Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills was a favourite of ours on it’s publication last year. It’s now out in a Penguin paperback (with a stylish new cover) along with a BBC Radio 4 serialisation. You can read the original Caught by the River review HERE, listen on the iPlayer HERE, and if you wish, buy it in our shop HERE.

by Martin Wainwright.

Fifteen Centuries Young

Townfolk know pleasures, country people joys.

Minna Antrim (1861–1950)

Britain rushes around on its bypasses and motorways. Rapid roads and trains connect city to city, home to office, school collection to shops. The traffic lights have gone green, the circle and slant of the derestricted sign allows the speedometer to flick to 70. Was that a field, some cows, a wood, a farm? Whatever, it’s gone.

But then the cars and lorries jam, or autumn leaves block the line, and quietly and gently an older pattern of England steals back into its ancient and astonishingly little-altered place. What do those beguiling signs mean, inviting you to somewhere, something, maybe even someone called Huttons Ambo, The Alconburys or Mavis Enderby? Why go to the bog-standard motorway services when the satnav flashes up an icon for the Cottage of Content near Ross-on-Wye or the George at Stamford whose tag reads: ‘Three kings have stayed here, as well as one of the fattest Englishmen ever – Daniel Lambert, who weighed 52 stone.’ And didn’t someone famous find that his train stopped unexpectedly at Adlestrop (alas, the station was closed in 1966)? Wasn’t their curiosity just like yours?

Get off, branch off, turn off, and the greenery of village England enfolds you with the certainty and confidence of settlements which have survived for up to a millennium and a half, and in some cases more. Devastation has often visited them in the form of the Black Death, civil war, evictions and the collapse of harvests. But a spell seems to girdle their familiar template of church and manor house, green and mill stream, tavern, beacon, war memorial, pond and stocks. Even where a town or city has rolled outwards and engulfed the ancient buildings themselves, road signs keep the past alive: Southfield Square, Chapel Close, Sheep Lane.

They touch something equally certain in millions of visitors.We may not have been here before, but our grandparents or their grandparents or their grandparents almost certainly led a life circumscribed by the seasons, rotation of crops and the demands of living in a close-knit community. Perhaps this was in The Alconburys, a cluster of hamlets just off the A1M north of Huntingdon, or at Mavis Enderby in Lincolnshire, whose shared sign with a neighbouring village is often converted by wags to read: ‘To Old Bolingbroke and Mavis Enderby – the gift of a son.’ Or it may have been somewhere very different in geographical terms: a life in thatched rondavel huts along the coast of West Africa or in a mountain hamlet in the Punjab. But the essence is there in every case, because the village way of life was so simple and the way that almost all of humanity lived for so long.

It has a special resonance in England, even among the ghosts of the relatively few communities which failed. Between today’s thriving villages which have adjusted successfully to enormous economic and social change, you will occasionally find hummocky graveyards marking the sites of their lost counterparts; places where the plague, enclosures or even the whim of a powerful landlord who wanted an uncluttered view led to the abandonment of farms and homes. But here too, the essence of a village is so ingrained that the traditional features and patterns can still be seen. Only the larks and Marbled White butterflies now live at Wharram Percy in the Yorkshire Wolds, but a visitor can walk above the buried streets and work out where each of the familiar buildings stood. Drought conditions in the Lake District see the skeletal remains of Mardale Green emerge from the falling waters of Haweswater. Here was the church, there the pub, and behind them the grazing for the ponies which raced every summer at the Mardale fair.

The English countryside has also been fought over, brutalized and exploited from humanity’s first arrival, and our means of changing things are today so devastating that the threat of irreversible damage to landscape, flora and fauna is a constant. But the scars of tragedy at battlefields such as Towton near Tadcaster, where in 1461 more Englishmen – 30,000 – died than at any other single place in the country, have long been engulfed by what the seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell called ‘a green thought in a green shade’. The red-and-white ‘York and Lancaster’ rose runs riot over the hedges leading down to the Cock beck. No one is out of walking distance of such greenery and who does not relish that? For all that the English cluster more closely in towns and conurbations than any other European nation apart from the space-starved Dutch, we have a dreamy love of the countryside implanted in our national character. And the idyll within that dream is the village.

