This is an ancient place, a remnant of old England, where ponies stop the traffic and donkeys look into shop windows, while pigs rummage in the woods in the acorn season. Things are different here! Past traditions still flourish, ‘commoners’ graze their animals overseen by a court of ‘verderers’ assisted by ‘agisters’! After 900 years, though still owned by the Crown, it’s now an open National Park.
Continue reading “The New Forest”
On a still, clear May evening in a wood in East Sussex the fire crackles as a group of people, including my daughter and son-in-law, chat together. Why have they come to this secret location at this time of night? Even more strange is that some of them have brought some musical instruments with them? What’s going on?
Continue reading “A Night with Nightingales”
With the dramas of bird migration taking place everywhere, some of the tagged cuckoos we have been following are back from Africa.
Read mo
With a dream of spring the countryside and our gardens wait expectantly. This is a creative season bursting with possibilities. There’s poetry in the air.
Continue reading “A Dream of Spring”
The magnificent panorama of the Weald reminds us that the spirit of the ancient wildwood still survives here. So too does the spirit of Winnie-the- Pooh and his ‘100 acre wood’.
Continue reading “In Wealden Woods”
On the Knepp Estate in Sussex re-wilding has created a profusion of wildlife that takes us back to the sights and sounds of our English countryside in the past.
Continue reading “Re-wilding the Countryside”
As the year ends, the light fades and the cold of winter deepens, but for a moment a beautiful song of hope is filling the air as it did for Thomas Hardy. Continue reading “My Darkling Thrush”
