Mixing nature observations about the New Forest (Hampshire, England), childhood memoir, and the politics of climate change and land ownership is the focus of Neil Ansells’s The Circling Sky: On Nature and Belonging in an Ancient Forest. The author visited the forest approximately thirty times during the changing seasons from January to December 2019 to walk alone and ponder, and as a result, has produced an inspiring study. ‘You need to see a place in every season, every weather, in order to begin to get its true measure’, says Ansell (p. 6), as he contemplates, among other things, ‘Who am I? What am I doing here? Where do I belong? (p. 7).

Mixing nature observations about the New Forest (Hampshire, England), childhood memoir, and the politics of climate change and land ownership is the focus of Neil Ansells’s The Circling Sky: On Nature and Belonging in an Ancient Forest. The author visited the forest approximately thirty times during the changing seasons from January to December 2019 to walk alone and ponder, and as a result, has produced an inspiring study. ‘You need to see a place in every season, every weather, in order to begin to get its true measure’, says Ansell (p. 6), as he contemplates, among other things, ‘Who am I? What am I doing here? Where do I belong? (p. 7).