Meadowland (34 page)

A. R. Clapham,
The Oxford Book of Trees
, 1986

John Clare,
The Shepherd’s Calendar
, 1827: the countryman’s year, tasks, festivals, rhythm, in verse.

John Clegg,
The Observer’s Book of Pond Life
, 1967

William Cobbett,
Cottage Economy
, 1822: the original classic of self-sufficiency.
Rural Rides
, 1830: a splendidly splenetic and entirely accurate portrait of Georgian England from the back of a horse.

John Stuart Collis,
The Worm Forgives the Plough
, 1973: working in the British countryside during WW2.

Country Gentlemen’s Association, The Country Gentlemen’s Estate Book
, 1923

R. S. R. Fitter, Collins
Pocket Guide to British Birds
, 1973

Roger Deakin,
Wildwood
, 2007

G. Evans,
The Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs
, 1967

George Ewart Evans,
Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay
, 1956: the oral history of a Suffolk village.

Thomas Firbank,
I Bought a Mountain
, 1959: hill-farming in Wales.

W. M.W. Fowler,
Countryman’s Cooking
, 2006: originally published in 1965, and quite fantastically politically incorrect.

Sir Edward Grey (Grey of Fallodon),
The Charm of Birds
, 1927: the man who led us into WW1 was an ardent ornithologist; this is his study of birdsong. His eyes were in decline, his ears were perfect.

Geoffrey Grigson,
The Englishman’s Flora
, 1955: always the
Flora
I turn to.

Lt-Col Peter Hawker,
Instructions to Young Sportsmen
, 1910: possibly the most popular book ever on shooting.

George Henderson,
The Farming Ladder
, 1944

Otto Herman and J. A. Owen,
Birds Useful & Birds Harmful
, 1909: This was the first book on birds I ever encountered, since my father’s copy, which he inherited from a relative, was on the bookshelf on the landing outside my childhood bedroom.

James Herriot,
If Only They Could Talk
, 1970

Jason Hill,
Wild Foods of Great Britain
, 1939: an early and inspirational book on foraging.

Barry Hines,
A Kestrel for a Knave
, 1968

W. G. Hoskins,
English Landscape
, 1977

W. H. Hudson,
Adventures Among Birds
, 1913

Richard Jefferies,
The Gamekeeper at Home
, 1878;
The Amateur Poacher
, 1879;
The Life of the Fields
, 1884

Rev. C. A. Johns, ed. J. A. Owen,
British Birds in Their Haunts
, 1938: every entry is nature literature.

Richard Lewington,
Pocket Guide to the Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland
, 2003

Ronald Lockley,
The Private Life of the Rabbit
, 1964: the inspiration for Adams’s
Watership Down

Robert Macfarlane,
The Wild Places
, 2008

J. G. Millais,
The Natural History of British Game Birds
, 1909

Ian Moore,
Grass and Grasslands
, 1966: from the New Naturalist series.

Ernest Neal,
The Badger
, 1948: also from the New Naturalist series.

George Orwell,
Coming Up for Air
, 1939

Eric Parker,
Shooting Days
, 1918;
The Shooting Week-End Book
, n.d.

E. Pollard, M. D. Hooper and N. W. Moore,
Hedges
, 1974

Major Hesketh Prichard,
Sport in Wildest Britain
, 1921

Oliver Rackham,
The History of the Countryside
, 1986

Arthur Ransome,
Great Northern?
, 1947: In the last of the Swallows & Amazons series, the children believe the rare great northern diver is nesting on a Scottish loch. And that they must protect it.

Romany (G. Bramwell Evans),
A Romany in the Fields
, 1927;
Out with Romany by Meadow & Stream
, 1942

Siegfried Sassoon,
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
, 1928

Peter Scott,
The Eye of the Wind
, 1961: the man who founded the Wildfowl Trust commanded RN gunboats in World War Two, winning a Mention in Dispatches and a Distinguished Service Cross. His father was Scott of the Antarctic, who in his last frozen notes had asked his wife to ‘make the boy interested in nature’.

John Seymour,
The Fat of the Land
, 1961

Henry Stephens,
The Book of the Farm
, 1844: the
vade mecum
of Victorian farming.

Paul Sterry,
Collins Complete Guide to British Wild Flowers
, 2006

David Streeter and Rosamond Richardson,
Discovering Hedgerows
, 1982

Thomas Traherne,
Centuries of Meditations
, 1908: Traherne might be described as ‘The British St Francis of Assisi’.

Edward Thomas,
Collected Poems
, 1920

S. Vere Benson,
The Observer’s Book of British Birds
, n.d.

Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald,
Game Birds
, 1946;
The Book of the Horse
, 1946

Paul Waring and Martin Parson,
Concise Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland
, 2009

Gilbert White,
The Natural History of Selbourne
, 1789: the fountainhead of British nature-writing.

Raymond Williams,
The People of the Black Mountains
, Vols 1 & 2, 1989–90: the local boy made good. Williams hailed from the railway village of Pandy, at the bottom of the Black Mountains, to become a drama don at Cambridge and a Marxist philosopher. These two volumes of fiction can be self-consciously literary; nonetheless they articulate the history of the Black Mountains landscape in a way that really works.

Henry Williamson,
Tarka the Otter
, 1927

William Youatt,
Sheep: Their Breeds, Management and Diseases
, 1848

J. S. Bach,
Sheep May Safely Graze
, 1713: the aria from the Hunt Cantata, in praise of the good shepherd.

Samuel Barber,
Adagio for Strings
, 1936

George Butterworth,
The Banks of Green Willow
, 1913: Butterworth was killed in action in 1916.

Hubert Parry,
Jerusalem
, 1916: yes, he was a relative; or at least claimed to be.

Henry Purcell,
When I Am Laid in Earth
, 1688: the aria from ‘Dido and Aeneas’.

Supergrass,
Alright
, 1998: I should coco. Especially on a warm spring day when the grass is singing.

Ralph Vaughan Williams,
Fantasia on Theme by Thomas Tallis
, 1910;
Folk Songs II: To The Green Meadow
, 1950

Thomas Tallis,
Spem in Allium
, c. 1570: ‘Hope in any other’.

I would like to thank the Society of Authors for granting me a Foundation Award.

My thanks go to Susanna Wadeson and Patsy Irwin at Transworld, to Julian Alexander and Ben Clark at LAW, to my wife, to my children, and to all the not so dumb beasts of the field, wild and farmed, who tolerate me. To the flowers, grasses and trees too.

Lastly, I thank Faber & Faber and Viking for their permission to reproduce short extracts from, respectively, Ezra Pound’s
The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius
(‘The Decade of Sheng Min’) and John Stewart Collis’s
The Worm Forgives the Plough
.

John Lewis-Stempel
is a writer and farmer. His many previous books include
The Wild Life: A Year of Living on Wild Food
,
England: The Autobiography
and the bestselling
Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War
. He lives on the borders of England and Wales with his wife and two children.

England: The Autobiography

The Autobiography of the British Soldier

The Wild Life: A Year of Living on Wild Food

Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British

Officer in the First World War

Young Herriot

Foraging: The Essential Guide to Free Wild Food

The War Behind the Wire: The Life, Death and

Glory of British PoWs, 1914–18

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First published in Great Britain by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © John Lewis-Stempel

John Lewis-Stempel has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Illustrations and map by Micaela Alcaino

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448152582
ISBN 9780857521453

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