Ken Smith (2023) The Way of the Hermit. My Incredible Forty Years Living in the Wilderness. Editor, Will Mallard.

Ken Smith was born 28^th October 1947 in a small village in Derbyshire. He tells us he’s an ordinary bloke. No special powers. Offers no great spiritual insights. No great secrets of how to survive in the wilderness beyond being prepared. He describes himself as The Tramp of Treig. He follows a long tradition of wanting to live alone in an isolated spot of great natural beauty in the Scottish Highlands.  

He quotes Henry Thoreau:

‘Not till we have lost the world, do we begin to realize were we are and the infinite extent of our relations.’

Smith kept a diary from a child and continued into adulthood. Will Mallard helped transcribe over a million words into a book.

Saturday, 1 January 2011, for example.

‘Fit as a fiddle I feel, slim as a pole and bleeding at the arse.’

Friday 8 January 2011.

It’s -4C and outside deep in snow, twinkling from above stars. It was 4a.m. I put on the kettle and waited for it to boil.

Town today. Departing an hour later through crunching snow. I observed the above heavens displaying the beauty of shooting stars.

Stacking my rucksack out she came, the post office attendant, on letter and yup! Cancer.

… Cold wind and snow hit my eyes, but I couldn’t work it out, was it the cold or a tear?

I reckon the robins will miss me.’

Smith’s cancer treatment is to take place the following Monday at Belfort Hospital. The difference between me and you and is he needs to walk around fifteen miles home carrying his supplies. He lives in a log cabin he built himself, with permission from the landowner, which burnt down and had to build again. It has no electricity or plumbing. He cooks on open flame and shits outside in a composite toilet he constructed. When the weather closes in and flung out gale-force winds and seas of rain and snow, he’s almost never made it back. Once following some people and fellow travellers the wrong way across a burn before realising they were deer.

‘The log pile is the ballast when daylight is at its longest…Put your faith in chopping wood.’

He came here he tells us ‘to find solace. A sanctuary of sorts. A deeper understanding of what this part of Scotland is. Warts and all.’

There are clegs and midges and all types of insects and animals that make his life miserable. Some of them cute enough, like the pine martin, but few warts. Smith’s preferred months and season are winter. He can sit in his cabin, feeding his fire and drinking his home brew. His diaries will show cataclysmic seasonal change, with hottest days of the year occurring in Autumn. You don’t need to be a naturalist. Just go outside as he suggests.

Smith, while claiming not be a guru, suggest those buying his book must somehow be seeking their inner hermit. Show a dissatisfaction with working and buying ‘a lot of crap’ we don’t need or to survive and pay rent. It’s difficult not to argue with the consumerism that is killing our planet.

He built a lean-to. Then a log cabin in the Highlands, with the permission of the landowner. He worked as a ghillie take the landowner’s rich London friends out shooting deer. Some of them top Tory politicians. No names are mentioned. My preference would have been for the deer to shoot back.

The irony here is having been to the frozen lands of Alaska and beyond and coming back to Scotland penniless. He lived in a bothy and signed on. Our Tory friends would gladly have shot him and hung the carcass of people like him. Smith wouldn’t be allowed to do that today. While freezing and hungry in a bothy and being haunted by a poltergeist to make his escape he’d have to be searching for work for thirty-nine hours per week. The fat salmon he fed on in Alaska no longer run and the bears that gorged on them starve.

There’s a book in all of us. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, tells of his hobo wandering and how they helped each other but local authorities offered a cup of tea and sandwich, sometimes a bed for the night, but kept them moving. He called for revolution. Closer to home, Ralph Glasser, Growing Up in the Gorbals, tells how after a long working week, in the nineteen thirties, many fled as far as they could on a tramline and ended up in the ‘huts’ at Carbeth. Some men never came back. He asks a question of politics and life, how did they pay for it? His answer was they relied on others like them, but working long hours to keep them in the hills. I like the Tramp of Treig. He made a life-changing decision on his fortieth birthday in 1986. A simple life. I’m sure I’d like his home brew. The idea of self-sufficiency is hardly revolutionary. I’m not sure it’s not smug and based on dishonesty. Read on.