Wales Books

“This was the very heart of Wales' rainforest zone, where the oceanic climate conspires to make conditions perfect for the rich profusion of plant life that we'd spent the past week exploring. Yet here, humanity had found a rainforest and turned it into a desert. It had started long ago, no doubt: Wales' Green Desert is the product of agricultural malpractice dating back to the twelfth-century monks of Strata Florida. But what began as a profitable enterprise in medieval times today supports a mere twenty-eight farms over an area covering 46,000 acres. The farming unions claim that rewilding will lead to rural depopulation, but centuries of overgrazing have already drained the land of both people and wildlife.

And in doing so, Wales is losing part of its heritage, its culture. Because the Wales of this great country's myths and legends was a rainforest nation, whose peoples lived and coexisted with the Atlantic oakwoods that once carpeted their land, celebrating them in song. They knew these rainforests and knew them deeply, weaving them into their stories, vesting their greatest heroes with a magic derived from that profound knowledge of place and ecology.

There is a way back from this, but it is unlikely to come through a culture war between sheep farmers and rewilders. The truth is that there is more than enough space in Wales, as there is in the rest of Britain, both for farming to continue and for more rainforest to flourish.”
― Guy Shrubsole, The Lost Rainforests of Britain