A Nature Book Reader by Caught by the River

CAUGHT BY B THE RIVER

AN Nature ature Book Re R Reader ader

AN Nature ature Book Reader

INTRODUCTION by Andrew Male, deputy editor of MOJO magazine

It wasn’t a particularly profound idea but I suppose it was mine. In the middle of 2009 I noticed that alongside a reprint of Gavin Maxwell’s Ring Of Bright Water and Edward Thomas’ imagistic, lyrical and proto-green The South Country, Dovecote Press were reissuing Adrian Bell’s terriﬁc Men And The Fields. Possibly with an eye to blagging a review copy or three, I ﬁred off an overexcited email to the guys at the Caught By The River website in which I raved about Bell’s peripatetic trek across prewar lowland Britain and the book’s “romantic, melancholy eye”. It would, I added “be considered an Arcadian classic even without its beautiful John Nash illustrations...” I then suggested that CBTR should compile a list of other great, lost nature books. “A List!”, I wrote, “Yes, I know, but I do work in the magazine industry.”

So we had a few meetings and it was decided that the best way to ﬁnd out about these books was to simply ask folks in the CBTR network for their favourites. The request was for three titles with two hundred word entry on number one. Some strayed and wrote more, whilst others found themselves going on fascinating lyrical journeys as their chosen books brought back memories of childhood, past walks, old friends and yet more treasured books. All I was hoping for was a high-quality reading list from CBTR’s unique team of writers and contributors, something to add to my Amazon wishlist, perhaps. But in asking everyone choose a desert island top three I think we’ve ended up with something more; a series of lyrical, passionate essays by an astonishing cross section of writers, broadcasters, artists and enthusiasts. It

goes beyond mere book recommendations and taps into what makes great nature books so moving and profound. Here are forgotten works of children’s ﬁction tinged with dusty melancholy, dream guidebooks to holiday enlightenment, bleak accounts of hard-scrabble self-sufﬁciency that inspired 70s sitcoms, richly detailed visits to the homes of grand eccentrics, ghostly tales of men possessed by brute nature, images of chill beauty from treasured books of poetry, and profoundly rare oddities about deeply peculiar humans and animals that you’ll just want to track down for yourself. So from an original tossed-off idea, we now have this marvellous collection. Left with me, the idea would doubtless be little more than another email in need of deletion in order to free up more memory for an

ever-growing itunes folder. Given my job, I suppose I’m conditioned to do this kind of thing; making exciting discoveries and wanting to pass them on. It’s about the redistribution of knowledge, if you want to be fancy and, ever since they set up the website back in 2007, I’ve seen CBTR as kindred spirits, from that equally exciting world of books and nature. Filtered through the egalitarian philosophy, boundless enthusiasm and rock’n’roll camaraderie of CBTR this single idea has been transformed into something special. The Caught By the River Nature Book Reader will now be an ever growing feature of the CBTR website, constantly building into an archive of great writing, on great writing. It may even become a book, or two; from an idea that I doubted would really come to anything, that makes me very happy.

AN Nature ature Book Reader

JOHN ANDREWS John Andrews buys and sells vintage ﬁshing tackle for the soul

The Call of the Wild by Jack London My favourite ‘nature’ book has to be The Call of the Wild by Jack London. I saw the film aged 7 at the Palace cinema in Watford, I went with my dad and my sister and the film affected me deeply. I read the book not long afterwards. As my mate Mark, a plasterer and fishing tackle obsessive from Gloucester said the other day “Humans are shit. Dogs are much better. there’s nothing I like more than a good cuddle with my Chester”. The Call of the Wild tells the story of Buck, a much loved family pet dog who is stolen and placed into a dog sled team in Alaska where he endures and witnesses much savage cruelty. The book, written originally for children, has a simple message – trust nature and be wary of human failings. It has long been

picked apart and criticised by fucked-up liberals but despite its deep unfashionability it remains my personal favourite.

Further Reading Mr Chippy’s Last Expedition 1914-15 by Caroline Alexander

The Fishermen’s Bedside Book by BB

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SANDRA ARMISHAW Sandra Armishaw owns River Reads bookshop in Torrington

A Child Alone by Denys Watkins-Pitchford fish. His work never ceases to be sought-after by a wide audience, eager for his latest publication. Local to Devon is Trevor Beer; who again, is a writer of highly readable nature stories, but my all-time favourite is, without doubt, Denys Watkins-Pitchford, or ‘BB,’ as he is more popularly known. He was the son of a clergyman, and lived through a longlost Edwardian era. My favourite book: A Child Alone charts his development from natureloving child with a keen observation of all creatures, including butterflies, birds and fish, to an artist of evocative scraperboards and oils, and writer of best-selling nature books. Without doubt, Yates and

‘BB’ shared that magical quality of inspired writing which ensures that their work will transcend generations, and take its rightful place in literary history.

