Running for the Hills: A Family Story

This chapter looks at Horatio Clare's life on a farm halfway up a mountain in Wales. It points out how his mother's diary of their life on the farm provided Clare with a model of how to write and formed the nucleus of his memoir. It also highlights the joy in Clare's Running for the Hills that lies in its seemingly effortless richness and precision, bursting with its own actuality. The chapter talks about Clare's wish to recapture the time when his parents were happy together in his book after his father walked out on the family. Clare writes of his life on the farm as a leap backwards through time to the pre-modern world, but it may also be the future as subsistence hill-farming might be the fate of the next generation due to global warming, rising sea levels, and the end of fossil fuels.