That was an extract from chapter one of The English Village by Martin Wainwright, recently published by Michael O’Mara Books. Copies of the book can be bought from the Caught by the River shop, priced £9.99.

An extract from Jon Berry’s new book A Train To Catch:

If one journey typified the travels of adventurous Victorians, it was the grand tour of Scotland. These were not the third-class day trips enjoyed by ordinary Thamesmen, but extended excursions for the moneyed gentleman hunter. Shotguns, servants and rod boxes with Pall Mall addresses would be loaded on to the north-bound trains, with stags and salmon waiting dutifully at the end of the line.

That is how I have always imagined it, anyway, and the literature of the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries suggests there was some truth in this. The writings of T. H. White, Frederick Aflalo, Captain Albert F. L. Bacon and countless others record an age of endless salmon and wild moors, peat-fired lodges and wisened ghillies in kilts, and a world of rigid class distinction where everything – including the salmon – had its rightful place. The Grand Tour was as much a part of a wealthy gentleman’s life as his London club, his alma mater or his mistress.

A century ago, seven different rail companies puffed and bellowed in to Scotland, and local branch lines often provided stations within walking distance of favoured salmon pools, lochs and lodges. For the Victorian angler with sufficient funds, it could be easy. Today, the Anglo-Scottish border is crossed only by the East and West Coast lines, and the network beyond Inverness is fragmented at best. Ticket prices can be outrageous for those who cannot book months in advance, and the reality is that it is cheaper to travel from England to France for its gigantic carp and catfish than it is to take a train to Scotland and try to search out one of its dwindling stocks of salmon.

Bloated Gallic cyprinids were not part of angling’s golden age, however, and therefore have no place in this story, and so I booked a return ticket to Perth. I’ve long regarded this delightful town on the banks of the Tay as the gateway to the highlands, though locals would suggest the real mountains begin farther north.

My plan from there was loose at best – it was the beginning of August, and I knew from previous experience that the grilse might just be running up the Cromarty Firth, past the Black Isle and in to the Averon. This, as always, would depend upon whether there was any water in the river, and I wouldn’t know that until I got there. If the water was low and the salmon were in the estuary, there were trout in Sutherland that I knew I could catch, mackerel off the pier at Ullapool, a ferox-fishing ghillie on Loch Ness I had long wanted to meet and a deep limestone loch full of ghosts in the far north at Cape Wrath. My car was back in Wiltshire with a flat battery and perforated exhaust, and so the entire tour would rely upon trains, buses and the kindness of others. To complicate matters, Vic had decided to come with me to take photographs and see what all the fuss was about. We had two weeks in front of us, and only the vaguest of itineraries – up the East Coast and back down the West, with two travel rods and a rucksack full of flies and spinners. There would be no servants to carry the equipment, no loch-side stations and only an outside chance of a wisened old man in a kilt to net our fish. This was a Grand Tour, proletarian-style.

The east-coast line to Inverness is one of my favourites. The mountains grow and darken once Perth is left behind; low-lying farming land gives way to the slate grey vista of the sheep crofter, and the old iron rails, which have carried fishermen in to the north for over a century, cross countless burns and rivers. I travelled this line many times as a boy, always on the night sleeper from London with brother and I squeezed in to a single bunk, and was in my ‘thirties before I did so in daylight. It is a journey which, for me, encapsulates all that is Scottish and special. Only the Kyle of Lochalsh line, which crosses the Highlands from East to West, rivals it.

The construction of the east-coast line was late by the standards of railway mania, but it still met with considerable opposition. In 1892, the introduction to The Wild Sports and Natural History of the Highlands had the following to say: The railways driven far into wastes of trackless bog and heather, now admit countless tourists to the most retired districts. Their taste for shooting and fishing, and the charm of a freer life than can be found in the great cities, have planted castles and shooting lodges all over Scotland. But it has pressed with great severity upon all wild life especially birds and beasts like the osprey, kite and pine marten, that are rapidly approaching extinction.