Denys Watkyns-Pitchford

Being asked to list my top three favourite nature writers really set me thinking. Not because I don’t have a choice; I do, because my husband and I run a bookshop specialising in angling and nature books and under that umbrella, nestles the angling icon, Chris Yates. He is essentially a writer of ﬁshing books which also embrace elemental forces in nature. His last book, Out of the Blue (Hamish Hamilton, 2008) was a ‘must-read’ for lovers of his work. Chris is one of those rare writers who can stimulate your senses to the point where, when he describes the sun on your back, you can feel its warmth; smell the brine of a restless ocean, and be dazzled by the gleaming scales of a freshly-caught

Further Reading Out of the Blue by Chris Yates

Nature Watch 2 by Trevor Beer

AN Nature ature Book Reader

LAURA BEATTY Laura Beatty is most commonly found is places of dense vegetation and mud

The Shepherd’s Calendar by John Clare When I was a child, nature was called ‘outside’ and it was where everything exciting happened – the river, for a start, harvesting by a full moon, stubble fires, bulls. It was about exploring and swapping knowledge – where the swallow’s nest was – in the gypsy caravan, in the junkyard – where the sticklebacks were, or the bullheads, how to unpack an owl pellet and look at the needle bones inside. We collected pen knives and showed each other the blades and we built fires and collapsing shelters. But it was also a place that was bigger than our knowledge, the place of animal secrets and of magic, of a power that we didn’t question and that had us in its grip. So my first books were books that understood these two things,

the importance of knowledge and practicality, and this apprehension of wildness: My Side of the Mountain by Jean George, about a boy who runs away to the Catskill mountains, tames a hawk and lives in a hollow tree; The Little Grey Men by BB; Bevis, the Story of a Boy by Richard Jeffries. Growing up was to move, without noticing it, away from the ﬁelds and streams and the world of the animals into the world of people – to come indoors for good. Most of us don’t belong in nature any more. We just visit it. We put on special clothes and go to see it at week ends or in the holidays, to excercise and to unwind, and then we come back inside again. So my favourite books now reﬂect that dislocation. The Spell of the Sensuous by David

Abram, is a compelling exploration of what we have lost, in terms of myth and primitive culture. If I can take it I re-read The Peregrine by J.A. Baker, which among many other things is a beautiful love letter to an alien species. But best of all is John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, a series of long poems that take you month by month through the year. John Clare inhabited his landscape and his writing has the springy, from the mud up, grown quality of the natural world as it really is. It’s teeming with life. It’s full of weather and thick Northamptonshire language and ﬂowers, birds, frogs, hornets. Most of all it reminds me of what it felt like to be seven, live and on the loose, in the world of the woods.

Further Reading The Pereguine by J.A. Baker

The Spell Of The Sensuous by David Abram

AN Nature ature Book Reader

JON BERRY When not ﬁshing or writing, Jon Berry is a school teacher

Wild Animal Books by Père Castor I don’t know when these books were first published – an uneducated guess suggests the ‘forties or early ‘fifties – but I saw my first copy much more recently. They are French children’s books, translated by Rose Fyleman for the British market, and describe the life cycles of various animals. There is the expected anthropomorphism; the Kingfishers are called Martin and Martine, the hare answers to Frou and the squirrel is known to his friends as Mischief – but aside from that the author, known only on the cover as Lida, offers faithful and unsentimental descriptions of the lives and habits of each creature. If Walt Disney did much to damage children’s’ grasp of nature in the postwar world – and I will argue

to my last breath that he did – then these books would have gone some way towards redressing the balance by offering a natural history that was both palatable and accurate. In Pere Castor’s forest, the deer don’t have American accents or Liz Taylor’s eyelashes, and are all the better for it...

