But Harry’s journey through this country, over the course of a turning year, has been driven by a belief that in those precious corners, beauty and sustaining meaning are to be found with a richness that is at least as intense as it has ever been. In one of the Duino Elegies, as translated here by the American Stephen Mitchell, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, hesitantly and modestly but still with an eye on the transcendent, makes the central claim on which a book such as this one is founded:
But to have been
This, once, completely, even if only once:
To have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
Adam Nicolson. Foreword Journey Through the British Isles