Walks in the Wheat-fields

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.

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

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