Further Reading Highland Birds

by Desmond Nethersole Thompson

The Pereguine by J.A. Baker

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BILL DRUMMOND

EVA IBBOTSON

Bill Drummond is the author of 45 and 17

Eva Ibbotson is the author of many magical adventures

The Life of the Robin by David Lack

King Solomon’s Ring by Konrad Lorenz

I am afraid that I will not be able to give the time to what you are inviting me to take part in. I am overloaded with commitments as it is at the

Eva Ibbotson’s choices are King Solomon’s Ring by Konrad Lorenz; A Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell and

moment. Sounds a great idea. The top of my list would probably be David Lack’s groundbreaking classic The Life Of The Robin (1943).

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

AN Nature ature Book Reader

TOM FORT Mediocre ﬁsherman, ageing cricketer, ham-ﬁsted apprentice pianist

The Fisherman’s Bedside Book by BB No ﬁshing anthology has ever approached BB’s masterpiece. Its glory was to bring together the best of ‘classical’ writing – Negley Farson, H.T.Sheringham, J.W. Hills, Arthur Ransome etc – with the testimony of humbler members of the brotherhood. J.L. “Wormy” Webb’s account of his 12 pound barbel from “a spot opposite the third meadow below the French Horn Hotel at Sonning” is immortal; Albert Buckley’s record carp from Mapperley not far behind. If my house caught ﬁre I would rescue my cricket bat, my Fisherman’s Bedside Book and – naturally – my wife and children before anything else.

Of my other choices, Luard’s little book is a masterpiece of modesty and self-deprecating humour. McGuane’s is the best ﬁshing memoir of the last ten years.

Further Reading Fishing Fortunes and Misfortunes by G.D. Luard The Longest Silence by Thomas McGuane.

A Nature Book Reader

JIMI GOODWIN Jimi Goodwin is a singer in a band and a frustrated hip hop overlord

The Runaways by Victor Canning I refound and rejoiced in these books again after research on the net a few years back. Along with Kes , which I still vividly remember getting for my ninth birthday, alongside a pair of cheap binoculars, this was the first nature fiction that I encountered. The Runaways was the first in Victor Canning’s Smiler trilogy which followed the adventures of teenage runaway Samuel Miles. Other books in the series were The Flight of the Grey Goose and lastly The Painted Tent. This first book sees Smiler wrongly accused and convicted of mugging an old lady in his native Bristol and deals with his escape from reform school. His dream is to make his way to Southampton to meet his dad, a merchant seaman, when his ship comes back to port, to help him clear

his name. That isn’t for nine months so Smiler, only 14, has to survive until then and keep out of the authorities’ reach. He hitches and walks and ends up near Salisbury Plain where he hides in a barn. At the same time as Smiler escapes so does Yarra, a young female cheetah from Longleat Safari Park. It’s a little 1950s “Gosh, thanks Mr!“ in places but some of the writing and his descriptions of wild animals and nature are really moving and whenever I’m down or want to regress and try and reclaim some innocence these books do it for me.

Further Reading Kes by Barry Hines The Observer Book of British Birds

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ANDREW GREIG Andrew Greig is a writer of poetry, novels and non fIction

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd The Living Mountain is truly astounding. Written in the Forties, it conveys and comprehends the sheer physicality of our being, one encountered in the mountains. The Living Mountain is a praise of how we see the world in and through our own bodies. Shepherd emphasizes the sensuous and the sensory. For her transcendence is entirely immanent, and spirituality inextricable from the sensual. over years of wandering in the Cairngorms, she comes to understand and honour both the otherness of the natural world and the completeness of our participation in it. Along with Neil Gunn, she embodies an early and unexpected Scottish Zen, hard-headed, a kind of transcendent materialism. She renders these insights

in anecdote, in moments of experience, and for me summons again the lifegiving presentness we seek and ďŹ nd in physical participation in the greater world. The hereness of here, the nowness of now: the living mountain.

Further Reading Collected Poems by Norman MacCaig

The Shining Mountain by Pete Boardman

AN Nature ature Book Reader

NIGEL HOUSE Co-owner of Rough Trade shops and farmer’s son

Shell Country Alphabet by Geoffrey Grigson

Just recently reissued, this book is ideal to have in your glove compartment on a jaunt out into the countryside. In these times of recession and more with people staying in this country for their holidays it illuminates the countryside that we too often speed through. What I really love about this book is that it is obviously his vision and passion, and so has extra emphasis on his home counties of Wiltshire and Cornwall; it is also occasionally spiky and pithy, which adds to the feelings of actually having him sitting next to you in the car. I didn’t know about W. G. Hoskins’ Making of the English Landscape until I came to London in 1977, for punk rock and geography

at university (in that order), but it was on our reading list and it has become one of my favourite books. I read it again recently having moved to near Steeple Barton which is where Grigson was living when he wrote it, and it is still fascinating, even though he had no love for the 20th century.

