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"I lie on the rock to let my limbs dry after my immersion in the river. My bones warm. I have no towel but the moss is grateful for the additional moisture that I bring as the water runs off me and into its spongy web of roots and branches. I look up through the canopy and time freezes as the oak leaves drift gently backwards and forwards, dappling the light as it falls onto my body.
I am home."
Reeling from the pain of devastating miscarriages and suffering from PTSD after military adventures in Afghanistan, Merlin and his wife Lizzie decide to leave the bustle of London and return to Merlin's childhood home, a Cornish hill farm called Cabilla in the heart of Bodmin Moor.
There, they are met by unexpected challenges: a farm slipping ever further into debt, the discovery that the overgrazed and damaged woods running throughout the valley are in fact one of the UK's last remaining fragments of Atlantic temperate rainforest, and the sudden and near catastrophic strickening by COVID-19 of Merlin's father, the explorer Robin. As they fall more in love with the rainforest that Merlin had adventured in as a child, so begins a fight to save not only themselves and their farm, but also one of the world's most endangered habitats.
Our Oaken Bones is an honest and intimate true story about renewal, the astonishing healing power of nature, and our duty to heal it in return.
Merlin Hanbury-Tenison is a Cornish conservationist and veteran who founded The Thousand Year Trust, Britain's rainforest charity. The charity's mission is to catalyse the movement to triple Britain's rainforest cover to one million acres in the next thirty years. His work has been featured in National Geographic, the Guardian and on the BBC. Merlin lives in a rainforest in Cornwall with his wife Lizzie, an entrepreneur and business leader, and their two young daughters.
"It is an ecological autobiography [...] scholarly, wise, funny, charming, terrifying and thrilling, and I adored it all, every page."
– Joanna Lumley
"An extraordinarily courageous, urgent and powerful book."
– Isabella Tree
"deeply compelling [...] emotional, informative, pleasurable. I believe that this is an important work with planet-sized dreams and ambitions. Perhaps the greatest philosophy or teachable lesson that came to me off the page is that dominion comes with responsibility."
– Russell Crowe
"a beautifully written, people-focused tale with many stories of the healing of troubled human souls brought about by the rainforest's health-giving powers. I absolutely loved it."
– Charles Clover
"Our Oaken Bones is aching and hopeful in equal measure: from the horrors and trauma of war, to the quiet intimate grieving of a hidden family loss, there are perhaps no greater tests of the healing power of Britain's lost rainforest habitats."
– Gillian Burke
