Chasing Fog: Finding Enchantment in a Cloud

by Laura Pashby

‘I must go in; the fog is rising’

Liminal, elusive and ultimately disappearing - far from just being a meteorological condition, fog is a state of mind; a plot device; a shortcut to a dank and spooky setting.  As with these words from Emily Dickinson, her final written words before her death, it can signify a shift of mood or a transformation.

Chasing Fog is a captivating meditation on fog and mist. Laura Pashby hunts for fog, walks and swims in it, explores its role in literature, mythology and history and also its environmental significance. There has been a 50 per cent drop in 'fog events' in the past fifty years, fog is drifting away without us noticing and the ecological impact could be calamitous.

As she journeys to the foggiest places she can find, Pashby immerses herself in Dartmouth’s dangerous fog, searches for the Scottish haar, experiences Venice’s magical mist, tell us the myths behind the River Severn’s fog and the shipwrecks it hides. It’s about how we see the world and ourselves, and how a simple cloud of water droplets can make everything – including us – feel different.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, Memoir, Biography, Audiobook, Essays

252 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 29, 2024

Reviews

[Katrina Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A love letter to the ephemeral and transformative magic of fog. Laura, with a photographer's eye, details the beauty that is often overlooked by this weather type. She feels an elemental connection which drives an obsession to chase fog around places including her local Severn Vale, the East Anglian Fens, Snowdonian mountain tops and Venice canals. In unexpected ways she witnesses fog interact with the various landscapes and conditions.
This is a personal piece of writing about the effect of fog on herself, the sensation of permeability with the natural world around her. It is also a fog-linked exploration of mythology, history, literature, art, witchcraft, ecology and climate.
I found myself absorbed in the writing, enjoying the stories she learnt on her journeys and the philosophical musings which, surely, would be best thought about on a foggy walk through the woods.



Photographer's eye and attention to detail and colour
Storytelling quality for a non-fiction book
Writers of note and research referenced nicely throughout
Personal and nostalgic to the author
Travel in both place and time

Waffling memory notes to myself: River disasters, fog-bow, lighthouse keepers, Purton hulks, mythology, photography, climate change, local Glos/Cotswold history, artists, Dartmoor, webcam and map longing, wild winter swimming, being pixie-led, wistman's wood, distinctions between cloud and fog and mist, Alice Oswald's "fog self", permeability with our environment, Snowdonia, magical stories of weather spells, mountain rescues, getting lost, lichens as a fog map, time slips, fear of the unknown, East Anglian fens, childhood stories of haunted lands, liquid borders, resources and land use, drainage following flooding followed by uprisings, moon love, fen ghost stories and charms, Ealy witch trials, birdlife in RSPB reserve, yay eels, history buried in land, ritual and spiritual significance of water, loss and haunting of her childhood best friend, Devon and Cornwall, lighthouse and foghorn, lens technology, fog measures taken by visibility, shipwrecks, the sennen "whooping" fog, salty fog that merges, foghorn requiem, painted seascapes, Daphne du Maurier's warnings, surprise summer sea fog, bird song fog arlarms, Edinburgh, Haar convection fog, cloud nets to collect water, smell map, witchcraft and weather magic, north sea trail, storm casting, north Berwick witch trials, climate action as weather magic?, Charles Wilson physicist and fog chamber, Ben Nevis observatory, loss of seasons, great grey man folktale, Laura's own crystal spell jar, Beara peninsula Ireland, sixth senses via meditation, thin places, stone circles, moss and bog, human water based bodies, water's memory theory, unpredictability by scientists and Laura, River Thames and Dickens' London Fog, damp Roman Londidium, industrial city smogs, Victorian yellow smoke-fog mix, gallery visit for urban fogscapes, Dracula in sneaky fog mode, mudlarking in river mist, poisonous smog crossing into homes, 1952 smog then clean air act, frost fairs on the frozen Thames, river source, Venice, revisiting with past self, reflections, climate change and rising seas, relief of the concealing effect, to be lost and anonymous, metamorphosis of self, Turner's paintings, November full frost/fog moon, traces of fog remain, canal walk epilogue, fog self, likeminded community, changing weather patterns, climate anxiety and fears,

