The Wild Isles Read online

  THE WILD ISLES

  THE

  WILD

  ISLES

  An anthology of the best

  British & Irish nature writing

  Edited by

  Patrick Barkham

  AN APOLLO BOOK

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  An Apollo book

  In the compilation and introductory material © Patrick Barkham, 2021

  The moral right of Patrick Barkham to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  The moral right of the contributing authors of this anthology to be identified as such is asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  The list of individual titles and respective copyrights to be found on page 605 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  All excerpts have been reproduced according to the styles found in the original works. As a result, some spellings and accents used can vary throughout this anthology.

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

  ISBN (HB) 9781789541403

  ISBN (E) 9781789541397

  Chapter-opening linocuts © Sarah Price

  Head of Zeus Ltd

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  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  THE WILD ISLES

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  BIRDS

  Gilbert White

  The Natural History of Selborne

  Kathleen Jamie

  Findings

  J. A. Baker

  The Peregrine

  Amanda Thomson

  Craw Sunday

  MAVERICKS AND UNDERDOGS

  Barry Hines

  A Kestrel for a Knave

  Isabella Tree

  Wilding

  Esther Woolfson

  Corvus

  Anna Adams

  Life on Limestone

  Sabine Baring-Gould

  Mehalah

  FIELDS AND FARMING

  W. H. Hudson

  A Shepherd’s Life

  Ronald Blythe

  Akenfield

  Kenneth Allsop

  In the Country

  James Rebanks

  The Shepherd’s Life

  Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

  The Grassling

  Tim Dee

  Four Fields

  FOUR SEASONS

  Edward Thomas

  The South Country

  Laurie Lee

  Cider with Rosie

  Patrick Kavanagh

  The Green Fool

  Jessie Kesson

  A Country Dweller’s Years

  John Moriarty

  What the Curlew Said

  MOORS, HEATHS AND MOUNTAINS

  Nan Shepherd

  The Living Mountain

  Thomas Hardy

  The Return of the Native

  Dorothy Wordsworth

  The Grasmere Journal

  Enid J. Wilson

  The Guardian Country Diary

  A WILD CHILDHOOD

  Shamshad Khan

  Untamed

  John Clare

  The Autobiography

  Jay Griffiths

  Kith

  Anita Sethi

  On Class and the Countryside

  Chris Packham

  Fingers in the Sparkle Jar

  WOODS

  Kenneth Grahame

  The Wind in the Willows

  Sara Maitland

  Gossip from the Forest

  John Fowles

  The Tree

  Robert Macfarlane

  Underland

  Zakiya McKenzie

  An Elegy for Lignum Vitae

  SWIMMING

  Roger Deakin

  Waterlog

  Henry Williamson

  Tarka the Otter

  Gavin Maxwell

  Ring of Bright Water

  Miriam Darlington

  Otter Country

  Victoria Whitworth

  Swimming with Seals

  ISLANDS AND COASTLINES

  E. L. Turner

  Bird Watching on Scolt Head

  Caspar Henderson

  Hypnagogia

  Rosanne Alexander

  Waterfalls of Stars

  Adam Nicolson

  Sea Room

  Brenda Chamberlain

  Tide-Race

  Tim Robinson

  Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage

  A NATURE CURE

  John Clare

  Reccolections &c of Journey from Essex

  Peig Sayers

  Peig

  Amy Liptrot

  The Outrun

  Helen Macdonald

  H is for Hawk

  URBAN NATURE

  Richard Mabey

  The Unofficial Countryside

  Michael McCarthy

  The Moth Snowstorm

  Charles Foster

  Being a Beast

  Anita Roy

  Stag Beetles

  DISCOMFORT, DYSTOPIA, DEATH

  Sara Baume

  A Line Made by Walking

  Cynan Jones

  The Dig

  Erica McAlister

  The Secret Life of Flies

  Richard Jefferies

  After London

  Kapka Kassabova

  A Fable for Today

  FUTURE NATURE

  Virginia Woolf

  To the Lighthouse

  Jacquetta Hawkes

  A Land

  Mark Cocker

  Our Place

  George Monbiot

  Feral

  Sarah Hall

  The Wolf Border

  Melanie Challenger

  On Extinction

  THE JOY OF NATURE

  BB

  Brendon Chase

  Horatio Clare

  Running for the Hills

  Michael Kirby

  Skelligs Calling

  Acknowledgements

  Extended Copyright

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  It is autumn and spiders’ silk stretches across dewy paths like tape at a finish line. The race to grow, that burgeoning rush of spring and summer, is at an end. The skies have emptied of swifts, the sunlight softens and all is quiet. A mew like a distressed cat falls from the stillness high above the industrial estate next to my home: a young buzzard, fledged and soaring, still asks its parents for food. In the garden, my children and I collect conkers, cool to touch, encased in cream memory foam, and decorated with whorls that resemble a chestnut map of the world. On the walk to school a giant puffball, bridal white and pregnant with possibility, lies on the first fallen leaves, kicked loose by a passing teenager.

