Book reviews: ‘Finding Hildasay’ and ‘Hildasay to Home’

Finding Hildasay: How One Man Walked the UK Coastline and Found Happiness and Hope by Christian Lewis. Macmillan, 2023. Hardcover, 352 pages.

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Hildasay to Home: How I Found a Family by Walking the UK Coastline by Christian Lewis. Macmillan, 2024. Hardcover, 304 pages.

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Life wasn’t going well for former paratrooper Christian Lewis. Depressed and unemployed, he knew homelessness was right around the corner. Turning to the natural world where he had always found solace, he came up with the idea of walking the entire coastline of Great Britain to raise money for a veterans’ charity. What might have seemed like an impulsive decision turned into something that gradually lifted his mood and gave purpose to his life.

In Finding Hildasay, the first of two memoirs about his almost six-year trek, Christian confronts nature at its best and at its worst as he walks from Wales to Hildasay, a remote Scottish island where he spent the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along the way, depending on the season, he faced hot weather and bothersome bugs, below-freezing temperatures in the Scottish Highlands, and days of almost relentless rain.

He also gained a companion when he adopted a dog named Jet, who came to be his best friend and canine soulmate. Often alone together for days at a time, Christian and Jet became firm friends and, in the author’s mind, equal partners on this adventure. Time and time again, Christian writes how Jet was so important to his well-being and how he made certain that Jet was always well fed and cared for on the journey.

In the second book, Hildasay to Home, Christian and Jet head south from Scotland, continuing to meet kind strangers who provided practical help and donated to the veterans’ charity, which would hit half a million pounds by the walk’s end. Quite unexpectedly, the author also met Kate, who would join him and Jet on the journey. Eventually, she would become his fiancé and the mother of Magnus, their son who was born during the walk.

Both of these memoirs are full of observations on the natural world and what we can learn from spending time in it, reflections on the kindness of people who lend helping hands, and celebrations of the human-animal bond.

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