You can tell Laura is a reader, mentioning books and authors: Conan Doyle, Alice Oswald, John Berger, Guy Shrubsole, Kathleen Jaimie, MacFarlane, Mary Oliver, Susan Cooper, Marie Trevelyan, Rebecca Solnit, Nan Shepherd, Sharon Blackie, Francis Prior, Annie Proux, Tom Cox, Daphne due Maurier, Alice Tarbuck, Kerri ni Docherty, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Bram Stoker, Lara Maiklem, Woolf, Jan Morris, Lauren Elkin

Had a few niggles with some of the more tenuous links and repetition, but I enjoyed this book. Would have liked more environmental and scientific content, but am content with this as a travel/memoir/essay piece.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

A middle class creative has a collection of experiences they find interesting and believes everyone else will find it equally as interesting.
I was super keen for this book - beautifully designed, with a really interesting premise. Coming from a Devonian valley, I too love fog! However, this book just seemed threadbare and unmoored. The idea of fog wasn’t enough to carry all the 200 odd pages, and the writer drew from so many different sources in a random manner that it seemed like she was pulling at any threads she could find. It wasn’t a natural history, nor a cultural history, it wasn’t a memoir nor a travelogue, it was a little bit of everything and nothing at all which felt flakey and unsatisfying. The excessive use of literary/flowery adjectives also just dulled the style.

[Laurence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Does exactly what you would expect - tells you about the author chasing fog around the world, in love with it. Beautiful imagery and phrasing, lots of folk lore and mythology. 4.5 stars.

[Naomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I Loved Laura Pashby book - A beautiful ode to fog, nature, uncanny, unknown

[Sophy H · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a beautifully poetic book by Laura Pashby about all things fog. I seem to have ventured into a weather journey this month on the book front and I'm loving it.

I too am a sucker for fog, I find it haunting, eerie yet strangely beautiful; in fact where we live it often gets named Dragon's Breath for where it sits in the valley.

I found the writing here engaging, fascinating and informative. Laura has a real ease with the way she imparts her knowledge and experience to the reader. I especially love her black and white photographs of foggy landscapes that serve as chapter headers.

I love how everything is covered here from folklore, fairies and ley lines to lighthouses, bargemen, shipwrecks to moss, lichen and estuary birds. There is a real mix of subjects covered.

Needless to say, this book is a firm favourite and is going straight on my shelf named just that.

A beautiful 5 star read.

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful evocative book.
Chasing fog is a book that will take you around England and beyond in the quest of finding fog, and more.
There is nature, history and magic.. Laura writes beautifully and I just got lost in her words, temporarily forgetting my surrounding, and finding myself chasing fog with her.

I have grown up surrounded by fog (in the Po Valley), I have grown up to be wary of fog, especially when driving. But, as a photographer, I also chased fog- which in the past years has become more elusive.. I loved seeing the photos at the beginning of each chapter.

[Ruth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmm not sure this works. In theory this would be a perfect subject for me but it seems rather lacking in depth. It was as though the author spent a year googling fog and then wrote up every reference to it. I’m not here to read what well known authors said, I’m here to experience this author’s writing. I guess a red flag would be she has an instagram where she takes photos of herself in mist. She talks quite a bit about instagram which is quite a vacuous platform. It’s not badly written, just rather shallow. Sorry.

