Could you leave behind the bustle of modern society and spend your days immersed in nature? In The Way of the Hermit , seventy-four-year-old Ken Smith recounts a life he has chosen to spend alone with the wilderness.

Gene: Exactly. They were basically an appeal of last resort. Here’s another quote - “Accusations were made mysteriously, often by nailing a notice up to a tree, and failure to appear for trial was punished by death. The possible trial verdicts were death, banishment or acquittal.”

Gene: Correct. And, a complication here is that the Count, who you are accusing, sits as one of the Freischoffen, which is what the judges of the Vehmgericht are called. A wonderfully fluent account of how the strange magic of water, and the beings that inhabit it, can enchant and intoxicate” Chris Yates (Author of ‘The Secret Carp’) Gene: I noticed that there was an alternate Jewel that was gold instead of silver. It was in the shape of a triangle, with an arrow pointing downward. That made me think of the way the Vehmgericht signify that they’ve meted out justice. David: And another quote says - “Very generally, the censure bestowed upon men's acts, by those who have appointed and commissioned themselves Keepers of the Public Morals, is undeserved.” Returning to the UK, he ended up living in bothies in the Scottish Highlands. Bumping into the local laird, he asked him if he would mind if he built a wooden cabin on his land. Turned out he wouldn’t and Smith has now been living off-grid on the banks of Loch Treig for more than 40 years, sharing his cabin with pine martins and hooded crows, and becoming something of a local legend.

Will writes with flawless charm, light humour and gentle authority – A major talent and the best writer of this type since I first discovered Bill Bryson” Heat Magazine David: OK. “The evil is wide-spread and universal. No man, no woman, no household, is sacred or safe from this new Inquisition. No act is so pure or so praiseworthy, that the unscrupulous vender of lies who lives by pandering to a corrupt and morbid public appetite will not proclaim it as a crime…. Journalism pries into the interior of private houses, gloats over the details of domestic tragedies of sin and shame, and deliberately invents and industriously circulates the most unmitigated and baseless falsehoods.”

Featured Reviews

Ken Smith's advice for staying alive in inclement conditions could equally be applied to achieving hard-won dreams' Geographical Seventy-four-year-old Ken Smith has spent the past four decades in the Scottish Highlands. He lives alone, with no electricity or running water. His home is a log cabin nestled near Loch Treig, known as ‘the lonely loch’, where he lives off the land: he fishes for his supper, chops his own wood, and even brews his own tipple. He is, in the truest sense of the word, a hermit… The Way of the Hermitis a humourous, transcendant and life-affirming memoir.” PanMacmillan

Born in Derbyshire, Smith left school aged 15 in 1963, and went to work for the Forestry Commission at Bridge of Gaur in Perthshire, planting trees. It was not an entirely pleasant experience: “The lads I lived with were merciless bullies, especially to newcomers or people they marked out as a bit different from the rest.” For a few years, Smith drifted from job to job – until October 14 1974, when he was 26, and his life changed forever. He was leaving a disco in Ripley when he was set upon by a gang of skinheads who, for no good reason, threw him through a window and beat him mercilessly. After two weeks in a coma and four operations, Smith returned to work, where he promptly fell onto some steel spikes, just missing his vital organs – and then his mother died. Gene: That means getting in tune with Divine Providence, aligning yourself to it so that you aren’t trying to sail against the trade winds, so to speak. The last quote I have from this Lecture is - “let him build no Tower of Babel, under the belief that by ascending he will mount so high that God will disappear or be superseded by a great monstrous aggregate of material forces, or mere glittering, logical formula; but, evermore, standing humbly and reverently upon the earth and looking with awe and confidence toward Heaven, let him be satisfied that there is a real God; a person, not a formula; a Father and a protector, who loves, and sympathizes… and that the eternal ways by which He rules the world are infinitely wise, no matter how far they may be above the feeble comprehension and limited vision of man.” To write The Way of The Hermit, Will spent a year travelling to and from Ken’s cabin in a remote corner of the Scottish Highlands. Interviewing him long into the night and meticulously scouring his extraordinary diaries for stories of his adventurous life very well lived – this book represented one of his greatest challenges as a writer; drawing on all his skills, including those wrought in expeditions overseas, and ultimately changing him profoundly as a person. As a nature fiend, this book really connected with me on so many levels. Though not a "hermit", I am happiest fully immersed in nature and can understand Smith's passion for living the lifestyle and thereby learning multitudinous life lessons. His descriptions are stunning and his lifestyle while a hermit (he is now in his 70s) was clearly worth sacrifices and hard work, as all things worth pursuing are. The adventures he had! I'm thankful he wrote them so people such as me can enjoy them.

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David: The story I had heard before was that they were building a Tower to reach into Heaven, but this story says that they were building a Tower to survive the next flood… when God had already promised that there wouldn’t be one if they’d obey the laws.

If you hanker for peace in all of its forms, do read this inspiring book with gorgeous wilderness descriptions and compelling anecdotes. Gene: Yes. And also overreach. You know, by imagining you can bend reality in ways that aren’t feasible. Understandably, these events led him to re-evaluate his life. He decided that none of the usual coping mechanisms would work: no “booze, gambling, junk food, drugs or smoking, all just to mask the tedium, while accelerating us closer to the grave”. Instead, he went to Canada. Once he was in the Yukon, living in the wild, he started to feel more at peace and at home. After six months he returned to England and scraped by, but after another trip to Canada, he had a choice to make, to “accept my predestined place in the lifelong tradition of earning little while giving over my body, mind and most of my time to paying rent and bills – or… replicate that new-found way of life.”

Set a small routine of prayer and meditation for your daily life, start and keep to it. Do not read about it, or talk too much about it, just do it! And the Absolute will be waiting for you.