Our Oaken Bones Merlin Hanbury-Tenison: How my father, my wife and me were healed by the Cornish rainforest

By ALEXANDER MASTERS

Published: 12:22 BST, 31 March 2025 | Updated: 12:22 BST, 31 March 2025

Our Oaken Bones Merlin Hanbury-Tenison Witness Books £22, 304pp

In March 2020, the ‘old explorer’ Robin HanburyTenison collapsed with Covid: his lungs filled with fluid; a secondary infection sprang up in his kidneys; he was 83 years old and the doctors, estimating a 20 per cent chance of survival, sank him into a coma. He emerged barely able to talk. Five months later, in the thunderous winds and battering rain of a oncein-a-century storm, he drove out to the highest peak in Cornwall and climbed it. 

Robin is the guiding spirit in this vital book by his son Merlin Hanbury-Tenison: a metaphor for the battle we face as a species, and our attempts to clamber away from destruction. All the same, I feel cross at the astonishing old curmudgeon. What he did that day was reckless to the point of insanity. Had he forgotten about the exhausted nurses who’d have to lose their weekend to try to bring him back to life if he slipped? Didn’t he think of the emotional pain he would cause by smashing his head? 

Nature boys: Merlin Hanbury Tenison with his father Robin 

Our Oaken Bones is an excellent book – thoughtful, provocative, occasionally maddening (just like the author’s father), a bit self-serving and beautifully written. Merlin Hanbury-Tenison runs Cabilla farm, a 300-acre ‘wellness centre’ on Bodmin Moor. Running through the middle is a seahorse-shaped sliver of ancient temperate rainforest. Our Oaken Bones is a paean to the restorative powers of woods, a prayer that our island will one day again be filled with such miraculous ecosystems, complete with beavers, moss and native trees – but it also contains photos of Merlin’s business. 

Ancient woods are good for you, says Merlin – and he is convincing. As well as delicious fresh oxygen, trees release short-lived aerosols called terpenes and phytoncide, which improve kidney and immune system function and reduce levels of cortisol, a hormone that regulates stress response and metabolism. 

A bathe in the woods is a bath in friendly chemicals. In Merlin’s opinion, that his father was able to walk at all – let alone attempt to clamber up a mini-mountain five months after his near-death from Covid – is only partly due to the fact that he’s a cussed old dog; a lot of it comes from the magical regenerative force of the ancient forest at Cabilla. 

The restorative wellness retreat Cabila, at night

Merlin has been blessed by these trees himself. He did three tours of duty in Afghanistan, in a Scimitar tank, ‘the MG Midget of the armoured vehicle world’. I felt in need of a stay at Cabilla myself after reading about the fuel blockages, snapping engine belts and broken torsion bars in this suicide machine. It was so hot inside that when Merlin leaned against the metal his skin began to ‘bubble and fizz’. The Scimitar has ‘a tendency to burst into flames at the most inconvenient of moments’. Then Merlin drove over a land mine, got blown ten feet in the air, ended up covered head to toe in English mustard (one of the crew had stored a jar of the stuff in his clothes, and the explosion burst it open), and had a nervous breakdown. As with his father, the forest eased him back to health. 

Merlin’s wife Lizzie is another restored character in Our Oaken Bones. Her first two pregnancies were miscarriages (not an uncommon form of emotional evisceration, Merlin points out: one in four pregnancies ends this way). For months, she wandered these woods, blank-eyed with defeat and loss, sitting on the mossy rocks beneath a huge beech tree. It nudged her up and along; it gave her hope again. How did the woods at Cabilla bring about these recoveries? Had this remarkable, seahorse-shaped patch of ancient trees and archaeological remains really repaired these shattered humans quicker than they would have healed in a city? Wasn’t it mostly that they were young, resilient, wealthy and good-natured? Who knows? 

Lizzie and Merlin are convinced it was the trees. They’ve introduced beavers (who bore the first kits on Bodmin Moor ‘since before William the Conqueror’) and started a charity called the Thousand Year Trust, which promotes agri-rainforestry, a nasty-sounding but delightful idea – eat venison, grow cows among trees (cows hate fields – they are forest animals), perhaps introduce wolves (‘you are more in danger of being killed by a falling coconut,’ Merlin insists, ‘than you are of being attacked by a wolf’.)

I loved this book. I approve of its philosophy wholeheartedly; I am convinced by its starry-eyed message, albeit written (as so many of these prayers to nature seem to be) from the point of view of huge privilege. But there are times in Our Oaken Bones when I feel I ought to double-check the facts. The truth might be a little more complicated, not quite so tidy. Merlin doesn’t tell us, for example, that his beloved beaver family escaped last year and refused to return. They moved upstream, to a patch of river belonging to an artist. Merlin accused the man in a recent article in The Spectator of ‘kidnapping’ the beavers, which was unfair. It was the beavers that had decided to skip. Nobody had pinched them. Their escape (as the artist pointed out) was a triumph for rewilding. 

But Merlin isn’t trying to explore nuance; he wants to slap us awake. Our Oaken Bones is an impassioned manifesto wrapped inside a prayer of gratitude to ancient and vanishing trees.

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Our Oaken Bones Merlin Hanbury-Tenison: How my father, my wife and me were healed by the Cornish rainforest

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