The creation of a National Forest for Wales inspired me to walk 300 miles and feel calm again

In the summer of 2020, I began a journey walking nearly 300 miles across Wales in search of an answer to the question many of us were asking. How, faced by climate change and a global pandemic, can we make peace with – and restore – balance with nature?

My family had adapted to lockdown in their own ways, but I didn’t take to enforced home time as easily. I was suffering from bouts of anxiety.

So, I started walking in my local parks and woodlands around Cardiff. As I walked, I felt myself relaxing, my heart rate slowing. I felt peaceful. These walks got me thinking about how most of us had lost any true connection to nature. That’s when I learned about a major new nature-focused Welsh government policy – the creation of a National Forest for Wales.

The idea was to create a pathway of biodiversity through the country by linking existing woodlands and planting new trees along the way. Not only would the forest support ecosystems, it would also help combat the climate emergency.

I was fascinated by the concept of a national forest, and it gave me an idea. What if I could map and walk an imaginary walking trail, a blueprint, for the forest? It could be a calming tonic for those anxious thoughts, but at the same time, perhaps I could start to find answers to the crucial question – how can we restore balance with nature?

I set off on foot in late July in Wentwood Forest, Monmouthshire, South Wales, and, over the next few days, I walked through the old Roman town of Caerleon, headed west to Newport, then on to the Norman castle at Caerphilly, before ending up in the coal mining communities of the Rhondda Valley.

I began to understand how our connection to nature has been lost over thousands of years. Deforestation – starting in the time of the Celts but accelerated by Romans and Normans – along with intensive coal and iron industrialisation distanced people from the natural world, ultimately relocating most of us into towns and cities.

At the top of the Swansea valleys, I left the village of Brynamman and climbed up over the imposing Black Mountain. Now I was entering the rolling farmland of Carmarthenshire and the beautiful but desolate Cambrian Mountain range of Ceredigion.

Here is a world where nature has long been revered in Welsh legend, folklore and culture. At the foot of the Black Mountain, I visited the village where three 13th-century herbal doctors – the Physicians of Myddfai – were said to have lived. According to legend, they were the sons of a fairy queen, the Lady of Lake Llyn y Fan Fach, who had taught them how to use nature to heal their patients.

I walked through the 18th-century Hafod Estate, just south of Devils Bridge, where Thomas Johnes had designed and shaped its vast woodlands and grounds as an homage to the Picturesque Movement that drew artists and writers such as JMW Turner and William Wordsworth to celebrate Wales’s natural beauty.

I kept walking north out of Ceredigion, up the Wales Coast Path to Machynlleth where the last native-born Prince of Wales, Owain Glyndwr, established his Senedd (parliament) in 1404. From there, I headed into the enormous Coed y Brenin Forest through the ancient Celtic Rainforest of Coed Felenrhyd and into old slate mining centres of Ffestiniog and Penmachno before following the Dee valley to Llangollen.

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I read up on the legal rights of nature and the growing movement to make ecocide a global crime. I looked deeper into the ways that business is starting to evaluate the risks associated with biodiversity loss and the opportunities of embracing so-called nature-based solutions such as biomimicry.

And, as I walked through miles of upland sheep-farming country, I began to see the pressures faced by traditional Welsh-speaking communities whose land was now worth more for new tree planting to offset carbon emissions than it was to tend their flocks. I ended my journey – 300 miles and 100 woodlands later – in the grounds of Chirk Castle near Offa’s Dyke.

The exercise had helped calm the anxiety I had been struggling with and, mentally, I had been buoyed by the places I visited and the things I learned along the way – the history of Wales, the ways of nature and the possibilities of creating a better future for all of us.

There is a Welsh phrase, dod yn ôl at fy nghoed, that means “to return to a balanced state of mind”. However, its literal translation is, rather beautifully, “to return to my trees”.

It captured perfectly how I felt. I had returned to my trees.

Matthew Yeomans is the author of ‘Return to My Trees: Notes from the Welsh Woodlands’ (£18.99, Calon)