A HEREFORDSHIRE writer has published his 'extraordinary account' of searching for the wilderness left in our world.

Artist and writer James Roberts lives in an old stone house on the side of a high ridge running from the Herefordshire border into Wales and overlooking the Black Mountains to the south, the Cambrian Mountains to the north, and the Brecon Beacons to the west.

He has been walking at dawn and dusk daily through the stripped, windswept, emptying landscapes of Wales for a decade, seeking the wilderness.

As a young man growing up in a house overlooking a coal mine in Stoke-on-Trent, Mr Roberts had little experience of landscapes teeming with wildlife.

It was only in his mid-twenties on a sleeper train from Kampala to Nairobi that he first encountered a truly wild place, leading him to walk rich landscapes across the world, from the Sahara to the Congo, the Rift Valley to the Canadian Rockies.

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Mr Roberts said his family had moved to Herefordshire when their first son was just a few months old, thinking that "we might be able to give him a Swallows and Amazons childhood".

Now, as he walks the landscapes closer to home at dawn and dusk, he sees and mourns the landscapes of loss as beautiful native species disappear, like the curlew whose unique cries are fading from our skies.

Combining nature writing, travel, science and memoir Roberts builds a picture of a wild world being silenced by human activity.

Mr Roberts conveys the beauty of what was, and the incredible diversity of what still remains, even in Wales, one of the most nature depleted countries on earth.

His book flits from Herefordshire to Hawai'i, describing the unspoilt wildernesses which still exist and the myriad of species that inhabit them.

Two Lights is Mr Roberts’ account of a life in search of wilderness, and connection to other species – and of how, in a period of intense, soul-stripping loss and depression, he found in the resilience of wild creatures a way back to life again.

Beautifully illustrated by Mr Roberts throughout, this poetic and powerful memoir offers a plea to look at ourselves as part of a wider, wilder community.