Take a walk with Rob Cowen on a chilly February evening 

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Take a walk with Rob Cowen on a chilly February evening

Common Ground

One of Britain’s Favourite Nature Books as featured on BBC’s Winterwatch

Immersive, evocative and powerful, Common Ground is a unique evocation of how, over the course of one year, Rob Cowen discovered a common - though extraordinary - square mile of wood, meadow, hedge and river on the edge of his northern town.

One of the most original books of 2015.

Cracking… Vividly and movingly described… Cowen writes very well.

Absolutely mesmerising, utterly beautiful, utterly engrossing – it takes a lot for a book to give me goosebumps but this one did.

[A] multi-faceted, touched-by-genius exploration of a stretch of Harrogate wasteland.

Marks out Cowen as a new writer who is both entertaining and significant… Cowen’s descriptive writing is visceral and gripping… and his attention to colour is particularly striking.

Magical... Deeply original... a detailed nature study [and] a moving memoir... I became both intrigued and enchanted by this hybrid approach.

Highly poetic... like an archaeologist, Cowen unearths histories, natural life and decayed infrastructure in a small area bordering the River Nidd... Above all, Common Ground is about the transformative power of this unnoticed piece of land, if one can only stand and stare for long enough'

Sensitive, thoughtful and poetic. Rob Cowen rakes over a scrap of land with forensic care, leading us into a whole new way of looking at the world.

Marvellously moving, this thrilling book is as big as any I know. A deep-mined and lovingly made account of survival, endurance and natural resilience in our old and broken world ... Heart-stoppingly beautiful.

author of The Running Sky and Four Fields

It takes a special kind of writer to make magic from the everyday. Rob Cowen has created something extraordinary; a journey into the Northern dreamtime in starkly beautiful prose. Common Ground gives us a new perspective on familiar places; makes us think again about what we think we know of our world; helps us understand the links that bind us to our landscape, and, like Blake, makes us see Heaven in a wild flower.

Heartfelt, deep, beautiful and moving.

Formally brave, beautifully written; an intimate account of one of life’s great turning points, and a luminous, painstaking exploration of place.

Boldly imaginative… This is writing of the highest order… Deep, rich and alive in prose that bubbles up from the fetid loam and, as in the work of, say, John Clare, William Wordsworth or DH Lawrence, takes pleasure in every microscopic, fecund detail… What makes this book special is the author’s total immersion in his subject… [Cowen] is an outlier, a Northern voice, a set of eyes on the soil, and Common Ground is his outstanding addition to – and expansion of – the canon.

Beautiful. It’s refreshing to read a piece of place-writing that digs so deeply and tenderly into a marginal landscape, and which (strikingly) does so using a novelist’s tools as well as a nature writer’s.

Cowen's relationship with this morsel of land is intense and honest, and described in superb prose... Not only rich and strange, but also astonishing.

When Cowen thinks of himself as an owl or a butterfly or a fox caught in a snare the book lights up... leaping over the space between animal and human as though there were no difference between us.

Cowen is without doubt one of our best current writers on landscape, on a par with Roger Deakin, Richard Mabey and Robert MacFarlane

Wonderful … An eerie haunting book … rendered with hair-raising, almost hallucinogenic, lyricism. Cowen moves on through the seasons of the year and the creatures of the edge land, feeling, more than observing, how the improving circumstances of animal life mirror his own climb out of darkness.

Blending natural history with a novelistic approach, Cowen revives his connection to the evocative, mysterious power of the natural world.

Very beautiful indeed... [Cowen] has all the alliterative grace and fresh metaphors of a poet

[A] poetic memoir... This apparently scrappy and overlooked piece of wasteland - a tangle of wood, meadow, field and river - proves to be, under [Cowen's] forensic and magnifying gaze, brimming with riches.

He is engrossed by his landscape, enthralled by the minutiae and evokes the same fascination in the reader

ONE OF BRITAIN'S FAVOURITE NATURE BOOKS AS FEATURED ON BBC's WINTERWATCH 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2016 
 
'Bold and beautiful.' Robert Macfarlane 
 
'Sensitive, thoughtful and poetic ... leading us into a whole new way of looking at the world' Michael Palin 
 
'Touched by genius' John Lewis-Stempel 
 
'Absolutely mesmerizing, utterly beautiful and engrossing' Joanne Harris 
 
After moving from London to a new home in Yorkshire, and about to become a father for the first time, Rob Cowen finds himself in unfamiliar territory. Disoriented, hemmed in by winter and yearning for open space, he ventures out to a nearby edge-land: a pylon-slung tangle of wood, hedge, field, meadow and river that lies unclaimed and overlooked on the outskirts of town. 
 
Digging deeper into this lost landscape, he begins to uncover its many layers and lives – beast, bird, insect, plant and people – in kaleidoscopic detail. As the seasons change and the birth of his child draws closer, his transformative journey into the blurry space where human and nature meet becomes increasingly profound. In bringing this edge-land to life, Cowen offers both a both a unique portrait of people and place through time and an unforgettable exploration of the common ground we share with the natural world, the past and each other.

Rob Cowen

A beautifully written study of our longest numbered route, the A1, is full of rich asides and haunting explorations, conjuring the visual pleasure of a road movie.

Richly historical . . . The North Road is a wonderful achievement . . . Cowen has perhaps found his country's elusive sense of identity. It resides not in landscape or football or a National Trust garden, but in an ever-changing, ever-active, thundering dual carriageway. It begins in uncertainty and ends in a different nation. Brilliantly, The North Road is everything. It is “England and nowhere”.

LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2025 
 
‘A dazzlingly inventive work of literature’ Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways'A wonderful, epic braiding of history, geography and personal memoir' James Rebanks, author of English Pastoral____________________________________________________________________At the heart of this book is a highway. The A1; The Great North Road. A 400-mile multiplicity of ancient trackway, Roman road, pilgrim path, coach route and motorway that has run like a backbone through Britain for the last 2,000 years. 
 
In this genre-defying and profoundly personal book, Cowen follows this ghost road from beginning to end on a journey through history, place, people and time. Weaving his own histories and memories with the layered landscapes he moves through, this is the story of an age, of coming to terms with time past and time passing, and the roads that lead us to where we find ourselves. 
 
Written in kaleidoscopic prose, The North Road is an unforgettable exploration of Britain’s great highway. 
_________________________________________________________________________ 
 
'Stunning and utterly unique. The North Road sits in a genre of one' Benjamin Myers, author of The Gallows Pole 
 
'A dazzling, dogged, layered account of one road’s passage through place, time and an ordinary family’s history, The North Road truly is a trip' Melissa Harrison, author of All Among The Barley 
 
'Thought-provoking and beautiful' Matt Gaw, author of Under The Stars 
 
'A beautifully woven and mesmerising book' Tom Bullough, author of Sarn Helen 
 
'Sweeping, sensitive and enduring' Tristan Gooley, author of How To Read A Tree 
‘Rob has given the A1 an entirely new sense of life’ Luke Turner, author of Out Of The Woods

Rob Cowen

Praise for The North Road

A beautifully written study of our longest numbered route, the A1, is full of rich asides and haunting explorations, conjuring the visual pleasure of a road movie.

Richly historical . . . The North Road is a wonderful achievement . . . Cowen has perhaps found his country's elusive sense of identity. It resides not in landscape or football or a National Trust garden, but ...

Books by Rob Cowen

Articles featuring Rob Cowen

Take a walk with Rob Cowen on a chilly February evening

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