The Edge of Cymru

Nature-writer and hiker Julie Brominicks takes a year-long walk around the edge of Wales and discovers places she thought she knew can be viewed in many ways. She reflects this in her new book, which combines the lenses of history, travel, the environment and nature to look at Wales, and the world, with fresh eyes and understanding.

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In the course of a year Julie Brominicks walked around the edge of Wales, having left her job in environmental education at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth. As an English incomer and a Welsh learner with a long association with the country, she was interested in what Wales meant, and how she did, or didn’t, fit in to it.
The result is a fascinating alternative travelogue, which merges topography, history, environmentalism and observation of nature, to produce the ‘long view’ of Wales, discovering the roots of the present in the past, sometimes the distant past.
Brominicks’ observations of the places and people she discovers around Wales are lively and well-written, although this is her journey (in many senses of that word) the narrative is at least as interested in who she meets and what she sees, especially of ‘ordinary life’. She brings the everyday to life in thought-provoking ways, her book a new way of looking at the place where we live and the people with whom we live our lives, knowingly and unknowingly. Her writing is lyrical, studded with engaging and striking coinages and images which take the reader along the journey with her, both entertained and informed. The Edge of Cymru is a refreshingly new way of looking at place, identity, memory and belonging, especially through an environmental lens. It rewards the reader, whether they are interested in Wales specifically, or the world generally.