A Year At Bottengoms Farm

These exquisite mini essays reflect on the natural landscape, the changing seasons, village life, art, poetry, the stories that ancient churches tell, the Christian year. They refresh ones vision of ones own daily routine and surroundings and can be read over and over again, like poetry.

Canterbury Press is proud to have acquired these backlist Ronald Blythe titles, consisting of illustrated collections of the authors regular weekly column on the back page of the Church Times where, with a poets eye, he observes the comings and goings of the rural world he sees from his ancient farmhouse in the South of England. Each volume was critically acclaimed on publication.

With reverence and love, Britain's most admired rural writer chronicles daily life in a Stour valley village, finding beauty and significance in its sheer ordinariness as well as its many literary, artistic and historic associations.

Long recognised as Britain’s greatest living rural writer, Ronald Blythe draws together literature, poetry, spirituality and memory which all merge to create an exquisite commentary on our times that is at once celebratory and elegiac. In this eleventh and final collection of his beloved 'Word from Wormingford', Ronald Blythe opens us our eyes to the small miracles that happen everywhere in ordinary life. With a poet’s deftness he gives us language with which to speak about the experiences that touch every life, but so often leave us speechless – life’s great joys and its incomprehensible sorrows. His writing awakens us to the colours and scents of the seasons and the weather, lets us listen to the myriad remembered conversations stored in his attic mind, evokes the smell of old books and all the memories they conjure up, and shows us how to be thankful for the inestimable blessing of simple routine.

A meditation on the painter John Nash's old home.

Concern about the 'decline of community', and the theme of 'community spirit', are internationally widespread in the modern world. The English past has featured many representations of declining community, expressed by those who lamented its loss in quite different periods and in diverse genres. This book analyses how community spirit and the passing of community have been described in the past – whether for good or ill – with an eye to modern issues, such as the so-called 'loneliness epidemic' or the social consequences of alternative structures of community. It does this through examination of authors such as Thomas Hardy, James Wentworth Day, Adrian Bell and H.E. Bates, by appraising detective fiction writers, analysing parish magazines, considering the letter writing of the parish poor in the 18th and 19th centuries, and through the depictions of realist landscape painters such as George Morland. K. D. M. Snell addresses modern social concerns, showing how many current preoccupations had earlier precedents. In presenting past representations of declining communities, and the way these affected individuals of very different political persuasions, the book draws out lessons and examples from the past about what community has meant hitherto, setting into context modern predicaments and judgements about 'spirits of community' today.

From the time that John Constable made its waterways and rural landscapes famous, the Stour Valley in East Anglia has been a haunt for artists, writers, poets, musicians and gardeners. Ronald Blythe perpetuates this rich artistic heritage from an ancient farmhouse, with its three-acre naturalistic garden, that has been a gathering place for literary and artistic friends for almost seventy years. Stour Seasons is the tenth collection of his Word From Wormingford columns that have appeared on the back page of the Church Times for over 20 years. Britain’s greatest living rural writer observes in rich detail the gifts that each season of the year brings and in doing so, evokes a world of beauty, friendship and wonder at the simple pleasures that make everyday life the miracle that it is.

In The Edge of Extinction, Jules Pretty explores life and change in a dozen environments and cultures across the world, taking us on a series of remarkable journeys through deserts, coasts, mountains, steppes, snowscapes, marshes, and farms to show that there are many different ways to live in cooperation with nature. From these accounts of people living close to the land and close to the edge emerge a larger story about sustainability and the future of the planet. Pretty addresses not only current threats to natural and cultural diversity but also the unsustainability of modern lifestyles typical of industrialized countries. In a very real sense, Pretty discovers, what we manage to preserve now may well save us later.Jules Pretty's travels take him among the Maori people along the coasts of the Pacific, into the mountains of China, and across petroglyph-rich deserts of Australia. He treks with nomads over the continent-wide steppes of Tuva in southern Siberia, walks and boats in the wildlife-rich inland swamps of southern Africa, and experiences the Arctic with ice fishermen in Finland. He explores the coasts and inland marshes of eastern England and Northern Ireland and accompanies Innu people across the taiga’s snowy forests and the lakes of the Labrador interior. Pretty concludes his global journey immersed in the discrete cultures and landscapes embedded within the American landscape: the small farms of the Amish, the swamps of the Cajuns in the deep South, and the deserts of California.The diverse people Pretty meets in The Edge of Extinction display deep pride in their relationships with the land and are only willing to join with the modern world on their own terms. By the examples they set, they offer valuable lessons for anyone seeking to find harmony in a world cracking under the pressures of apparently insatiable consumption patterns of the affluent.