Near our house on the Derbyshire-Staffordshire border is a place called Wolf Edge. It is a raven-haunted slope set to the sounds of curlew song in high spring and I visit it regularly, not least because I imagine that within the deep peat soil there is some remembrance of the site’s eponymous predator, and the thought thrills me.

A similar emotion appears to have gripped Derek Gow, and has led him to locate, over several decades, as many references to British and Irish wolves as possible. He has done a great job of researching the lore surrounding these much mythologised creatures and has unearthed plenty of arcane material – such as the role of wolves in children’s play (a schoolyard game called ‘Woof and lambs’); the millennia-long trade in their skins (738 passed through Bristol port in 1558 alone); and their bizarre links to medicine. The heart was apparently sovereign against epilepsy and dried wolf penis served as a cure for impotence.

Gow extended his search overseas, and reminds us of Dina Sanichar, the tragic wolf boy of Secundra, Uttar Pradesh, said to have been a model for Kipling’s Mowgli. He never learned to speak but made sounds similar to a wolf. Closer to home is the barely credible story of Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja. Now aged 77, he was abandoned as a child and was found after several years living with wolves in Spain’s Sierra Morena. He howled and bit his captors when first rescued, and has since claimed that his years spent with the pack were the happiest of his life.

Gow discusses one English place name that has particular resonance. Woolpit in Suffolk has no link to sheep but draws on the special excavations once used to catch wolves, reflecting an almost national fixation with ultimately exterminating the species. He spends a good deal of time running to ground those moments when the wolf flame went out in parts of our islands. The process was said to have culminated in 1743 beside the River Findhorn in the Scottish Highlands when Dougal MacQueen plunged his hunter’s dirk through the throat of the last wolf on British soil. Others dismiss this account on the basis that the beast had already been lost as a viable species a century earlier.

That Gow manages to bring fresh insights even to this oft-repeated tale is a measure of his overall achievement. There have been several books on the fate of British wolves, but this is the best. It combines the right concern for factual detail with an earthy disregard of romance and a great deal of swashbuckling humour. But when Gow considers whether Britain is a fit place for the reintroduction of wolves – and, after all, 17,000 wolves now live across 28 European nations – the reader feels bound to take him seriously. He points out that, worldwide, wolves have been found to take 1.4 human lives a year, whereas dogs kill about 59,000. The impact of both predators, however, is dwarfed by that of the brute we let live outside our homes. In an average year, cars cause a million times more human fatalities than wolves. Our fears, it seems, have few genuine links to the risks posed.

Gow also has a walk-on part in the superbly written Groundbreakers, described by its author, Chantal Lyons, as ‘the infamous rewilder’. She is, in truth, as great an enthusiast for bringing back wild boar as Gow is for reintroducing wolves. But she has a trickier role as defence counsel since her totem animal is already widespread among us.

The wee stripy boar piglets may be known affectionately as ‘humbugs’, but large males weigh anything up to a quarter of a tonne. The species occurs in Eurasian forests, from Japan and China right through to the English Channel, and at one time its range extended over much of this country. Its exalted place in field sports and reputation for fine eating led to intense hunting which, coupled with habitat loss, had uprooted boar as a British native by the late Middle Ages.

Yet the species is highly intelligent, and farmed stock have recently escaped various forms of captivity and seeded feral populations in Scotland, the Home Counties and especially in the Forest of Dean. Lyons visited the historic forest as a student to research public attitudes to this renewed presence – by 2014 the boar population was estimated at 800 – and gradually got hooked.

She has persisted in Groundbreakers with the original listening exercise of her student days and shows herself to have a good ear for people’s testimony as well as a gift for sharp writing. Her book works well simply as a celebration of that local community and its atmospheric English landscape. But her central concern is undoubtedly the pigs themselves – as creative constituents of the forest, as progenitors of both ancient myth and modern story, and most especially as an expression of unfettered otherness in an overly tame English countryside.

She explores most of this through a careful audit of their truffling impacts on the Gloucestershire landscape. Boar apparently improve tree regeneration, plant dispersal and soil quality, while aiding fungal communities that are crucial to healthy woodland. On the debit side are the creatures’ penchant for eating bluebell bulbs and the fear their unpredictability creates among locals. Lyons scrupulously explores these more negative responses and gives due recognition to the balancing act left to the rangers of Forestry England who manage the area and have reduced pig numbers to 400 – which seems to have satisfied all but diehards on both sides.

It is impossible not to see in these two books creatures with a shared heritage. The wolf and wild boar are partners to real landscapes, where they are at once profoundly integrated and deeply creative. Both animals enrich the places they occupy, the wolf by keeping herbivores in check and preventing overgrazing. They also dwell in the British imagination, where they are ancient objects of excitement and fear. Will we as a nation ever reconcile one with the other?