The ecological impact of the railways in remoter regions was something that I rarely considered during my journeys, though I probably should have done. The benefits of the railways, for me, always outweighed the losses. Trains democratised travel in an age when the poor got a rough deal in all other aspects of everyday life, they brought fresh food to regions that had previously gone without , they mobilised a workforce and enabled the creation of a football league. Trains opened up an island to its inhabitants, and only rarely did I consider the cost. The castles and shooting lodges which once outraged locals are now part of Scotland’s romance, and any environmental consequences have long since been surpassed by the effects of motorways, North Sea oil-drilling, air travel and an endless stream of 4x4s along the A9. If Victorian railway mania carved up the British countryside, subsequent generations have managed to screw it up beyond all recognition. It’s no defence, but it is the truth.

If the landscape had been ruined, it didn’t appear so from our carriage. Vic was entranced, and so was I. The rivers held water but didn’t look especially high, and we saw anglers everywhere – in the Garry and Tummel at Pitlochry, in the Spey at Kingussie, and on streams and burns whose names we didn’t know. Vic pointed out that none of them appeared to be reeling in any fish, and so I explained that this was Scotland, and that they were fishing for salmon and that sometimes these salmon weren’t in the river, and when they were in the river they weren’t really supposed to feed. ‘I see’, she said. ‘So why exactly are we here?’

A Train To Catch is published by the Medlar Press.

Our friends Lora and Paul are having a launch for their Felt book at Rough Trade on Friday February 3rd at 7pm. Here are some details about the truly unique party they’re putting on:

“For the first time since their split Lawrence and other members of seminal indie group Felt will be on stage talking about their 10 year career, a career which saw them make 10 albums in 10 years, making some of the most jaw-droppingly beautiful pop music of the decade. This event is to celebrate the release of ‘Felt – The Book’ – a stunning hardback, limited edition book documenting the band’s career using exclusive photography from the archives and Lawrence’s text. Before the Q&A Paul Kelly will be screening relevant portions of his Lawrence Of Belgravia documentary and then this event will see the band field questions from both the organisers of the book, director of ‘Lawrence Of Belgravia’ Paul Kelly and members of the audience. After the event the band will be djing their favourite records and signing copies of the book.”

How I Came To Know Fish by Ota Pavel, Penguin Translated Texts

By Chloe Evans.

When I was a little girl, I was allowed to go with my Dad fishing the trout streams around Llanddewi Brefi, a blonde dot trailing after him with a blue and white rod. I fell in the water so often I was eventually banned, health and safety were never invoked, but scaring the brownies away was a cardinal sin. I relived the unexpected cold of that water, and sighed again over my Pa’s obsession as I read How I Came to Know Fish, Ota Pavel’s memoir of pre-war Czechosolovakia. The book reads as a tribute to his father and a childhood spent learning to see the beauty of his homeland. But this is also a celebration of the abundant carp they fished out on their expeditions together and the freedom from worry and hunger that gave them.

The father we meet here is a little bit strange, but also wonderfully familiar to anyone who has known, loved and been exasperated by a fisherman. He sends his tiny son into dangerously high floodwaters after eel, having boasted about his expected catch and too proud to ditch a complicated plan long in the preparation. Although he is scared for his boy, this is not enough to keep him on dry land. The night before he is to be transported to a concentration camp, he is unable to sleep thinking of the fish suffocating under thick ice in his carp pond. Man and boy spend a freezing night releasing them; first lighting a fire on the ice and then bringing them home in heavy sacks. Simultaneously this is an act of love for the fish, and an act of defiance – two fingers to the tyranny of the invading force that had appropriated them. (Although the carp eventually end up doing their bit for Czech independence in a more tangible way when they are distributed into various local cooking pots). When his brothers are sent after their father to concentration camps, the kindness of strangers in a period of near starvation is heartbreaking.

