Dreaming of cowsheds

In 1999, Adam Nicolson published a very good book called Perch Hill: A New Life, about his escape from London and a break-down, after his divorce and a nasty mugging, to a farm in the Sussex Weald, close to Kipling’s house, Batemans.

In 1999, Adam Nicolson published a very good book called Perch Hill: A New Life, about his escape from London and a break-down, after his divorce and a nasty mugging, to a farm in the Sussex Weald, close to Kipling’s house, Batemans.

It’s one of the great descriptions of what embedding yourself deep in a patch of the countryside is like, truthful about both its solaces and its frustrations. ‘The Weald has found its Thoreau,’ said Richard Mabey. ‘This is Sussex’s answer to Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence,’ said Alain de Botton. Each according to his own.

As a young man, Nicolson had owned some small, uninhabited islands in the Hebrides given to him by his father Nigel, and he so loved being there, in a wholly natural world, that he has felt ever since ‘essentially shaped by those island times’.