Fog, mist, niwl, haar, haag, roke, smog, peasouper, nebbia, nebbietta, foschia, calìgo, féth fíada, Sabrina’s veil. Laura Pashby is a connoisseur of fog, and her readers will have fog words and metaphors swirling around their minds long after they close her book. A photographer, Pashby began to research the subject having become fascinated by the visual effects of fog she had captured with her camera and its unpredictable and transformative nature. The resulting book, Chasing Fog – illustrated with her own photographs – ranges far beyond fog as weather. It is about fog in history, fog in folklore, fog in literature and painting, fog as it occurs in specific places, from the canals of Venice to the bogs of West Cork. It is also about the author herself. As Pashby loses herself in the fog, she begins to feel a paradoxical clearing of her mind and a reconnection with an essential part of her own nature. The subtitle promises ‘enchantment’, but Chasing Fog is really about the author’s quest to find herself – the phrase ‘fog-self’, borrowed from Alice Oswald’s poem ‘Mist’ and used by Pashby to describe ‘a nebulous, hazy, free and drifting version of myself’, tolls through the book like a bell.

Over nine brisk chapters, the author describes her journeys around Britain, Ireland and Venice to find fog and to explore the mysterious changes it can bring to a place. Pashby spent her early childhood on the edge of Dartmoor, which is where, she suspects, her obsession with fog really began. When ‘the moor’s call becomes impossible to ignore’, she sets off there, determined to immerse herself in the landscape. She describes swimming in a clear natural pool high up at the isolated Foggintor Quarry, walking in ancient Wistman’s Wood – fabled as a haunt of ghosts and druids – and being enveloped in fog on the moor near the Nine Maidens. Although the site is not far from her accommodation, the episode is profoundly unsettling. On her return, she reflects on how these experiences made her question her habitual, unified sense of self: ‘my fog-self is still out there. She floats in the quarry, she drifts across the moor, she hides behind the trees in the wood on the hill. She is a mist-wraith, a thing of breath and cloud – forever waiting for me.’

While the prosaic dangers of fog are never forgotten – there is plenty here on shipwrecks, fatal falls and simply getting lost – a theme that runs through the book is its uncanniness. ‘To me, fog seems to open up a rift in reality,’ Pashby writes in her chapter on