A great part of the enjoyment of the writing is that although we know the child’s affection for his father and Uncle Prosek, the ferryman who taught him to fish, there is also an adult’s awareness of the slightly comical self-importance of these men. Bathos comes to the fore in a long story describing his father’s infatuation with the brassy wife of his boss, and the eventual rejection of this woman as a subject for a painting by his friend Vatislav Nechleba, a sort of early Czech Lucian Freud. In the closing passages before the epilogue, the gently confused old age of his father who fishes sleepily from a boat, unable to see where he has cast his bait, is described with great tenderness. Like any book in translation it would be a great omission to fail to mention that the reason these sentiments flow as clearly from the page as the rivers of the Krivlokat castle region, is thanks to the work of Jindriska Badal and Robert McDowell who translated it from the Czech.

We are left with an impression of nostalgia, but also hopefulness despite the terrible events of the war. This is a great exposition on freedom, celebrated with gorgeous descriptions of pastoral landscapes, as beautiful and lush as any blue remembered hills. Temporally confused in parts, the postmodern arrangement of pieces points up the bewildering times. And in the epilogue detailing the psychiatric meltdown of his early adult years, despite being blunted with psychotropic medication Ota Pavel describes feeling protected from suicide by his memories of and longing for the outdoor life of his childhood. No surprise then that when writing his memoir he must have found time as easily fluid as these lyrically remembered rivers.

An extract from Jon Berry’s new book, A Train To Catch:

The Wessex rivers owe much to the railways, and may never have flourished without them. Until the final years of Victoria they were ostensibly salmon rivers, but that changed in the 1890s when two fishermen – the Gomm Brothers – used the new railway network to transport Thames barbel to the Dorset Stour and Hampshire Avon. On later journeys the wooden barrels in the freight carriages contained carp and tench and silver fish, all captured from the waters around Staines by rod and line. The extent of their activities is shrouded in some mystery, but there can be little doubt that these two Londoners, working in league with a local hotelier called Newlyn, did much to transform two of the south’s premier salmon rivers in to equally desirable coarse fisheries.

Their actions were timely; the Thames was about to enter an extended decline, and Midlands anglers were already deserting the polluted Trent. England’s fishermen decamped to the Throop and Royalty fisheries in numbers, and the London and South-Western Railway took them there. Within forty years, the Royalty was home to record-breaking barbel catches, and the early morning train from London now brought biscuit tins full of maggots from Midlands bait farms to meet demand in the tackle shops of Ringwood and Christchurch.

And so the south-west line from London brought the fishermen, the bait, and even the fish themselves. For all these reasons, only a day after washing Southsea’s sand from my shoes, I took the early morning Maggot Train from London to Christchurch, the harbour town where the two great rivers of Wessex meet.
I packed a split-cane Avon rod, a favourite centrepin and some floats. Nigel at the tackle shop had told me when I’d booked that the silver fish were shoaling up below the weir and there was a reasonable chance of sport from them, and perhaps the big perch which had followed them there. I also took another old railway guide to read on the train, and so the final slow miles through Sway and Brockenhurst and Hinton Admiral were given over to Fishing in the South by J.W.G. Tomkin. The author researched his book in 1934, and the Southern Railway Company published it in the following year. Curiously, no mention is made of Tryon’s record barbel, but his notes on Christchurch are otherwise detailed.

Quite recently it has been found that the lower reaches of the Avon hold immense barbel, which actually average from 6 to 7lbs., in the Royalty Fishery stretch at Christchurch. The nearest station is Christchurch, which is five minutes walk from the water and about ten minutes from the centre of the town.

Accommodation is plentiful and varied, but it may be noted that the King’s Arms Hotel caters especially for anglers. The telephone number is Christchurch 69 and visiting anglers may be well advised to book in advance if they intend to stay there. The special tariff for anglers is 15/- per day all-in, including an excellent luncheon basket for those who intend to take their mid-day meals by the river.

