Adrian Bell's travels through East Anglia and lowland Britain capture the character of the countryside before modern agriculture altered the landscape and changed forever the way we eat and live.
In the mid 1930s, Dorothy Hartley travelled England by car and bicycle gathering material for the book. Published as a companion volume to Food in England, the book is a portrait not only of the rural
Climate change is eroding the familiar pattern of the seasons, so we turn instinctively to the life cycle of herbaceous plants to guide us through the year. The growing, flowering, seeding and dying b
The slender-billed curlew, Numenius tenuirostris, "the slim beak of the new moon," is one of the world's rarest birds. It once bred in Siberia and wintered in the Mediterranean basin, passing through
Written in simple, direct prose, Farmer's Glory is a portrait of a farming life in southern England and in western Canada, and is a model of the genre: warm and humorous as well as an astute and unfli
More than fifty years on, The Fat of the Land remains an important and inspiring book and retains its power to make us think carefully about our own lives. Complete with Sally Seymour’s illustrations
Silbury Hill, the largest pre-historic mound in Europe, like Stonehenge, has inspired and perplexed people for generations. Adam Thorpe, author of the highly influential book Ulverton, reflects on wha
Lockley was a hugely influential figure in natural history and was lauded by Sir Peter Scott and Richard Adams, the author ofWatership Down, who also used him as a character in his book The Plague Dog
In March 1913, as the storm clouds of the Great War gathered, Edward Thomas took a bicycle ride from Clapham to the Quantock Hills in Somerset. The great poet recorded his journey with photographs and
Oliver Rackham, the outstanding botanical writer of his generation, has written the first history and ecology of the ash tree, exploring its place in human culture, explaining Ash disease, and arguing
An anti-pastoral memory, the real life of English farm labourers in a time of great agricultural change. Unsentimental and honest, this is an unforgettable account of life during the first half of the
A century before Charles Darwin, decades before the French Revolution, Gilbert White began his lifelong habit of measuring and observing the world around his Hampshire home. Daily rainfall levels and
Through the story of one man, Caleb Bawcombe, a shepherd whose flocks graze the Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset borders, we meet men and women of humble birth, poachers, gypsies, farmers and labourers
During the early 1970s Richard Mabey explored crumbling city docks and overgrown bomb-sites, navigated inner city canals and car parks, and discovered there was scarcely a nook in our urban landscape
Acutely sensitive to rhythms of the countryside, Edward Thomas's lyrical, passionate, and sometimes political writing merges natural history with folk culture, and gives us a free-form record of the f
Beyond the Fell Wall is a distillation of the author’s thoughts and observations on this particular patch of land. It is a poetic enquiry into the inanimate life of a landscape – its unheard melodies
Subjects include picking primroses, the local pub, tramps and the village flower show. With senses well attuned to her part of Southern England in the Chiltern Hills, Leighton gently explores rural cu
