Book description
The countryside is filled with beauty and wonder in these
imaginative, idiosyncratic writings, but also cruelty and hardship.
They describe the texture of an owl's feather, the colours of autumn
and the sound of rooks' wings sweeping across the sky. Yet here too is
the grinding toil of reaping the harvest, and the discovery of a
gamekeeper's bloody kill. Brimming with intense feeling, these pieces
show an acute awareness of the land, and the people on it.
Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English
countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too. It has provoked a
huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and
people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are
travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long
tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the
countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's
relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the
countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).
Richard Jefferies (1848 - 1887) was the son of a Wiltshire farmer. He
never worked the land but made his living from writing, trekking across
the countryside with his notebook. He spent much of his life struggling
against poverty and tuberculosis, which would eventually kill him at the
age of thirty-nine.