Little has changed. The Royalty’s reputation as a venue for holiday anglers is a strong as ever, and the infamous crowds of the ‘thirties are there, three or more generations on. The tackle shop is still there, though it has moved from the bailiff’s hut to its current premises on the high street, and so too is the pub – albeit re-named The Royalty Arms, and with a hand-painted sign which shows Royalty hero Jack Harrigan with a 13-pound barbel in his hands. Suburbia and industry has gradually enveloped the land around the fishery, but many of the landmarks which Tomkin would have enjoyed are there still – the bends of the House Pool, the reinforced banks of the Piles, the secluded Parlour and the great iron bridge over the Railway Pool, on which a commuter train once stopped and allowed its passengers to watch one of Wallis’s companions land a monster.

It is all too tempting to get swept up in the history of the place when fishing the Royalty – I certainly do – but the challenges facing the angler are very real, and wholly modern. There are the poachers in the harbour at Mudeford who net the salmon and sea trout before they enter the river, and who are hunted themselves by police using night scopes and walkie-talkies. Then there are the perennial threats to water quality of low summer flows and pollution from local industry. Talk of mink and otters is common, though the current management do much to moderate predation. Finally, there is the challenge of the fish themselves – these are canny creatures, well-versed in bolt-rigs, back-leads and other traps laid by twenty-first century specimen hunters.

The barbel were not to be found in the Top Weir. Nigel assured me there would be a resident fish or two in the white water, but that time might be more profitably spent trotting maggots down the far bank from the pitch known as Jack’s Corner. According to the local sage, the rest of the barbel were further down the fishery between Trammels and Harrigan’s. The first afternoon’s fishing confirmed this – the roach and dace came readily to maggots, while the cries of successful barbel hunters could be heard in the distance. I was particularly pleased to catch some roach; the Avon was once famed for them, but like many rivers has witnessed a decline. Mine were bright, scarlet-finned fish, and the biggest topped a pound.

In the evening I set up my leger rod, and waded out in to the froth. Nigel had suggested I bounce a cube of luncheon meat around in the white water, allowing the undertow to whip it back up under the sill, just in case a barbel was foraging. One certainly was. It weighed eight pounds and put up a thumping fight that would have reduced my old Wizard to splinters.

The train journey home the following morning was slow, but that didn’t matter. I thought about the Maggot Train and wondered what had happened to all those biscuit tins – were they ever returned to the Midlands bait farms? Was there a stockpile of them hidden away somewhere in Bournemouth, rusting away and reeking of another generation’s sawdust and ammonia?

The flat scrub of the New Forest gave way to the over-development of Southampton, and then the tracks swung north to Eastleigh. There, the train sat still for almost an hour as undisclosed problems up the line were resolved. I watched the ‘planes landing and taking off at the adjacent airport, and remembered the ill-fated local campaign to rename it Matt Le Tissier International.

The diesel engine finally grumbled back in to life and pulled us forward, towards the Itchen valley and beyond. Ahead lay more delays, more platform coffees, changes at Basingstoke and Reading – and then twelve weeks of teaching. Dreams of record barbel would have to wait.

A Train To Catch is published by the Medlar Press

I was lent that book about a year ago by my aunt who brought it when it came out in the ’70s. I found it too depressing to read all the way through but wasn’t quite sure why. But even more depressing is a book that came out after his death which is a collection of letters he wrote to his daughter. That will really bring you down. I found it in a second hand shop last year. A quite intriguing man, he was best known as a tv presenter on the Tonight programe but also wrote a book about American hobos that I have been meaning to buy. The other thing worth a mention is that he only had one leg which caused him lots of pain hence the drugs I think.

The Kenneth Allsop Memorial Trust

By Richard Askwith (Aurum Press)
Reviewed by Nick Small

It’s New Year’s Day. I’ve had a poor night’s sleep and I’m being pebble-dashed by cold, hard rain, driven on strong crosswinds, as I try to negotiate deep peat bog, a riot of tussocks and sheets of near freezing water on legs rendered uncontrollable by the 300 hundred feet of steep climb I’ve just run. My vision is blurred, I’m struggling for breath and ahead of me is precipitous descent on ground riddled with ankle snapping tree roots that I’m going to hurl myself down despite the protests of the sensible portion of my brain. Why am I doing this? Because Jeff sent me a copy of Richard Askwith’s love missive to fell running, “Feet in the Clouds”, a couple of months ago and it inspired me to take part in this, the annual Giant’s Tooth fell race above Halifax.

