LEAVES FROM A NATURE NOTEBOOK: ENGLAND

A NATURAL HISTORY

A swansong….On 3rd October my book ‘England, A Natural History’ is published. This will be my last full-sized book on nature. Below is the book’s introduction. I’m doing talks about the book. The dates are also below. Maybe see you? **** ‘This is my swansong. By which I mean my last full- size book on Nature (NB the majuscule ‘N’). I wanted to say something, beginning with The Wild Life in 2010, and with this book I have found my last word. That ‘something’ was an exaltation of the remaining traditional English countryside, such as hay meadows (Meadowland ) and ponds (Still Water ), with a plea for connectedness with Nature. Very quickly, the imperative in my books switched from what Nature can do for us, to what we can do for Nature. A running theme, with variations, has been the necessity of exploring the means, the manners by which humans and Nature can co exist in these crowded isles; The Running Hare and The Wood are records of experiments in small- scale retro- farming and, simultaneously, the restoration of Nature in a landscape deadened by industrialized agriculture. And in every book I learned, relearned, the humility of equality: we humans vaunt ourselves as Homo sapiens sapiens (‘doubly wise humans’) but we are not so different from the fox, the rabbit, the sheep. All the above books are set in a farmland corner of England, south-west Herefordshire, where England runs into Wales. They are close studies of Nature and place, which is a very English style of nature writing, beginning with the Reverend Gilbert White in Selborne in the eighteenth century. (Actually, nature writing is very English; as a genre it’s a poor, thin thing in Continental Europe.) But then, one day, sitting in the queue for passport control at Dover, I happened to flick through those odd wasteland pages at the back of the passport: they were scenes of quintessentially British habitats, English especially, outside my familiar farmland. Moor, Lake, Park, Coast, and so forth. I realized in that moment I wanted to know those places, really know them; the animals that lived there, the way twilight settled there, the feel of the wind on my face in midwinter, their particular scent. Almost by definition, agriculture – my day job – prohibits extended periods away from the farm, so immersing myself for months at a time in each habitat was impossible. The alternative has been time grabbed over years – the hour here, the day there – and the drawing on memory: the steady accretion of knowledge, in the way an oak in the wood gathers lichen and moss, the rock on the coast becomes barnacle-studded. Minutes stolen on the Thames Estuary, between visits to family and book research, aggregated into months. There is a very simple test for knowing a place: the recognition of a particular individual bird, animal; the particularly cheery rock pipit on the wintry Cornish coast, that fallow deer at Richmond Park with the burst of snowflake blotches on its haunch, and the estuarine bank where the sea aster mining bees nest. I wanted not to observe from outside, but to be a part of the scene. There is more, of course. Sometimes I wondered particularly about iconic English fauna and flora (red deer, beech trees), although generally, under the influence of the Victorian naturalist W. H. Hudson, I have simply ‘wandered’ these English habitats in a personal recording of what was encountered with eyes, ears, nose wide open, without discrimination. The stoop of a peregrine can achieve a spectacular 242mph, making it the fastest of all living things, but is this less marvellous than the ability of the fat wood pigeon down Church Lane to produce for its brood milk similar to mammalian milk? Everything in Nature is worthy of admiration. I have sought, like Hudson, to be ‘a traveller in small things’, and assess too the state of ‘Natural England’ in my time, the duty of all practitioners of nature writing. And it is no spoiler to say I begin this book where the old Thames Estuary does flow, amid refineries and sewage works, and end it on the tourist-besotted Cornish coast, and the both of them carried on their flow a buoy of hope. And the things I have seen in between these places. I should declare my influences, the cultural ‘goods’ I carry. They are the works of the Reverend White, John Clare, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas, BB, and I make no apologies for them being people of the past. They all believed in Nature. I do, too. I should declare my status. My family have farmed for biblical donkey’s years, and much of this book, including the hub chapter, ‘Home Farm’, was written while I practised agriculture in England. Almost the entirety of the English landscape is farmed land (even the seemingly ‘wild’ bits such as heath) so I had an easy passage into appreciation due to familiarity. And farming is grounding. But some notes were written up in France. Which gave perspective. Always, I tried to show the Nature of England (NB the majuscule ‘N’)’’ **