MERLIN HANBURY-TENISON
Merlin Hanbury-Tenison is a Cornish conservationist and veteran who founded The Thousand Year Trust, Britain's rainforest charity, whose mission is to catalyse the movement to triple Britain's rainforest cover to one million acres over the next thirty years. Merlin grew up on Bodmin Moor, in a valley where a fragment of ancient Atlantic temperate rainforest still survives, and it was there, after serving three tours in Afghanistan, that he found an unexpected path to healing.
His work has been featured in National Geographic, the Guardian, and on the BBC. He is the author of Our Oaken Bones: Reviving a Family, a Farm and Britain's Ancient Rainforests, and lives in that same Cornish rainforest with his wife Lizzie, an entrepreneur and business advisor, and their two young daughters.
Our Oaken Bones: Reviving a Family, a Farm and Britain's Ancient Rainforests
Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize 2025
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After three tours in Afghanistan left him with complex PTSD, and reeling from the pain of repeated miscarriages, Merlin Hanbury-Tenison and his wife Lizzie left London behind for Cabilla, his childhood home on a Cornish hill farm deep in Bodmin Moor. There they found new battles waiting: a farm sinking into debt, his father — the explorer Robin Hanbury-Tenison — critically ill with Covid, and an extraordinary discovery in the neglected woods running through their valley — one of the UK's last surviving fragments of Atlantic temperate rainforest. As the family fell back in love with the forest Merlin had once roamed as a child, a fight began to save not only themselves, but one of the world's most endangered habitats.
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Our Oaken Bones is an honest, intimate story of renewal and nature's extraordinary power to heal — and our duty to heal it in return.
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"An enormously moving and inspiring story about war, trauma, nature and rebirth." — Dominic Sandbrook
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"Scholarly, wise, funny, charming, terrifying and thrilling." — Joanna Lumley
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"A remarkable spiritual and environmental vision." — Rory Stewart
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"Both a comfort and an inspiration." — Chloe Dalton, author of Raising Hare
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"An extraordinarily courageous, urgent and powerful book." — Isabella Tree
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"Powerfully enchanting, written with verve and imbued with hope." — Guy Shrubsole
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