The conception began as a short story written for the 1979 Milford Writer's Workshop; a novella of the same name appeared in the September 1981 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Ryhope Wood magically repels outsiders by various means, including disorientation and physical defences such as thick, impenetrable scrub, huge lakes and raging rivers.

Stephen Huxley returns from service (after recuperating from his war wounds) to see his elder brother Christian, who now lives alone in their childhood home, Oak Lodge, just on the edge of Ryhope Wood.

Stephen also meets a local man named Harry Keeton, a burn-scarred ex-RAF pilot, who encountered a similar wood when he was shot down over France and has since been trying to find a city that he saw there.

Stephen and Harry try to survey and photograph Ryhope Wood from the air, but their small plane is buffeted back by inexplicable winds each time they try to fly over the trees.

Orson Scott Card described it as "for readers who are willing to take the time and effort to let a writer evoke a whole and believable world, peopled with living characters".

[12] Dave Langford reviewed Mythago Wood for White Dwarf #58, and stated that "Powerful, impressive and magical, it deserved all manner of awards.

[9] John Howe, a modern fantasy illustrator, wrote that "Mythago Wood is a wonderful book written with great style, insight and individuality".

[14] A decade after Mythago Wood was published Brian Aldiss stated that Holdstock's books were full of ancient power, unrivalled throughout the 1980s.

[15] Mythago Wood is also noted for its pairing of sexuality and violence, and has been called “an earthy, tactile, deeply mythological tale set in an English wood.”[16] In Horror: The 100 Best Books Michael Moorcock asserts that "Holdstock avoids sentimentality ... by offering us tougher questions, moral dilemmas, an imagined world far more complex than anything found in the wood's precursors".

[18] Nicholas Riddick states that "Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood can be read as a journey into the heartland of the psyche.

[10] Brian Aldiss has written that "Ryhope Wood [is] that terrifying metaphor for our mental labyrinths" in which "phylogeny presides over ontogeny" with regard to an individual's history and destiny.

[21] The interior of Ryhope wood is a pre-Christian British setting in which pagan and shamanistic rituals are common, and one scholar notes that death and mortal remains are prominent and disturbing part of these works.

[9] According to one modern Tolkien scholar, Mythago Wood and Lavondyss have an internally consistent framework of principles, and deal with the traditions of the British Isles with originality and deftness by incorporating its unwritten culture.

These elements of culture include Morris dances, the Green Man, shamanism, Neolithic tribespeople and pre-Roman Celtic traditions.