Richard Jefferies was born on a Wiltshire smallholding in 1848, but this lyrical evocation of the county’s downlands, copses, streams and hedgerows was written after the author had moved to the outskirts of London in search of literary fame. ‘To read these essays today is chastening,’ Richard Mabey writes in his introduction to this new edition. ‘There is, in the best of them, an electric attentiveness, a noticing, that is hard to aspire to. They are chastening, too, in what they are able to describe – an abundance of bird and insect life that, despite the contemporary passion for slaughter (in which the author played his part), is unimaginable in the modern industrial countryside . . . Jefferies did not know this, but he was sending, in a faltering new language, a message in a bottle from a disappearing country.’

Little Toller Books | Paperback 272 pp. |ISBN: 9781908213006