[David Steele · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an evocative book, by which I mean, it's the kind of book that conjures images in the mind as you read it. For me, the foremost image in my mind is of a middle aged, middle class housewife (who normally attends guided yoga sessions on a Wednesday and vegan cookery classes on a Friday) sitting in a church hall for her monthly book group, closing her eyes in ecstasy as the author reads passages from her latest essay on fog.
I can imagine a whole room of these women, enraptured, listening with gasps of appreciation to the author's descriptions of the "quotidian horror of the sea's dark plunder" putting their hands to their bosom as she speaks of places where "weeds blow in the wind and crepuscular rays slice the sky". I can imagine the finger-tip clapping. The beatific smiles. The eager nods of encouragement.
In me, however, as much as I thought I was in the mood for something a little more spiritual, I can at least be grateful for the full-face workout this book gave me - the eye rolls, the teeth grinding, the drawn back lips. I'm sure it's taken years off me.
It's a pity, really, because this is a perfectly good book that does what it says on the tin. The subject matter is genuinely fascinating, and the author does a great job of her fieldwork and background reading. I mean, if you didn't care about what the author had to say about fog, why buy a book with this title?
In fairness, I think this was more a case of me not being emotionally ready for this book, rather than there being anything wrong with it.

[Fortytwo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional nature writing. Combining lyrical observations on the complexities and wonders of fog and mist in a variety of settings, with diary-memoir recollections. Highly recommended. Will inspire you to seek out fog yourself.

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laura's writing is magical. She writes with such tenderness and love. She takes such care.

It's so hard to pin down the liminal, that in between space, neither here nor there, but that is what Laura does in this collection of essays about fog. I love that she sees her other 'fog' self as someone worth exploring and goes after her with such passion. Handling another self, a shadowy, liminal self that exists between worlds is hard. It requires both strength and delicacy and that's what Laura is so good at. This is a book I will return to again and again.

[Julie Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finding enchantment in a cloud. A lovely journey through a mysterious foggy landscape.

[Clare · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic. I felt so at ease, my mind quietened when I was ready this book. I loved it.

[Sigune · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s pity that the book has only black and white photographs at the beginning of every chapter. I expected beautiful coloured ones like on the cover of the book.
I liked Laura’s enthusiasm for fog and the idea of a fog-self. She succeeds to describe fog in many ways. I find it unnecessary that she sometimes adds a similar description by a famous author. This contributes to my impression that the narrative does not flow organically but is rather constructed . Her nature writing often reads like an exercise in a nature writing workshop: write down what you see, hear, smell, taste, feel at a certain site.
Laura did a lot of research about the stories real or mythical which belong to the appearance of fog in the places she visits.
It’s an enjoyable book about a difficult subject. You get to know her buoyant way of moving around from places to literature and to stories. Often family accompanies her.

[Violet · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 rounded down.

Overall a pleasant read, similar enough to a few nature books I have seen published in the UK in the recent years. I did think it lacked a bit of depth and was enjoyable musings to read but felt a bit superficial at times, and sometimes repetitive. A very short book still worth reading.

Free ARC sent by Netgalley.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each chapter featuring a different type of fog in a different location was so interesting! The author's personal experience of each location helps the reader to immerse themselves, along with historical & folklore stories and beautiful nature descriptions. The last chapter on Venice was a highlight -- having been there a few years ago, I could clearly picture the mystery and magic through the foggy descriptions. The short readings via video for each chapter on the author's Substack was such a lovely addition and greatly appreciated!

[Hazel R · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book. It’s winter, and it felt like the right non fiction to read. I like a mixture of science, art, history, mythology and geography. For me, this was just too repetitive (not in a poetic way) and too fanciful. Spelling a name incorrectly, and misnaming a bird species grated: small things that should have been picked up along the editing process.

[Alison Peters · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book 10 minutes at a time, enjoying all her descriptions of fog and her surroundings of the various journeys she makes. Lovely quiet read.

[Julie Nicholson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Journeys, stories, history and personal experiences within this mist-seeking book.

[Emma-Kate Haidley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel as if I have been entranced into a world of subtleties that I can begin to appreciate now that Laura Pashby has given us a gentle reminders of their occurrences

[Madds · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF
Did not keep me focused, a bit superficial. Appreciated some explanations and descriptions, the climate bits. But the rest I feel like I’m reading about someone’s life when I wanted to read about fog.
Later edit: Marie Belloc Lowndes’ name is spelled incorrectly in the book….