The Sacred Combe: a search for humanity’s heartland

By Simon Barnes; Bloomsbury, 2016 Hbk, 238pp; black-and-white illustrations ISBN 978-1-4729-1402-6 BB Bookshop price £13.49 This latest offering from Simon Barnes is a meditation on the need that all of us have for a special place in which to celebrate nature. His ‘sacred combe’ is the South Luangwa National Park in Zambia, a place he fell in love with on his very first night in the Luangwa River valley in the late 1980s when elephants made a meal of his grass-thatched hut. Barnes has returned to ‘the Valley’ many times since, including a two-month stint at the end of the fierce dry season when the river dwindles to a trickle. In September and October it becomes a killing ground for the resident Lions Panthera leo, Leopards P. pardus and crocodiles as the drought-stricken herbivore herds have to run the predator gauntlet on daily trips to their only water supply. South Luangwa is a key destination for upmarket safaris because poaching has largely been kept in check and the wildlife is still prolific. Barnes spent his two-month sabbatical from The Times (where he was chief sports writer until 2014) living and working at one of these safari camps and paints delightful vignettes of wildlife encounters he had then – and on his many subsequent trips. He also writes evocatively of his rural home – and adjacent broad – in Norfolk. But as his wife Cindy perceptively points out (p. 181): ‘You’re telling your readers that they can find a sacred combe if they’re rich enough to go to Africa or lucky enough to live in Norfolk.’ (A Sacred Combe Safari with Simon Barnes will set you back £6,000.) So Barnes devotes a chapter to… ‘A sacred combe in Redditch’. And his account of a day on a pocket-sized nature reserve in the Black Country has as much joy in nature as his African adventures – and he finds (on call) the reserve’s first Firecrest Regulus ignicapilla. In 101 bite-sized chapters, Barnes celebrates our primordial need for nature and natural places in an engaging style that cannot fail to lift the spirits of anyone stuck in an office or on a train and craving their next visit to their own sacred combe. My only criticism is not of the author, who will no doubt share my disappointment, but of the proofreading by his publisher. There is approximately one typo – inserted or missing words – in every one of those 101 chapters. For a publisher of the calibre of Bloomsbury, that is a very poor performance. Adrian Pitches