Further Reading Making of the English Landscape by W.G. Hoskins

Hamlyn Guide to Minerals, Rocks and Fossils

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RICHARD KING Richard King is the editor of Loops, a bi-annual journal

The Fat of the Land by John Seymour When John Seymour sat down to write The Fat of the Land at the end of the 1950s, he would have shrugged off as ridiculous any suggestion that his story of converting a gamekeeper’s cottage in Suffolk would become a textbook for the trip back to nature that thousands would embark on in the next two decades. The Fat of The Land is a rambling and wonderfully stubborn description of a family trying to live off ﬁve acres of farmland and little else. Illustrated beautifully by Seymour’s wife Sally, it’s hard not to be seduced by its willing subjugation to the earth. Seymour gleefully admits to a never-ending series of mistakes and bad decisions in establishing a truly rural base for his family. This sense of ad hoc

peasantry was no doubt a pull on anyone considering fleeing the city. But as Seymour reminds us on page after page, getting it together in the country means sixteen hour days of butchery, aching backs, frozen knees saturated in blood and mire – and no money. Instead an almost visionary delight at the world around you: “Our flower garden is a thing still in our imagination...but there are wild flowers, and blossoms on the wild plum trees, and the beautiful woods and marshes, and the cries of the marsh birds coming to us at night as we lie in bed, and the song of the nightingales in the summer time.” Seymour, for all his stress on toil and sweat, is not without romance either:

“My own belief is that – if a man is entitled to nothing else – he is entitled to his share of the land surface of his own country” I would have paid good money to see Seymour argue his case to the Countryside Alliance or whoever they thought they were back then. The Seymours moved to Pembrokeshire where John died in 2004. To think of him up in the Preselis, overlooking Carningli, dotted with houses and settlements, where his books no doubt reside on nearly every shelf, is as enriching, exhilarating, and as singular a pleasure, as listening to The Lark Ascending.

Further Reading Food for Free by Richard Mabey

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin

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CERI LEVY Ceri Levy is a documentary ﬁlm maker.

Tarka The Otter by Henry Williamson I have always had a soft spot for otters and Tarka The Otter as well as Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water made me smile and cry in equal measure as a kid. I never understood how two books about otters could end up with so much otter death! Either of these books could make it into my top three just because after all these years I still remember the magic that otters weaved upon me as I grew up. But if push came to shove then Tarka wins because of one fact. My father, who was a writer, was a member of The Savage Club in St. James’s. It was one of those timeless, gentlemen’s clubs, where the odour of brandy and cigar smoke, mixed with a leathery aroma, was written large upon my young senses.

I imagined it as the place where the wager was set for Phileas Fogg to complete his eighty-day journey. I was about nine or ten and I loved the club as it was full of books, stuffed animals, comfortable Chesterﬁelds and snooker tables upon which I was allowed to play snooker, standing atop a dining chair, with a sawn off cue. I met many names from the day, including Arthur Askey and Arnold Ridley, and once had lunch with Henry Williamson, the author of Tarka, himself. He was a wonderfully charming man, who teasingly refused to sign my autograph book, which my father always insisted I carried with me at all times. Finally we had some sort of play ﬁght over lunch and

he reached for my book and signed it thus: To Ceri, We met, we fought and he won Best wishes, Henry Williamson. Odd fact – Williamson died on August 13th 1977, which by the spookiest of coincidences was the exact same day that the ﬁlming of the death of Tarka took place for the movie of the book. I have just bought Tarka and Ring Of Bright Water again and I look forward to reading them both, as I am pretty certain that they will still retain their sparkle.

