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“... Roger Deakin has swum through England. Instead of a travelogue, he has written a waterlog, and instead of being waterlogged, he has moved around the country untrammelled, and often naked. In this seductive book he gives a rare and visionary account of what it means to feel an affinity with the lakes, springs, rivers, streams and seashores of these islands, instead of the motorways, car-parks and Little Chefs that blight the instincts of the traveller who is eager to commune with what is left of raw nature ...”

“... a lot of boldly going. Mostly alone, occasionally in the company of his friend and mentor the late Roger Deakin, Macfarlane made a series of highly researched journeys into the British and Irish landscape seeking those places ‘not on the road map’, seeking the ‘glimmerings of a wild consciousness’. These places range from the summit of Ben Hope in ...”

“... Richard Jefferies (Nature near London), J.A. Baker (The Peregrine), Jacquetta Hawkes (A Land) and Roger Deakin (Waterlog). It’s interesting that all these were connoisseurs of nature rather than workers with it or in it. Macfarlane’s accounts of them have a scholar’s thoroughness and also bring us close to them as people. He has visited Davidson ...”

“... however, it is increasingly able to rely mainly on grazing and natural regeneration to do the job. Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, edited from a manuscript completed before the author’s death last year, is an idiosyncratic delight. It is meditation and description, nature writing and travel writing, rooted in his Suffolk home but with excursions elsewhere in ...”

“... up between flats and office blocks at the sky over Shaftesbury Avenue and Covent Garden. The late Roger Deakin, in Waterlog, his delightful narrative of swimming round the British Isles, found this pool at one of its magical moments, with snow falling through the steam onto the swimmers, as it was doing this February. A handful of us regulars – a stage ...”

“... that a precarious balance must be kept. As the person walks (or sails, or climbs, or swims like Roger Deakin in the delightfully graphic and immediate Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain), mental notes will inevitably be scribbling themselves; the telling will be flawed if the impulse of the journey is merely to fulfil a book ...”