Gossip from the Forest by Sara Maitland: review If you go down to the woods today, you're likely to find some literary type in the undergrowth in search of narrative. A host of modern writers of outstanding prose - including Roger Deakin, Robert Macfarlane and now Sara Maitland - has found inspiration in the wildwood. In her latest book, Maitland sets out to explore the connection between woods and words. Sometimes alone, but more often accompanied by a fellow writer, local expert or by her son, Adam Lee, who took the monochrome photographs with which the book is illustrated, Maitland spent a calendar year visiting the forests of England and Scotland - from Kielder Forest to the Forest of Dean, and the all-but-vanished Great North Wood, whose fragmentary remains can be found by taking a red London bus to Dulwich, in south-east London. Woven into Maitland's journeys are accounts of the European fairy stories that sprang from the forest: "I believe that the great stretches of forest in northern Europe, with their constant seasonal changes, their restricted views, their astonishing biological diversity, their secret gifts and perils and the knowledge that you have to go through them to get to anywhere else, created the themes and ethics of the fairy tales we know best." Maitland herself grew up with fairy stories, particularly the folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm. She argues that the nationalistic tendency for which the Grimms are often criticised offers valuable evidence of the link between northern European storytelling and the love of forests which continues to thrive. On her walks in the woods Maitland explores the human and natural history of the landscape alongside the more fantastical narratives of folklore: so a trip to the New Forest in bluebell time, during which she encounters a small adder, leads her to a consideration both of the habits of adders, and of the role of snakes in fairy tales, where they appear rarely and often decline to engage with humans. Maitland punctuates her richly digressive text with mildly subversive retellings of familiar fairy tales: Rumpelstiltskin gives his side of the story, Hansel and Gretel become middle-aged, the seven dwarves acquire parenting skills, and so on. She ends with a plea for the preservation of the ancient forest and its equally ancient narrative tradition. When a child's birth is registered, together with a birth certificate they should also be given a book of fairy stories... At the same time, she argues, everyone should be "assigned" to a tract of forest with which they could have a special imaginative relationship. It sounds whimsical. But actually, as a way of keeping alive the old magic of forest and fairy tale, why not? Gossip From the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairy Tales Sara Maitland Granta, £20, 368pp