COUNTRY MATTERS

A Countryside Companion with 74 tips, tales and talking points by a father and daughter team who combine decades of practical knowhow with a passion for literature and lore. The countryside of course means different things to different people - long hours, hard work, or escapism, a place to play and dream or of course a backwater from which you ache to run away, or your happy place. It can seem timeless and perfect - that honeysuckle, those bluebells, bleat of lambs, sweet kiss of cider at the cricket, sharp bite of cold water in the dark pool on the high moor. It's all true but so are the blighted habitats and decimated wildlife, boarded-up pubs and cancelled bus routes. Fundamentally the authors want to show why the land (woods, fields, meadows, moors, gardens, footpaths) is the way it is, and its people (farmers, walkers, hunters, poachers, ravers and druids) are the way they are. They also want to shine a little light on the mistakes that have been made in the past and ideas about how we might do better in the future. Because they live in the Quantock Hills, their reference is skew west. We are invited to nibble some cheese (page 134), confront a cow (page 55), dive into farming past, present and future on pages 25, 60 and 338, consider the rights and wrongs of grand houses and their gardens, knock up some jam (page 239) or fashion your own crop circle (page 309). And there are poems and prose as we look closely at trees and the world beyond our towns and cities in all its pleasures and perplexities. 354pp, beautifully decorated pages including place names from old languages like Cornish and Northern French and delightful woodcut illus.