Linescapes

Linescapes

Remapping and Reconnecting Britain's Fragmented Wildlife

Summary

‘Glorious… Political, passionate, perceptive’ Robert Macfarlane

An eye-opening exploration of the lines that cut through our countryside, from hedges to railways, and a passionate manifesto for reconnecting wildlife.

Our landscape has been transformed by a vast network of lines, from hedges and walls to railways and power cables. In Linescapes, Hugh Warwick unravels the far-reaching ecological consequences of these changes. As our lives and our land were fenced in and threaded together, wildlife habitats were cut into ever smaller – and increasingly unviable – fragments.

Yet as Warwick travels across this linescape, he shows that we can help our flora and fauna to flourish once again. With his fresh and bracing perspective on Britain’s countryside, he proposes a challenge and gives ground for hope, for our lines can and do contain a real potential for wildness and for wildlife.

Reviews

  • In Linescapes, Hugh Warwick has written a gloriously unclassifiable book, a manifesto-adventure-exploration-reflection that manages to be political, passionate, perceptive – and very funny
    Robert Macfarlane

About the author

Hugh Warwick

Hugh Warwick is an ecologist and writer with a particular fondness for hedgehogs. He is the author of A Prickly Affair and The Beauty in the Beast and Hedgehog, a monograph. Hugh has studied hedgehogs, off and on, for over 30 years, spending months radio-tracking them around the West Country and Scotland. He is a spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and appears regularly in the media talking about wildlife and the environment. He lives in Oxford with his wife and two children.
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