‘West: Tales of the Lost Lands’ review in Country Life Magazine

Loosely structured, at the author’s admittance, the book also embraces Simon Evans, Cleobury Mortimer’s postman bard, and the alcoholic auto-biographer Archie Hill. It protests today’s failing rural infrastructure, the lack of ethnic diversity in the countryside and the degradation of Britain’s pubs, the BBC and the Glastonbury Festival. However, alongside its many soap boxes, West is a commonplace book, so loaded with quotation and allusion that the final two pages of notes and a ‘select’ bibliography belie the library on which it feeds. Journeying along A. E. Housman’s highways or through the Shire of Tolkien’s imagination, Mr Wall has Bruce Chatwin brushing shoulders with the priestly poet of Onward, Christian Soldiers, Carl Jung and the lead singer of Led Zeppelin (who provides the elliptical foreword).

It’s all delivered with a goodly dose of the psychogeographer’s dialect: liminal, palimpsest and the like. Luckily, there is richness enough in Mr Wall’s own writing. Chatty and haughty, self-conscious and unstintingly personal, it flits like a butterfly, challenging the reader with its enthusiasm for a proudly worn knowledge. When the author finally settles, gazes at the landscape he loves and trusts his inner voice, West can reveal both wonder and wisdom.