It is the rituals that keep us sane. So writes Canton, who holds the wonderful title of director of Wild Writing at the University of Essex. His latest book is an eminently readable and well-researched meditation on what it is that keeps a human ‘grounded.’

From a small, cold chapel in Lindsey, Suffolk, where he realises the truth in a Philip Larkin poem about stepping into a church as an unbeliever and knowing a ‘tense, musty, unignorable silence’ to research about the Neolithic monument at West Kennet Long Barrow, Canton takes the reader on a journey of historical discovery, on foot, by bicycle and car.

He realises the truth in a Wendell Berry statement: There are no unsacred places. There are only sacred places and desecrated places.

One of those is Aldham Common where a Protestant martyr Rowland Taylor was set on fire for his beliefs, with the landscape stripped of its natural wonder by the action of that February day in 1555.

Living as he does in a former farm worker’s cottage, Canton comes to realise that the hearth of the home is also a sacred place.

He muses on the evolution from Mesolithic hunter-gatherer people to Neolithic farmers, taming the landscape.

Emblematic of the pre-history existence of humans are carved figures such as the 40 000-year-old Lion Man found in Germany; the Dagenham Idol (4000 years old) of England; or the Ralaghan Man, found in an Irish bog.

In Grounded, Canton finally contemplates the words of an eminent archaeologist who once wrote of the creators of those figures: We cannot be sure of what they saw. For thousands of years he suspects people have needed to express in some beautiful way what it is to be human; to conduct acts of devotion to keep those they loved in health; and he warns modern humans to remember the connection to the earth that hunter-gatherers had, if we are to survive.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville

About the author

Another Book by this Author

The Oak Papers

This is the story of one man’s relationship to an ancient tree, the Honywood Oak. Colossal and wizened, it would have been a sapling when the Magna Carta was signed in 1215.

James Canton spent two years sitting with and studying this unique tree. It was an exercise in discipline: he needed to slow down in order to appreciate it fully, to tune in to it, to connect with the ecosystem that lives around, inside and under it.

In this stunning, meditative treatise, he examines our long-standing relationship with trees, a material as well as a source of myth and legend, and of solace. We no longer build our houses from the sturdy oak and its relatives, use them to fuel our fires or grind their seeds and nuts into flour in times of famine. Physically, we don’t need them. Or do we? The natural world has lessons for us – if we slow down enough to listen.