In his preface to Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way (2012), Simon Armitage explains: "In the summer of 2010 I decided to walk the Pennine Way. I wanted to write a book about the North, one that could observe and describe the land and its people, and one that could encompass elements of memoir as well as saying something about my life as a poet." (Armitage 2012, 4). The publication of this memoir/travelogue, with its subsequent companion series of site-specific poems Stanza Stones (2013), coincides with the confirmation that a new wave of nature writing which has swept over British bookshops: 2012 also marks the publication of another popular tale of writing and walking by critic and essayist Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways. Both authors attempt, in these separate accounts of long hikes and walks, to recapture the experience of walking along ways that are either ancient, dangerous or culturally significant; such an approach to writing and the land corresponds to what one may call a new ethos of nature writing. By walking "in the ‘wrong’ direction" (Armitage 2012, 5), Simon Armitage offers to transforms what might have been a classically individual and subjective experience into a collective one, by appealing to his readers and offering to ‘sing’ for his supper by reading poetry; the shared dimension of the text, even as Armitage tells us about his own experience in an often humorous tone, corresponds to the fluidity of the medium he has chosen since the final book (and the second part of the diptych, Stanza Stones), turns this project into a surprising object. Simon Armitage then exposes his unusual position in the renewal of a rapidly-changing publishing ecosystem, becoming a modern-day ‘troubadour’ (a true to form Neo-medievalist occurence). The resulting book thus embodies the complex position held by the new Poet Laureate in his attempt to connect land and poetry in a down-to-earth manner which can be compared with the growing proximity between the body of the author and the book as object in contemporary publishing which Sarah Brouillette has described as the presence of "little separation […] between the thing for sale and the working body behind it." (Brouillette 50). I therefore propose to examine in my paper how Simon Armitage’s Walking Home and Stanza Stones correspond to this new ethos of nature writing.