The Depths of the Wild
Sophie Yeo praises Eloise Kane’s Wilderlands as a clear-eyed history of Britain’s long “dewilding” and a corrective to nostalgic ideas of an untouched natural past. Drawing on palaeoecology, recent scientific debates, and Kane’s fieldwork, the book traces how hunting, settlement, agriculture, and later development transformed the landscape from the post-Ice Age wildwood onward. Yeo especially values Kane’s caution in interpreting fragmentary evidence—from buried eagles to Seahenge—because modern ideas of wildness can distort what prehistoric people and places meant. That restraint gives the book contemporary force: archaeology, Yeo argues, must inform rewilding so future landscapes are not designed around nostalgia, guilt, marketable romance, or aesthetic preference alone.