Sasha Swire, or Lady Swire to give her full title, made headlines in 2020 with the publication of her irreverent, behind-the-scenes account of David Cameron’s inner circle, to which she belonged courtesy of her Eton-educated, ex-minister husband, Sir Hugo. Diary of an MP’s Wife portrayed the Cameron circle as snobbish, entitled and incestuous.
Her new book is an attempt to escape from all that – a form of “ecotherapy”, as she puts it. It involves hiking the 630-mile South West Coast Path, from Minehead in Somerset to Poole, in Dorset. “As I walk along this path, I am walking out all the bossiness, all the debating, all the rivalries and the ambitions … I am being presented with the knowledge of how unimportant these things really are in the order of things,” she says.
The walks take place over a 10-year period, so there are no burst blisters, aching feet or sudden drenchings in thunderstorms. You have the sense that she sometimes just hopped out of a Range Rover, did a leisurely 10 miles and drove back home to Chaffcombe Manor in Devon for tea. But she is an amiable companion, who ingeniously evokes the landscapes, famous people who lived here and, especially, the flora and fauna. “This fat and rugged appearance, particularly when its chest is expanded to expel not very pleasant-sounding notes,” she writes of the corn bunting, “gives it an almost Dickensian appearance, one … of jollity and conviviality.” On the allure of orchids, she writes: “I suspect it’s the vulva in them: legs akimbo, they just provoke desire.”
She is sometimes predictable in the material she chooses to excavate. In Porlock, on the Somerset coast, she gives us the inevitable potted account of the opium-infused creation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan, while missing the chance to elaborate on her theme of the “edge” as the boundary of consciousness.
Hugo occasionally pops up to accompany her for a few miles, notably in the touching account of his quest for some genuine Cornish gold to fashion their wedding rings. During his research he reads about the Nebra Sky Disc, the oldest representation of the night sky. “The most fascinating aspect, for both my husband and I,” she writes, “was not the beauty of the disc itself nor the interesting story behind its burial and discovery, but that the sun, moon and stars were cut from gold and tin that came from Cornwall.”
Cornwall is her taproot. She grew up in Newlyn Harbour, after her father, Sir John Nott, was elected MP for St Ives in 1966. She was three years old and remembers the moor in front of her house and a nearby menhir, a grave marker for a warrior. And her most impassioned writing is about this “edge” region. “The true Cornish,” she writes, with more than a touch of romantic exaggeration, “have always been at the mercy of their emotions; their feelings are easily excited and often openly displayed. They are prone to the mysterious which ultimately accepts true art and true science, but they need an outlet for their passions, they need a sense of being in the world through a common union.”
At Land’s End, she reflects on the meaning of her journey. Listing Brexit, Trump and cracks in the European project, she realises: “When I started this walk it was to avoid the land of political decision-making, to enjoy the unencompassability of places, to be somewhere where there was no time, no limit, no choices, and yet all I see all around me is politics still.”
• Edgeland: A Slow Walk West by Sasha Swire is published by Abacus (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
