Jul 26, 2012

Splish, splosh, let's go swimming. Oh look, an otter. A jellyfish! No, that's pondweed. Mind the pike. Did it bite your nose or was that a leech? Oops, a rock, down we goooo. Roger Deakin's Waterlog swims around Britain, in wild water and posh pools, arguing with water bailiffs and enjoying the tickle of sunny water on...

Jul 19, 2012

Birds, birds, more birds and precious few home comforts. Robert Atkinson's Island-Going is about sailing and camping in the roughest of weathers in the Outer Hebrides in the 1930s, looking for some very tiny birds and animals, summer after summer. North Rona, Handa, the Shiants, St Kilda, and Sula Sgeir are visited,...

Jul 12, 2012

Kathleen Jamie's Findings is a book of nature writing so hard to pin down, we just need to think about the key words; poet, kitchen window, hills, cycling, skulls, ospreys, peregrines, corncrakes, binoculars, weathercocks, the fragility of the body and its parts, and looking closely at whatever you missed the first...

Jul 5, 2012

Let's go for a walk: through time, through mud, through woods, up roads, past hedges, through rivers, round ponds, over moorland, down dales, on high roads and low roads, to the sea, all laid out and explained by the brilliantly readable Oliver Rackham in his History of the Countryside. Walking boots not required, not yet.