Further Reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

How To Be A Bad Birdwatcher by Simon Barnes

AN Nature ature Book Reader

ANDREW MALE Andrew Male is the deputy editor of MOJO magazine

The Public Life of the Street Pigeon by Eric Simms I bought The Public Life Of the Street Pigeon in a second-hand book shop in Lyme Regis in 2001, as a bit of a joke. My friend Simon and I had been out walking along the Cobb, singing the praises of the herring gulls that lined the harbour walls and lamenting the fact that these beautiful birds were now being labelled as “pests” by the local council. Finding a copy of Simms’ book, I held it aloft and announced that it was now time to reclaim yet another maligned bird. Little did I know... At a time when letters to his local newspaper were predicting a near future where “pedestrians will be ankle deep in pigeon droppings” Simms

appointed himself as the valiant biographer of this rejected and reviled bird. Opening with an anecdote about a pigeon travelling by tube from Kiburn to Finchley Road in 1965, the book educates us in the grand history of this “conﬁdent but vigilant opportunist”, from the rock doves of Israel some 310,000 years ago, to “the sacred pigeons of Aphrodite” on Mount Eryx in Sicily. Explaining how the domesticated bird was brought to Britain by the Romans (and why the dovecote became a hated symbol of feudal nobility in the middle ages) The Public Life Of the Street Pigeon is half

AN Nature ature Book Reader

anthropological study and half 70s popular biography, contrasting the grand past of this one-time symbol of purity and life force (Pepys’ diary notes that pigeons were placed at the feet of the ailing Queen Henrietta Maria in 1633) with the daily habits of these scabby city hoodlums who spend “a high proportion of their daylight hours... loaﬁng , sleeping, sun-bathing and preening.” Simms, who always took two carrier pigeons with him when ﬂying Bomber Command Lancasters during World War Two, was of course most famous for his Countryside broadcasts for the BBC and the four books he wrote for Collins’ New Naturalist series: Woodland Birds (1971), British Thrushes (1978), British Warblers (1985) and British Larks, Pipits and Wagtails (1992). But this,

along with his “natural History of Dollis Hill”, 1975’s Bird of Town and Suburb, is the book I most return to. London has always been a city at ease with intolerance, often directed towards its feral outcasts and its funnylooking aliens. This is a book that sticks up for them. Kenneth who took his own life in 1973 with an overdose of barbiturates, did not perhaps have the happiest of lives, and while In The Country is undoubtedly a joyous book, it is one tinged with sadness and righteous anger. First published in 1972, this account of a year in “Hardy country” from January to Christmas, chronicles both the changing of the seasons and the coming of a more industrial form of intensive farming. “In the short term,” he writes, “man seems to have it taped, to have gained

dominance over the planet: in the longer term, I think we may be the losers...” Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household is on the surface it’s a classic ‘Boy’s Own’ thriller, the tale an English aristo who sets himself the ultimate 1939 sporting challenge of tracking down and killing Adolf Hitler. However, when hunter becomes hunted our hero is forced to go to ground in a sunken lane or holloway in West Dorset. One of the best pieces of sustained writing about man in wild nature, Rogue Male went on to inspire a journey in Roger Deakin’s Wildwood and is also eulogised in Robert MacFarlane’s The Wild Places.

Further Reading In The Country by Kenneth Allsop

Rogue Male

by Geoffrey Household

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STEPHEN MOSS Stephen Moss is a television producer specialising in British wildlife

The Shell Bird Book by James Fisher Choosing my favourite nature book – the one I would take to the proverbial desert island – is really tough. How do you compare a great ﬁeld guide with a single-species monograph, or a personal memoir with the mammoth Handbook of Birds of the World? (If I could cheat, and take all 16 volumes, that would be my top choice)! But when I came to pick my top three it wasn’t all that hard after all. They were all books I read when young, and all were written in the 1950s and ’60s, just before I began birding. At number three, the novel Adventure Lit Their Star, by Kenneth Allsop, is particularly dear to me, as its hero is the little ringed plover, one of my favourite birds. Moreover its setting, on the western outskirts of London, is where I cut my own birding

teeth. If you haven’t come across it, do seek it out: a truly charming read. At number two is Wild America, a ripping account of a whistle-stop tour of North America in the early 1950s, written by Britain and America’s leading birders of their day.And at number one another book by the Attenborough of his time, James Fisher. The Shell Bird Book is my top read because it is so many books - a history, catalogue, celebration, and endlessly fascinating account of Britain’s birds and our obsession with them , all rolled into one – simply wonderful.

