There are days when you choose your place and time well as a walker and it can take you so vividly and swiftly inside a legend, or a piece of history, that it feels a little illegal.
The title of Tom Cox’s Ring The Hill comes from a 13th-century rhyme, ‘The Names of the Hare,’ and while it is indeed ‘a book about hills,’ it quickly feels like something much, much more. For, just like the exhilarating passage of the hare, Cox’s writing zig-zags elusively in plain sight. Like the hare, it is open to a litany of names: memoir, nature-writing, ghost story, folklore, environmentalism, philosophy, history, humour, and categories of writing for which names have yet to be invented.
Cox is steeped in the landscape, sometimes literally. The many hills he explores include Glastonbury Tor, the uplands of Dartmoor, Dorset and the Welsh Marches, and the bleak, haunted heights above the 17th-century Derbyshire plague village of Eyam.
Hills are always good.
In his writing, Cox is romantic, fanciful and paganistic, but also prosaic, gently polemical and mildly political. Populated by Characters-with-a-capital-C, shaggy dogs, polished pheasants, spectral livestock and unpredictable cats, Ring The Hill is also very funny.
After a little over two hundred pages, the subtle hare itself takes form. Cox calls hares ‘liminal, edge dwellers, mercurial, non-conformist,’ and one knows immediately and implicitly that he’s also describing himself, or the ideal of what his self can be. His affinity with the hare seems stronger than even he acknowledges: obsessive sea-swimming, he says, has made him longer, leaner, browner, fitter. In folk legend, hares were shape-shifters, too.
Ring The Hill has a metamorphic quality. The work of one who, like the hare, ‘does not go straight home,’ Cox’s writing deserves an expressive, eccentric nomenclature of its own.
In this brilliant review of Ring the Hill you so perfectly capture the uncapturable. As an author, Tom is a bonafide phenomenon, and his books are pure joy. Before he arrived on the scene, his style of writing did not exist … and so he had to invent it. (With apologies to Voltaire.) I have been a supporter of his work from the outset and hope I can continue to do so.
How beautiful to see you use this Substack space for longer reviews. I've made you one of my recommended publications after reading this and hope some of my community subscribe to you as a result...