I adore this book. It’s my favorite thing that I’ve read in a very long time. In fact, I’m fairly certain that if I were a book, I would be this one. It’s not for everyone. In fact, it’s so very niche that I’m almost amazed it got published at all. I’d thought surely I was the only person on earth who could wax poetic about the beautiful nuance of hedge laying, but apparently there are at least two of us. (Pleased to meet you, Mr. Langlands.) If you are not the sort of nerd who makes things with your hands and dabbles in flint napping or other absurdly obsolete crafts purely for the sake of experiencing the technologies used by our ancestors for generations, you will be monstrously bored by this book. Walk away now. Save yourself the trouble. But if you do happen to be just the right brand of Luddite, oh you will love it.

It’s difficult to describe this book concisely. It blends archaeology (specifically experimental archaeology) with philosophy and ecology. It’s both exceedingly romantic (which it readily acknowledges) and surprisingly practical. It’s amazing to me to see the ways in which humans have historically made use of the materials locally available to meet their needs. It’s not overtly stated as such, but I would say this is in many ways a book about human ecology: it examines our place in the world and how we interact with it. It’s beautiful, and I could write bad poetry about how much I adore it until the end of time. Instead I think I’ll go experiment with hedge laying...