Perch Hill by Adam Nicolson

Introduction

Adam Nicolson's homage to a new life is set to become a modern classic of rural England. Funny, poetic, ironic and wise, this is a profoundly moving and beautifully crafted book about his search for the rural idyll.

A particularly savage mugging in London was the catalyst for his move in search of a rural Arcadia. And so, without knowing one end of a hay baler from the other, Adam Nicolson escaped with his family to a run-down farm in the Sussex Weald. What he found was a mixture of intense beauty and profound chaos. Over the three years that the book describes, he struggled with dockleaves, spring flowers, bloody-minded sheep, his neighbours, his woods and his fields, before eventually arriving at some kind of equilibrium.

Perch Hill traces the growing intimacy between a man and his chosen place, his love affair with it and his frustrations with its intractable realities. As an attempt to live out the pastoral vision, it makes one heartfelt pleas: we should never abandon our dreams.

Biography

Adam Nicolson is the son of Nigel Nicolson and the grandson of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sacville-West. He was brought up at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. As a boy, he spent many holidays in Scotland, where his father owned a tiny West Coast island. On his eighteenth birthday, Adam was given the island by his father and has owned it ever since. For most of this summer, he has been living there, living in its sole house, an old stone cottage without electricity or running water, and spending his time discovering all that he could about the place. He has helped excavate a Viking grave, scuba-dived to look at the rich marine life, been whale-watching and bird-watching. He is an award-winning writer and journalist. His books include the National Trust Book of Long Walks, Frontiers, which won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1985, and Restoration, which tells the story of the rebuilding of Windsor Castle. For four years he wrote 'The View From Perch Hill' column in the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, although he finished writing it earlier this year. His latest book, Perch Hill: A New Life, has been short-listed for the Country Life Book of the Year Award. He is married to the writer and horticulturist Sarah Raven, and they live at Perch Hill Farm in the Sussex Weald, with their children.

Reviews

"Beautifully descriptive, passionate, candid, more knowledgeable than you may realise, and has a lot of heart."
Paul Theroux

"A delight: beautifully written, acutely observed and laced with self-mockery."
Jonathan Dimbleby, The Times

Extract

That summer burned. The south of England was bleak with heat. Cars along the lane raised a floury dust in their wake. The cow parsley and the trees in the hedges were coated with it like loaves in a bakery. The streams were dry coming off the hill and the river in the trench of the valley was little more than a gravel bed across which a line of damp had been drawn, connecting the shrunken pools.

I spent long days down there in the dark, deep shade of the riverside trees. The valley felt enclosed, a place apart, and secrecy gathered inside it. Rudyard Kipling lived here for the second half of his life - he bought Bateman's, a large seventeenth century ironmaster's house just below the last of our fields, in 1902 - and the whole place remained haunted by his memory. Everywhere you went, he had already described. It was here, among the hidden constrictions of the valley where, in Kipling's wonderful phrase, 'wind prowling through woods sounds like exciting things going to happen' that I felt most in touch with where I had come to live.

It was a pathless place, or at least the only paths were the old deeply entrenched roads, never surfaced, which dropped from the ridge to the south, crossed the river at gravelly fords and then climbed through woods again to the ridge on the other side. They were the only intrusion in what felt like an abandoned world. The woods were named - Ware's Wood, Hook Wood, Limekiln Wood, Stonehole Wood, Great Wood, Green Wood - but it felt as if no one had been here for half a century.