In 2005 Robert Macfarlane, the best selling author of books on landscape, nature, place, people and language, proposed that a library of the classics of nature writing from Britain and Ireland should be established and published. Such a library, "would not kowtow to the doubtful idea of a 'national' literature. Instead, it would be a series of local writings, which concentrated on particular places, and which worked always to individuate, never to generalise." Any book to be included in the series, he suggested, would "firstly have to evince the belief that the fate of humanity and the fate of nature are inseparable. Secondly, it would have to imply, however obliquely, that the natural environment must be approached not with a view to conquest, acquisition and short-term use, but according to the principles of restraint and reciprocity."

Skywalls was one of his picks of the nominated titles.