Ken Smith explores the role of hermits in past societies and gives his practical advice, gathered from his experiences, on how to live off the land
Review by Olivia Edward
‘It does not matter how slow you go – if you’ve got somewhere you must be before nightfall, and you are all alone in the wilderness, especially if the weather is bad. DO NOT STOP… The bridge between taking a rest and giving up entirely is a cruelly short one.’
Ken Smith’s advice for staying alive in inclement conditions could equally be applied to achieving hard-won dreams. Born one of four children in a poor, rural Derbyshire village, he left young to work in forestry and later construction before eventually saving up enough money to go and explore the wilder stretches of Canada during the late 1970s. There he learnt how to dodge bears and discovered a natural abundance of the like he’d never seen before: ‘salmon runs so dense that they completely blackened the crystalline rivers’ and groves of mushrooms so profuse that they ‘would turn the forest floor a snow-white and seemingly went on for days’.
Returning to the UK, he ended up living in bothies in the Scottish Highlands. Bumping into the local laird, he asked him if he would mind if he built a wooden cabin on his land. Turned out he wouldn’t and Smith has now been living off-grid on the banks of Loch Treig for more than 40 years, sharing his cabin with pine martins and hooded crows, and becoming something of a local legend.
There are fascinating tracts in here about the role of hermits in past societies and lots of practical advice – how to shape cabin poles, catch trout and build fires using techniques Smith learnt from Indigenous Canadians – but it feels as though there’s something more important lingering here, too, a kernel of kindness and an idea for a society built on warm, good-natured reciprocity with each other and all the beings among whom we live. Smith seems to stand like a shy, modest trailblazer and perhaps the most unlikely of life coaches, just nodding encouragingly from his woodpile, saying, ‘Go on, why not give it a go?’
