Gaw’s nature writing scintillates” – The Countryman“It’s just glorious … a marvellous book … it really put me in a good mood” – Georgey Spanswick, BBC Radio“Beautifully written and highly engaging … it cries out with a message from its pages – a message that life is an adventure and, if you have the physical capacity to do so, it’s best spent out of that armchair – outdoors, active and immersed in nature” – East Anglian Daily Times“Just started this and already have a hankering for a canoe and a long weekend on the river…" – EspressoCoco book blog“Seen from the water, Britain's familiar landscapes are made mesmerisingly new. The Pull of the River is a hugely satisfying work of exploration and reclamation, and one that will have you itching to cast off on your own riparian adventure” – Melissa Harrison, author of Rain: Four Walks in English Weather“Following in the long and distinguished tradition of The Wind in the Willows and Three Men in a Boat, Matt Gaw spends his time ‘messing about in boats’. In doing so, he entertains not only himself but us, in this delightful account of exploring the wonder of our waterways” -- Stephen Moss, author and naturalist“A Lark for the soul” – Paul Evans, author of Field Notes from the Edge“Gaw is an excellent writer … [his] spirited book will encourage others to seek out such waterways, and to appreciate the importance of conserving them” – Nancy Campbell, Times Literary Supplement“A joyful and beautifully written account … if it doesn’t make you want to pick up a paddle and head to your nearest river, you’re reading it wrong” – Waterways World magazine“A really enjoyable book, written with humour, a wry wit and a keen eye … his research of the rivers uncovers those nuggets of information of the historical and cultural terrain that overlays the rivers and that makes this a much richer read as they paddle along. I also found it refreshing as Gaw brings no personal baggage to his watery voyages; it is just him and his friend taking the time to immerse themselves in the natural world, sleeping out under the stars and rediscovering a place where time moves at a very different rate to modern life; a world that few people see now days” – Half Man, Half Book “Jolly yet reflective … I’m rooting for this to make next year’s Wainwright Prize Longlist” – BookishBeck“Rather wonderful … An engaging travelogue of taking the slow route across England’s inland waterways in a Canadian canoe belonging to an old friend” - Gather Outdoors blog for Adventurous Ink

    Part meditation on nature and walking, part memoir and part social history, his arresting debut is first and foremost a personal inquiry into the spirit of a place: a 14-mile broken ridge of land on the fringes of Northern London known as Scarp. Conspicuous but largely forgotten, a vast yet largely invisible presence hovering just beyond the metropolis, Scarp is a vast storehouse of regional memory. We join the author as he explores and reimagines this brooding, pregnant landscape, meticulously observing his surroundings, finding surprising connections and revealing lost slices of the past. SCARP captures the satisfying experience of a long, reflective walk. Whether talking about the beauty of a bird or a telegraph pole, deaths at a roundabout or his own troubled past, Papadimitriou celebrates the poetry in the everyday. His captivating prose reveals that the world around us is alive and intrinsically valuable in ways that the trappings of day-to-day life lead us to forget, and allows us to re-connect with something more authentic, more immediate, more profound.

    It's both travelogue and natural history, and an exploration of the position of moorland in our literature, history and psyche. It's not merely an account of solitary wandering, but of encounters, busy with the voices of the moors, past and present - gamekeepers and ramblers, shepherds and huntsmen, miners and archaeologists, publicans and priests, meteorologists and dry-stone wallers, environmentalists and developers.The Moor is a journey into Britain's single most expansive natural habitat - and its most mysterious.

    Her father was deeply conservative, with romantic, old-fashioned views about England. After his death, wanting to understand him better, Bunting began to explore his passionate, lifelong attachment to a small plot of land in North Yorkshire. Delving deep into the rich history of this acre, she uncovers traces of its Neolithic inhabitants and of the Cistercian monks; she learns of the medieval battles and considers the changing face of agriculture and leisure. The result sheds a fascinating light on what a contested, layered place England is, and on what belonging to a place might mean to all of us. "The Plot" is an original, heartfelt, and deeply political book.

    From orchids growing in abandoned cars to kestrels over Kensington, this is Britain's unofficial countryside.

