Countryside

One of the greatest difficulties environmental activists have always had in the war for hearts ’n’ minds is that they so often seem priggish and negative. Everyone knows what they are against (central heating, fun, cod and chips, James Delingpole etc). Fewer people know what they are for. Here, therefore, is George Monbiot’s attempt — shot through — no, positively ravished — with personal feeling — to tell us. He offers, he says, a set of ideas ‘not about abandoning civilisation but about enhancing it […] to “love not man the less, but Nature more”.’ ‘Rewilding’, in his definition, means something different from ‘stewarding the environment’ or ‘conservation’: the idea

This is a very short book recording two visits to the hills around Chideock in Dorset.In the first Robert Macfarlane and the late Roger Deakin, author of Waterlog, go searching for the ‘holloway’ in which Geoffrey Household’s hero holes up in Rogue Male. A holloway (not to be found in the OED) is, in Macfarlane’s words, ‘a sunken path, a deep & shady lane’ and, according to Household, ‘a lane not marked on the map’. The second trip, made with Macfarlane’s co-authors after Deakin’s death, revisits the holloway, and the hill-fort at the top of Pilsdon Pen. After Macfarlane’s Edward Thomas-infused account follows Dan Richards’s more subjective prose poetry describing

The idea came to me after I had just got back from South America after a long trip to Peru.  Perhaps because I was badly jetlagged, everything about England looked strange, different — and certainly worthy of as much exploration as I would give to a foreign country. The few other times I’ve ever had really bad jet lag — the sort where you walk in a trance, as if under water and sedation — have been when I’ve travelled abroad, not travelled home.  The only cure then has been total immersion in the new culture. So I felt like plunging into England — and to do so by the

Clive Aslet was the long-time editor of Country Life, and now, as its ‘Editor at Large’, is released into the environment. Clive Aslet was the long-time editor of Country Life, and now, as its ‘Editor at Large’, is released into the environment. It obviously suits him. He writes wonderfully in Villages of Britain about building materials such as mud and stud, wattle and daub, and cob, which is where our oldest houses meet African mud huts. Cob is just earth ‘that has been sieved to a fine tilth and laid over straw; water is put on it to make it sticky, and more straw laid on top’, with a seasoning

This is a book which, along with a packet of extra strong mints, deserves a place in the glove compartment of every car. This is a book which, along with a packet of extra strong mints, deserves a place in the glove compartment of every car. Any motoring trip into the British countryside, any hillside picnic or stroll will be made the more interesting with The Shell Country Alphabet to hand. In these pages you can find out about singing sand, church architecture and fossils. You may learn that heart burial was common in the Middle Ages, that marine luminescence causes ‘herrings to glow on a plate in a dark