  We live in a busy, suburban place in lowland Britain, one of the most nature-depleted countries on the planet, in a geological era defined by the destructive dominance of human beings. And yet other species continue to make their lives all around us – and to change our own. We still reside alongside plants, animals and fungi which keep us alive and well – helping us breathe and providing us with food, or pollinating and fertilizing what we grow. If we look up, or down, or pause and take notice with a
ny of our senses, these living things give us a sense of companionship and wonder.

  Writing about natural landscapes and wild species is flourishing like never before. Nature writing has been given pleasing green space in many bookshops. The lives of plants and animals intrude more visibly into novels, children’s books, poetry, screenplays, blogs, social media and films. Nature seems to be moving through the work of visual artists, sculptures and musicians with a new dynamism. This is no coincidence.

  As we live in a world that is more technological than ever, with more of us collected in cities than ever before, we have been liberated from the back-breaking physical labour required to work the land that defined thousands of years of our evolution. But we also find ourselves alienated from the non-human world, and craving connection with it. We find solace and succour, and mental and physical good health from time in nature. An increasing number of us seek to bond with nature vicariously too, via culture and reading about the wild world. The best writing nourishes us in many different ways: it may soothe us, entertain us, inspire us, anger us or encourage us to spend more time among non-human life, as admirers or custodians.

  I hope you, like me, will find pleasure, wonder, refreshment, motivation and perhaps a new way of looking at the world from the British and Irish nature writing I have collected in this volume. Nature writing is a complicated term and I should explain how I have chosen to define it. I also want to briefly summarize its history in Britain. Finally, I’ll reveal how I chose this selection. Dear reader, I don’t want to give too much away yet but it involved many a genuinely exciting hour in the British Library.

  Writers today mostly don’t particularly like the term ‘nature writing’. We are nature, so all writing is nature writing. Like most of my ‘nature writing’ peers, I also say I’m just a writer. Some of my work is about our relationship with other species or landscapes where other species live. Nature writing is undoubtedly a piece of marketing shorthand, a publishing genre that helps books find a home in a bookshop. However, I think it is a valid concept; a useful banner to march under, as its leading proponent today, Robert Macfarlane, put it back in 2003 when he began to map this flourishing. I define nature writing as any writing that considers other species or non-human places and our relationship with them. Unlike a field-guide, for instance, which provides in plain text some facts about the appearance or habits of a flower or a bird, nature writing usually possesses a lyrical or poetic quality, romance as well as science.

  For the purposes of this one modest volume, I’ve had to tighten that definition. I take the birth of British nature writing to be 1789, when Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne was published. Never out of print, the Hampshire curate’s close observations of the changing seasons and secret lives of plants and animals was an early kind of ecology. White has inspired and informed subsequent generations in many different ways. His work reached scientists, modernists and artists, from Charles Darwin to Virginia Woolf. I decided I could not offer an exhaustive encyclopedia of historic works, and so Gilbert White feels like a good place to begin what is a brief introductory tour of modern British and Irish nature writing.

  Of course there is plenty of writing about nature before 1789. When I interviewed the writer and poet Kathleen Jamie, she said that all writing before 1900 was nature writing. When we lived more closely with the land, it seeped into our culture rather more. There is a wealth of poetical observation about the natural world to be found everywhere from Anglo-Saxon poetry to William Shakespeare. Many earlier non-fiction works about nature were by sportsmen-authors, who wrote with varying degrees of accuracy and flair about the species they hunted. George Turberville’s The Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting, first published in 1575, features a panoply of creatures that lived, and died, solely for our gratification. These hunter-naturalists share with nature writers the quality of taking notice. Plenty of lyrical nature writers from more recent times have been predators too. Gavin Maxwell’s first book was a brutal account of hunting basking sharks off the west coast of Scotland.