    

    To love and loathe the fox is a British condition."The fox is our apex predator, our most beautiful and clever killer. We have witnessed its wild touch, watched it slink by bins at night and been chilled by its high-pitched scream. And yet we long to stroke the tumbling cubs outside their tunnel homes and watch the vixen stalk the cornfield.There is something about foxes. They captivate us like no other species.Exploring a long and sometimes complicated relationship, The Wild Life of the Fox captures our love – and sometimes loathing – of this magnificent creature in vivid detail and lyrical prose.

    Some, like the Isle of Man, resemble miniature nations, with their own language and tax laws; others, like Ray Island in Essex, are abandoned and mysterious places haunted by myths, ghosts and foxes. There are resurgent islands such as Eigg, which have been liberated from capricious owners to be run by their residents; holy islands like Bardsey, the resting place of 20,000 saints, and still a site of spiritual questing; and deserted islands such as St Kilda, famed for the evacuation of its human population, and now dominated by wild sheep and seabirds. In this evocative and vividly observed book, Patrick Barkham explores some of the most beautiful landscapes in Britain as he travels to ever-smaller islands in search of their special magic. Our small islands are both places of freedom and imprisonment, party destinations and oases of peace, strangely suburban and deeply wild. They are places where the past is unusually present, but they can also offer a vision of an alternative future. Meeting all kinds of islanders, from nuns to puffins, from local legends to rare subspecies of vole, he seeks to discover what it is like to live on a small island, and what it means to be an islander.

    

    In this, his last book completed just before his death, Sigurd F. Olson guides readers through his wide-ranging memories of a lifetime dedicated to the preservation of the wilderness.

    The Green Road into the Trees is a journey made rich by the characters he meets along the way. And the ways he takes are the old ways, the drover-paths and tracks, the paths and ditches half covered by bramble and tunnelled by alder, beech and oak: the trails that can still be traced by those who know where to look.Just as in his acclaimed book about Peru, The White Rock, Hugh shows how older, half-forgotten cultures lie much closer to the surface than we may think. In recent years, archaeologists have uncovered remarkable findings about the Celts, Saxons and Vikings that have often yet to reach the wider public. Travelling along the Icknield Way, Hugh passes the great prehistoric monuments of Maiden Castle, Stonehenge and Avebury, before ending at the Wash near Seahenge.By taking a 400 mile journey from coast to coast, through both the sacred and profane landscapes of ancient England, Hugh casts unexpected light - and humour - on the way we live now.

    More than a place to stalk the white-tail, this is a place to get together, chase armadillos, swap campfire stories, listen to quail, make biscuits, and enjoy the antics of ringtails. It's the sort of place where a man is only as good as his dog, where memories last longer, where the hunter's moon is the perfect light for chasing raccoons. Most important, it is a place to recharge the spirit and renew family ties.

    Going right up to the present day, and including both natural and man-made features, it demonstrates the sometimes subtle, sometimes radical ways in which people, flora, fauna, climate, soils, and other physical conditions have played a role in shaping the landscape. "...quirky and rewarding...full of answers to questions that others have not had the wit to ask."--Economist. "One thing is certain: no one would be wise to write further on our natural history...without thinking very hard about what is contained in these authoritative pages."--Country Life.

    The separate entries are characterised by close observation, depth of experience, and a profound awareness of seasonal change, both within in each distinct year and, more alarmingly, over the longer period, as a result of the changing climate. The writing is concise, magical, inspiring.Cocker describes all the wildlife in the village – not just birds, but plants, trees, mammals, hoverflies, moths, butterflies, bush crickets, grasshoppers, ants and bumblebees. The book explores how these other species are as essential to our sense of genuine well-being and to our feelings of rootedness as any other kind of fellowship.A celebration of the wonder that lies in our everyday experience, Cocker’s book emphasises how Claxton is as much a state of mind as it is a place. Above all else, it is a manifesto for the central importance of the local in all human activity.

    While many people's idea of the perfect holiday involves sun, sea an sand, he instead makes trips to cold, snowy parts of the world: Russia, Scandinavia or the Arctic Circle. A few years ago he bought a mountain home, an old chalet d'alpage high in the Haute Savoie, and for the first time he began to understand what it is to live in an environment where extreme snowfall is frequent.Like the six sides of a snowflake, the book has six chapters, each exploring the art, literature and science of snow, as well as his own experiences and memories, asking whether it really did snow more during his boyhood in Kent and whether changing climate patterns might mean, that for some areas of the world, snow may become a thing of the past. He also wonders why snow is so powerful for our imagination, so transformative and as fundamental as our response to darkness, to sunlight.