The thing is, I’m not alone in being seduced by Askwith’s lyrical take on what seems, at first glance, to be a foolhardy pursuit. The Fell Running Association has seen membership increase from about 6,000 to 7,000 since its publication in 2005 and the book has sold over 50,000 copies, which means it has well and truly “crossed over” as media biz types like to say.

You’d think that this would been seen as cause for celebration by the governing body but the raising of the sport’s profile in faddy lifestyle supplements has brought significant problems. The entry applications for the “glamour” events of the sport have been swelled to such an extent by “things to do before I die” types, that the more competitive championship runners have found themselves squeezed. Fell racing is unusual as a sport in that it depends upon the good will of land owners for access to its routes and, of course, there are environmental considerations where hundreds of runners might be arriving in cars, parking and then trampling all over areas of natural beauty and fragile eco-systems. Necessarily, numbers have to be limited. Still, this is only an issue for those organising races and administering the sport.

So, why has this book connected with so many people? Well, it’s tremendously well written for a start. Richard Askwith was associate editor of the Independent, so can turn a neat phrase. The book is also constructed in quite an unusual way, chronicling the fell racing calendar whilst recounting the rather gruelling personal story of the author’s attempts to complete the Bob Graham Round, a rather arbitrary collection of Lakeland peaks to be tackled in a 24 hour period. Along the way, the romance of the sport is explained, largely in the context of its people, from the folk who turn up to stand atop mountains, marshalling events to the racing heroes of the sport.

The heroes are something else. Ordinary working people from unglamorous backgrounds who have managed near superhuman feats for scant reward other than the process itself: Joss Naylor, the Wasdale farmer whose legendary exploits are well enough documented; Kenny Stuart the Cumbrian gardener whose fleet footed conquests of Ben Nevis (1hr 25m34s….think about it) and Snowden (1hr2m29s) in the mid 80s are records which still stand today and Ian Holmes, a Keighley jacuzzi fitter and multiple British Champion who is still competitive at the elite end of the sport in his 40s. There are tales of derring-do, skulduggery and intrigue going back over a century to the days when the runners were shepherds with wealthy patrons who “owned” and gambled upon them as though they were race horses. Perhaps the most fascinating chapter in the book deals with the bizarre and destructive squabble that took place between the professional and amateur branches of fell racing right up to the early 1990s.

Above all of this though, the book connects because it taps into the zeitgeist: the same one that draws people to wild swimming, mountain biking, kite surfing, wilderness craft, fishing and all those other expressions of our desire to seek “otherness”; getting away from the job, the city, the mortgage and all the comforts that separate us from wild nature. Experiencing the beauty and the beastliness of the universe on our own, with no safety net other than that which our wits allow us; testing our minds and bodies against the elements in ways that are as primal as we can muster, seeking to be reminded “what it’s all about”. It’s very much in the same ball park as “The Art of Camping” which I reviewed here last year.

I would recommend “Feet in the Clouds” but with a caution. It may well convince you, as it did me, to go and run a fell race. If it does, just remember that you can enjoy running on wild hills recreationally without entering high profile races that are already over-subscribed. Running for fun is just as liberating and, if you do feel the need to race, there will probably be events in your local area that would be much more appreciative of your support.

The Giant’s Tooth race is one such low-key affair. As I crossed the line in a heap and slumped against the nearest wall, I vowed “never, ever, again”. Thirty minutes and a pint of Taylor’s Golden Best in convivial company later, I was planning next year’s race, convincing myself that I could do it three and a half minutes faster.

Read “Feet in the Clouds” and you’ll realise that this is entirely normal.

Kenneth Allsop – In The Country (Little Toller Books)
Reviewed by David Hemingway

Inspired by the likes of WH Hudson (A Shepherd’s Life) and Henry Williamson (Salar The Salmon) but seduced by Fleet Street, Kenneth Allsop combined these passions with a weekly column in The Daily Mail that would eventually morph into In The Country. First published in 1972, and now lovingly repressed by Little Toller, it was to become his most successful book. A year after its publication, Allsop took his own life, with an overdose of barbiturates.

