Ken Smith Audiobooks

The Way of the Hermit: forty years alone in a cabin by Loch Treig

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Who is Ken Smith?

In 1984 a man from Derbyshire built a log cabin on the shore of Loch Treig in the Scottish Highlands and stayed. Ken Smith has lived there for four decades without electricity or running water, fishing for his supper, cutting his own wood and brewing his own drink, beside a loch whose name is often rendered as the lonely one.

He did not begin as a recluse. He grew up working class in Derbyshire and spent formative years travelling in the Yukon, and the decision to withdraw came later, for reasons his memoir sets out plainly. Since then he has become an unlikely public figure, the subject of the documentary The Hermit of Treig and of a steady trickle of walkers who come to see whether he really exists.

He does, and he keeps a diary. Decades of those entries are what made a book possible at all, written with the broadcaster and writer Will Millard.

Ken Smith in audiobooks

The Way of the Hermit is his account of those forty years, and it is not the wilderness sermon you might brace yourself for. Smith is funny, matter of fact and entirely without self-congratulation about a life most of us could not manage for a fortnight. He is honest, too, about the part that gets harder, which is growing old a very long walk from anyone.

Dean Williamson narrates, and close to ten hours proves the right length: long enough to settle into the rhythm of the place and the seasons, short enough never to outstay its welcome. The diaries give the writing its texture, so the detail stays specific rather than misty.

Keep an eye on the audiobooks below, where this one will take its place among our nature and outdoor listening.