Further Reading Wild America by James Fisher and Roger Tory Peterson Adventure Lit Their Star by Kenneth Allsop

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BEN MYERS Man of letters

Walden; or Life In The Woods by Henry David Thoreau

Forget Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn or The Leaves Of Grass, Walden is the single most important book in early American literature. When he took to the woods of Concord, Massachusetts in 1845 armed with little more than an axe and a desire to observe nature at the closest of quarters Henry David Thoreau can’t have imagined the effect this “experiment in simple living” would have on the world. Walden Pond was Thoreau’s muse, and in its surroundings he found a way of life and philosophy that formed a blueprint for living. Walden found Thoreau seeking sanctuary in the simple things – the things we miss when our eyes and ears are trained elsewhere: nature’s soundtrack, the

changing face of his beloved pond and seasonal wildlife. From his self-made cabin in the woods, Thoreau explored anarchism, civil disobedience and transcendentalism via the day-to-day tasks required to existent in harmony with ones surroundings. And in observing that “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude” he inspired generations of hermits, conservationists, hippies and free-thinkers the world over.

Further Reading The Shining Levels by John Wyatt

The Poacher’s Handbook by Ian Niall

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JEREMY MYNOTT Jeremy Mynott is the author of Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience

The Peregrine by J.A. Baker On the ‘Desert Island Discs’ principle I’m picking three very different kinds of books to remind me of some of the different ways I respond to birds. First, John Clare’s poetry, which is the work of a man who finds things for himself, observes what he finds with great attention and describes it very tellingly (Gilbert White or Henry Thoreau would have been other good examples.) This is the naturalist’s response, drawn from experience. By contrast, Aristophanes, in his great comic play The Birds (412BC), treats birds as symbols for human hopes, fancies and ambitions – as reflections of ourselves. This is the response of the imagination, and we see such emblems and associations all round us (think robin, swan, peacock, eagle ...).

But my favourite book combines these two modes of engagement, and in an extraordinarily powerful way. This is The Peregrine, ﬁrst published in 1967 by the reclusive author J.A. Baker. It’s the story of one man’s obsession with a particular bird. He becomes fascinated with a peregrine that he encounters locally, and he stalks it for a whole year. He comes to know it intimately; indeed he comes to feel a kind of afﬁnity with it and longs to be accepted by it. In a sense he wants to be the bird, and he uses it to express the way he feels, or wants to feel, about the natural world as a whole. The writing in the book is remarkable — it’s a very lyrical, elevated and daring kind of prose that could completely fail, or become too lush or rich or

pretentious; but he pulls it off magniﬁcently and I still ﬁnd it very moving. The peregrine itself, of course, remains for most of us a very thrilling and charismatic species — which has interestingly gone from being a bird of remote places to a bird of our cities, but still brings with it the spirit of wilderness.

Further Reading Selected Prose and Poetry by John Clare

The Birds

by Aristophanes

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JONATHAN NEWDICK Jonathan Newdick is an artist and writer

The Birds of the British Isles and their Eggs by T.A. Coward This little classic from 1920 was written by a man who was not only a respected authority on birds but who also possessed a love of and a delight in his subject and who had the added qualiﬁcation of being able to write lyrical prose. When combined with Archibald Thorburn’s atmospheric watercolours of the species described the result is a work that would have greater value to me than the Bible or Shakespeare if I were ever to be invited to the BBC’s fabled desert island. You just do not ﬁnd this level of joy and humility in today’s bird books, dealing as they do with ‘natural history’ while Birds was all about ‘nature study’. The Oxford Birds of the Western Palearctic is all very well,

and a commendable piece of scholarship but its volumes are dense and tedious – you get the impression that its contributors never actually enjoyed writing them and they gather dust on a high shelf. Coward and Thorburn, however, are ever with me and part of the reason is that you can tell that these men worked with an enthusiastic love of nature – and that is another way of saying a love of life.

Further Reading The Fishes of the British Isles by J.Travis Jenkins

The Butterﬂies of the British Isles by Richard South

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MARTIN NOBLE Martin Noble is guitarist with British Sea Power

The Shining Levels by John Wyatts The Shining Levels is John Wyatts’ personal diary of when he left the city to live a frugal life, in a modest hut, in the wilderness of the Lake District. It’s a lovely, charming, easy book to read, and thankfully there isn’t a TV crew or camera in sight. On Johns arrival, he pulls water from a well with a frog in it (“if it’s good enough for the frog, it’s good enough for me”) and makes the best cup of tea he’s ever had. He shares his experiences with the plants and animals he encounters, both their practical uses, and as things of beauty, and later, as companions, when he befriends a buck Roe Deer. He becomes a connoisseur of wood smoke, goes on bug hunts, gets stuck in a bog on his way

home from a pub lock-in, sleeps rough and constantly marvels at the minutest details that surround him. Up there on the mountains, the reﬂective lakes appear as shining levels. Living amongst wildlife, his simple existence becomes magical and grandiose.