I don’t really think there are many clues, although I’m struck by Allsop’s notes that writing is “rather melancholy and intensely solitary” and that people “always have been and presumably always will be, happy and unhappy.” Certainly, for a book that describes ancient forests and chalk streams, In The Country is cut through with revulsion and horror. The author is dismayed by the cruelty and short-sightedness on his door-step; by the deer inhumanely wounded by poachers and left to “hobble off to die in the hollows of infected wounds” and by the DDT “being squirted over the countryside like scent in a brothel” and poisoning birds. He even battles with his conscience about removing moles from his garden (he purchases poison but then doesn’t use it). Saddened by the closure of local pubs, he demands that “it is written into the constitution of the nation that every village must, as a public service and a monument to more sensible civilisations, maintain a pub.”

In The Country captures Allsop’s fears and concerns around land usage, about concrete and asbestos buildings, about ponds being filled with overdoses of pesticides, about the damage being wreaked on water supplies. Recently reading about the current government’s reforms of planning regulations, I was reminded of Allsop’s adage that “Money speaks, beauty is voiceless.”

But – equally or, perhaps, more so – In The Country is brimming with joy and excitement (at discovery, at learning, at identification) and I’m left with the feeling that it is actually one of the most life-affirming books I’ve read in a long while: As much as the countryside is a subject for Allsop to write about (and thus, presumably, pay his wage), it also often seems to provide him with an excuse to be away from his desk, to not be writing. Perhaps the ease with which he is diverted explains why he would work into the small hours, hammering out lines like “A vixen’s amorous cry sounds like the last strangulated screech of a victim garrotted by thugs” late into the night.

Allsop is “semi-anaesthetized” by the headiness of high summer but wonders if winter is his favourite season: “It is when the countryside comes clean. It has been scalped of all fussy tresses. Lapwings and fieldfares rough ride the winds, golden plover flash like glinting metal filings as they hurl towards the magnet hoop of black nimbostratus pincering around Eggardon’s ridge.” I’m particularly enraptured by Allsop’s encounter with a badger (“It cast a slightly surly glance back, a head with vivid humbug stripes and ridiculously petite ears with shell-pale rims,” he writes) and moved by his mourning for the swallows that haven’t settled at his mill (“I miss their rippling blue flight across the lawns, the flash of chestnut throat and white underparts as they soared up from drinking on the wing.”)

Penning a loving introduction, author/journalist Brian Jackman suggests that his close friend is within a “pantheon of writers who have strived to repair mankind’s broken covenant with the natural world.” Remarkably, approaching the fortieth anniversary of its publication, In The Country still seems utterly potent.

In The Country can be found in the Caught by the River shop, priced £10.00

One response to our stunned impotence in the face of financial meltdown, political chicanery and the creeping surveillance society, is to indulge in fugues of entropy tourism. Badlands dérives. Websites clanking with scrap metal, the refuse of military hardware, sump-oil lakes, pastiche Tarkovsky. The recent invasion of the Lower Lea Valley (the Olympics site) by fork-tongued instruments of global capitalism, hellbent on improving the image of destruction, has been duplicated by raiding parties bearing cameras and notebooks, the tattered footsoldiers of anarchy: retro-geographers, punk Vorticists. Sentimentalists of every stripe are undertaking knotweed rambles as pilgrimages to rescue the last remnants of locality by reciting threatened names made sacred by generations of unacknowledged predecessors: Hackney Wick, Temple Mills, Isle of Dogs. Every trudge around the perimeter fence of the Australian super-mall and its satellite stadium is a recapitulation of William Blake’s itinerary, as laid out in his mythopoeic masterpiece, Jerusalem: “thro’ Hackney & Holloway towards London / Till he came to old Stratford, & thence to Stepney & the Isle / Of Leutha’s Dogs”.

continued on The Guardian site..