  I see modern nature writing in Britain and Ireland rising from three groups of people: from these sportsmen authors who closely observed the natural world to understand their quarry; from the first scientific naturalists who wanted to explore how the natural world functioned and how it could best be classified; and from the Romantics who defined a radically new relationship with nature – as a place for self-discovery, personal growth, awe, appreciation and wonder. The Romantic poets, particularly William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and later Romantics writing in response to fears about the direction of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, are the most significant shapers of modern nature writing. I haven’t included poetry in this volume because that would make it an unreadably epic enterprise (and I am totally unqualified to assess the merits of poetry) but I have included the prose of Dorothy Wordsworth and John Clare, whose reappraisal in the twentieth century inspired new British nature writing.

  There was a boom in nature writing in both novels and non-fiction in the early years of the twentieth century as artists, writers and readers responded to anxieties over industrialism, pollution, urban sprawl and the rise of the machine. The natural world was an escape, and a new literate, urban-dwelling mass audience lapped up magazines such as Country Life and the ‘country diary’ columns in popular newspapers. The first conservation organizations were formed in these decades, popularizing the idea of creating spaces for nature – nature ‘reserves’ – and saving species, particularly birds, from industrial-scale exploitation. Then nature writing seemed to quietly expire.

  The genre did not really flower again until this century. Writing in 2003, Robert Macfarlane dated its disappearance to November 1932, when Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm was published, a satirical novel (by a suburban writer) which lampooned popular rustic novels with their tragic heroines and stereotypical depictions of rural life. Through the middle years of the twentieth century, our finest writers, poets and philosophical thinkers did not, in general, turn their gaze upon the wild world. Nature writing existed in culture mostly in a rather mundane rabbit hole of children’s fiction featuring anthropomorphic characters and the occasional adult non-fiction narrative about the nature close to an individual’s home. (While researching my book Badgerlands, I discovered an intriguing wealth of writing from the mid-twentieth century about people who befriended badgers, watching wild ones or bringing them up as part of the family. Frances Pitt, Eileen Soper and Norah Burke write rather beautifully at times about watching badgers, although I haven’t included this trio to avoid a massive badger bias in this selection.)

  The fact that British and Irish nature writing was so insignificant in this era is a puzzle when it was steadily gaining significance in North America. Founded upon the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and (Scottish-born) John Muir, and the movement to protect wilderness within national parks, American nature writing has been producing both bestselling and critically acclaimed works for many more decades. Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and is still in print. Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986) was a New York Times bestseller. Other writers who put the natural world in the centre of their writing, from Gary Snyder to Annie Proulx, have enjoyed huge success in recent decades. American nature writing has numerous sub-genres and university courses devoted to it. Today in North America, many huge literary names and ambitious, prize-winning novels explore explicitly environmental themes, from Margaret Atwood to Richard Powers’ The Overstory.

  British nature writing has been catching up. During the 1970s and 1980s, Richard Mabey was a lone voice in a literary wilderness, virtually the only contemporary writer at the time who was both a serious and popular nature writer. His work, including his biography of Gilbert White and the epic cultural history of plants Flora Britannica, helped revive British nature writing. Robert Macfarlane, more than any other individual this century, has shaped the genre
– through his justly celebrated books, his academic studies and his championing of writers old and new: J. A. Baker and Nan Shepherd from the lost years of British nature writing, and a whole host of new writers up to 2020 with the brilliant young Irish writer Dara McAnulty.

  But the genre has also been criticized for its male character, and the apparently colonialist enterprise of cloaking a landscape, or other species, in fine writing. As Kathleen Jamie wrote in a review of Macfarlane’s The Wild Places in 2008: ‘What’s that coming over the hill? A white, middle-class Englishman! A Lone Enraptured Male! From Cambridge! Here to boldly go, “discovering”, then quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with his civilized lyrical words.’ In the last decade, however, publishers have produced much more nature writing by women. Many of the most successful and critically acclaimed works of recent years have been by women: Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize after its publication in 2014; The Outrun by Amy Liptrot won the Wainwright Prize in 2016. Other recent bestsellers include Wilding, Isabella Tree’s account of rewilding her West Sussex farm, and The Salt Path, Raynor Winn’s memoir of homelessness and walking the South West Coast Path.