explains that “I have spent all my life in this leg of land.” The area has always provided her with an escape from the tumult of political life: “As I walk along this path, I am walking out all the bossiness, all the debating, all the rivalries and the ambitions; mostly, the social-media mania that drives the news cycle and worsens situations.”
The quality of her musings as she moseys along, however, is variable. She thinks, for example, about colours and hues: “How clouds often have bright silver edges where the sun reflects.” There are etymological detours: “The word ‘estuary’ is derived from the Latin ‘aestuarium’, meaning ‘tidal inlet of the sea’.” Pebbles are described as “photographs, snapshots” that “interrupt, arrest the slow flow of time”. Beach huts “jealously guard the ghost of our island self”. Water: “Something without beginning and without end; it has no shape of its own, but it can take any shape as its own.” The butterfly effect: “With my smallness, can I actually bend history?” “I like to compare the spread of Christianity, or any religion for that matter, to the life cycle of another invasive seed, the dandelion.” “One could spend hours looking into a hedge.”
