Landscape and Identity in Hugh Thomson's The Green Road into the Trees

Abstract

Although familiar with distant and exotic locations, Hugh Thomson became alienated from his own native region. The study explores the process of re-familiarising oneself with the native landscape by allowing the natural environment to inspire probes into its historical and social layers. Thomson's book, The Green Road into the Trees, documents the restoration of his local identity through physical and psychological immersion in the British countryside. The paper focuses on the phenomenon of slow travel as a means of reconnecting with the environment and enabling one to identify as part of the local landscape. I argue that such reconnection, albeit driven by anthropocentric motivations, helps to break the traditional human-nature dichotomy and enables us to see the landscape as “the engagement of people in place, as experience in the world” (David and Wilson, 2002: 5-6). On a more general level, the analysis also examines how the focus on travelling enriches the genre of nature writing. Although the text analyses nature writing, it is not an environmental study, but rather a study of identity construction.