If, when writing my book Bog Witch, Marsha O’Mahony’sThis Stolen Land had been available, it would have been one of the top on my list and certainly well quoted in my own wetlands book – for here are the Gwent Levels, which contain salt marsh, reed swamp, peat bog and many other forms of wetland type, in all their gorgeousness and glory. 

What makes This Stolen Land even more interesting is that it expands out from a single author to a multiplicity of voices, since it contains interviews and a ‘people’s history’ of the area: real lived experience and the memories of many, which greatly enriches and enlivens the book. Myriad perspectives are seamlessly woven together by O’Mahony, whilst she herself is very much ‘on the ground’, traversing the Gwent Levels throughout these pages – but others’ words, and her own research, inform and inspire, resulting in a remarkable richness here.

With depth of research, wide intelligence, and a light literary touch, the author shows us the beauty and wonder of these wetlands, painting them and also their numerous threats in clear and liquid prose. Place is important, but what O’Mahony shows us is that people are too, and we cannot separate one from the other – we, too, are animals, like the curlews and kingfishers she presents here, and we belong to the earth, including the wetlands, just as much as they do. A socially conscious, mindfully meandering, brilliantly wrought gem of a book.