Further Reading In The Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall Birds and People: Bonds in a Timeless Journey by Nigel Collar

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JAMES OLDHAM NME, A&R, A&M

Selected Poems by RS Thomas It would be misleading to describe RS Thomas as a nature poet, and it would be false to call the Penguin edition of his Selected Poems a nature book. Thomas was an Anglican clergyman for over 40 years, and much of this collection is inevitably devoted to his relationship with God (“this great absence that is like a presence”). For this writer, though, the great beauty of it lies in his writing about the natural world. Thomas was a deeply contrary ﬁgure – a cleric who doubted, and frequently vocalised that doubt, an entrenched Welsh nationalist who married an English woman, and a paciﬁst who sympathised with those who burnt down Welsh holiday cottages. He also lived a life embedded in the landscape of his beloved

Wales, unencumbered by either friendships or modern comforts (he even threw out the family vacuum cleaner on the grounds that it was too noisy) and it was this “narrow experience” which helped give his poetry such a concentrated purity of vision. His views of the contours of Northern Wales have often been described as harsh and merciless, but there’s a chill beauty to them as well. He writes superbly on rivers and ﬁshing (Afon Rhiw, The River), as well as birds (indeed his only recreation was birdwatching), but the greatest of his poems are where the connection between the spiritual and natural world is made; Raptor, where God is imagined as “an enormous owl”, for instance, or my personal favourite, The Moor, a poem that articulates

the sheer majestic power of nature and it’s effect on the mind of man. It’s as good a place as any to begin to understand his undoubted greatness. It was like a church to me I entered it on soft foot Breath held like a cap in the hand. What God was there made himself felt, Not listened to, in clean colours That brought a moistening of the eye, In movement of the wind over grass. There were no prayers said. But stillness Of the heart’s passions – that was praise Enough; and the mind’s cession Of its kingdom. I walked on, Simple and poor, while the air crumbled And broke on me generously as bread

Further Reading Growth Of The Soil by Knut Hamsun

Complete Country Bizarre by Andy Pittaway

and Bernard Scoﬁeld

AN Nature ature Book Reader

KEVIN PEARCE Writing. Music. Connections

The Summer Book by Tove Jannson The most precious things are often those we ﬁnd by chance. I stumbled across a copy of The Summer Book by Tove Jannson while looking for something ‘light’ to read in the local library. It was the title that attracted me. I don’t think at the time I made a connection between the author and the Moomin books of my youth. I borrowed it, devoured it, and have often returned to it. I am not a great reader of nature books. I hate stories of disenchanted city folk who have retreated to pastures new and feel compelled to share their experiences. It’s all so forced. But there is a beautiful simplicity and naturalness about this ‘adult’ book by Tove Jannson. It’s really a collection of strikingly stark tales about a girl of six and her contrary

grandmother, and the time they spend together on their small island in the gulf of Finland. It’s so much more than that though. And it makes me desperately want to visit that island. It makes me want to hug that old grandmother and hear some of her words of wisdom. It makes me want to copy chunks of text out which I can chuckle over at leisure. And it makes me want to buy copies to give to loved ones.

AN Nature ature Book Reader

JIM PERRIN Jim Perrin is The Guardian’s Country Diarist for Wales

The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau John Clare’s poems are the most uncluttered acts of attention to the natural world you will ever read; Nan Shepherd’s exquisite prosemeditation on the Cairngorms is unique in the literature; but the book I’d offer as first choice is Thoreau’s The Maine Woods. You cannot not include Thoreau if you’re to consider nature-writing. The obvious choice would have been Walden – a book I re-visit endlessly, always with pleasure, new discovery and appreciation – but its condensed, apophthegmatic style is less immediately accessible than that of The Maine Woods, a wonderful, playful book, full of sly, sharp views of his companions, races, camp-fires, chance encounters, short rations, fish feasts. He evokes the shifting and imprecise with

affective precision, gives us a clue, a way through into a more focused state of human insight and perception. This is how it is with Thoreau as you come to know him. He permeates and reﬁnes your objective awareness in ways that are subjectively amplifying and enhancing. When you move on into his best work, his observation of particular landscapes at crucial points in their history as man had begun to wreak grievous change becomes an entrancement even more relevant now than in his own time.