Returning home from holiday this weekend, I went for a walk across the fields.
Perhaps it’s just me suffering late summer lethargy, but the countryside looks tired. The sheep paddocks, clumpy and patchy with grass that never recovered from last summer’s exhausting heat, are silent and have gone to seed.
The harvested wheat and barley fields have been left as stubble, fading gold to grey and scratchy like an old boozer’s chin.
Stomping towards South Luffenham I crushed brittle straw underfoot and kicked up tiny shuttlecock seeds in the pasture.
All around, the trees and hedges have lost their lustre, the brambles are bent over and gnarly yet there’s an abundance of blackberries, grenades of juicy tartness on the tongue. A season ending, a season beginning.
Personally, autumn appeals to me. It’s when I most want to be outside and wandering along the footpaths; although since living in Rutland I’m also moved by May when the cow parsley lines the lanes and the birds join together in joyous dawn chorus.
Now, though, it’s quiet and the evenings are still and silent. Soon, the swallows will line up on the telegraph wires and begin their flight south.
One thing I’ve enjoyed about this summer’s holiday is time for reading. We spent a week in Wales in a cottage on the side of Dinas Mountain, Pembrokeshire, overlooking the Irish Sea.
With the exception of a spectacular sunset, the weather was dull and cool. But in a spacious cottage with ever changing seascapes and skies, we were happy just to look out to sea, read and play games.
In bed at night and then late into the morning, I sat propped up by pillows with a book resting against my knees, a mountain rising from the foothills of my duvet.
In those pages I lost myself to different places and different times. If you’re interested, here’s what I was reading:
The Outermost House, by Henry Beston
Published in 1928, The Outermost House chronicles a year living in a beach house on Cape Cod. Beston wrote:
“The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling up from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot…. The longer I stayed, the more eager I was to know this coast and to share it mysterious and elemental life.”
It is an extraordinary account of what Beston witnessed and experienced, written with rich, elemental detail and crafted in poetic style. Beston’s beach cottage was built in 1925 and survived numerous storms before finally succumbing to the sea in February 1978.
• For UK friends, and especially those in my home county of Sussex, you might like reading Copsford by Walter Murray. Escaping London in the early 1920s, Murray spent a year in a remote, abandoned cottage and chronicled his experiences living next to nature. Published in the 1940s, it has echoes of Thoreau’s Walden.
Holding Fire, by Bryce Andrews
Subtitled ‘A reckoning with the American West’, this book is about a journey towards reconciliation between people, land and weapons.
The title refers not only to guns and the author’s sense of guilt on inheriting his grandfather’s Smith & Wesson revolver, which he eventually melts down and forges a tool for tilling the earth, but with Native American tradition.
There’s a telling conversation with an Indigenous neighbour who challenges the received understanding of ‘sustainability’ comparing it with her people’s concept of a reciprocal relationship with the natural world. She says:
“Reciprocity is not the same as sustainability. White people talk about sustainability, which has to do with how much you can take from nature, or a place, without it falling completely apart.
“I look, and most Native people look, at the relationship between people and their place in terms of reciprocity. The question then becomes: What can I give back? What can I do to take care of the place that feeds and shelters me? That’s a very different approach than asking: How much can I sustainably take?”
Moortown Diary, by Ted Hughes
I have to admit my lust for poetry is late flowering, inspired by a nature writing course I have been doing with New York Times bestselling author Kathryn Aalto, an American living in Devon, where these poems were penned by Ted Hughes in the early 1970s when he bought a small farm on the edge of Dartmoor.
Instantly, I fell for Hughes’ visceral and sometimes violent poetry about everyday farming experience. He writes of dehorning cows, foxhunting, a tractor, the death of a calf, ravens pecking at a dead lamb and birds in the rain.
You see and feel everything in all its gritty detail yet compassionate commentary. It’s set me off on a journey exploring Ted Hughes and I’m now reading Birthday Letters, addressing his relationship with Sylvia Plath.
Rutland in the News
If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll have seen that Rutland was featured in yesterday’s FT Weekend, in the House & Home section (Saturday August 26).
I referenced the comments I made to the journalist in last’s week’s blog, On Rutland Water.
Interestingly, the headline in the paper edition ‘Reservoir Digs’ has been changed online to the less than memorable ‘Modestly beautiful Rutland hit by rising interest rates’.
I was never much good at headlines when I started out as a trainee newspaper reporter, but I doubt this headline will win many awards, or do much for estate agents in Rutland.
But then many locals probably won’t mind too much. It sums up Rutland nicely.