This is Guy Shrubsole’s best book yet, despite the success of his excellent Who Owns England (reviewed here) and his book about soggy, slippery woods, The Lost Rainforests of Britain (reviewed here) because this book is about everything! It covers a lot of ground, all of it, because it is about land use and who…
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Sunday book review – The Volunteers by Carol Donaldson
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This is the story of the relationships between the author and a team of conservation volunteers. It is a tender account of those relationships and has some very, very well-written and moving passages. I liked it a lot. However, although these are conservation volunteers, nature is the backdrop to this book rather than a leading…
Sunday book review – Enjoying Birdwatching in Lancashire and Cumbria by David Hindle
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I wrote the foreword for this book (the author must have caught me on a good day) but it was published last year so I have been rather dilatory in giving it the little breath of publicity here that it most certainly deserves. The title is self-explanatory but few vaguely similar regional books use the…
Guest blog – Walshaw Turbine 25 by John Page
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John Page was born in the West Riding, a proud Yorkshireman and was taught to play cricket left-handed “’cos it flummoxes t’ bowler, and buggers up t’ field.” He went to university in London and Leeds, and enjoyed (most of the time) attempting to teach young people that there’s a big wide world beyond the…
Guest blog – Walshaw Turbine 56 by Nick MacKinnon
Nick MacKinnon is a freelance teacher of Maths, English and Medieval History, and lives above Haworth, in the last inhabited house before Top Withens = Wuthering Heights. In 1992 he founded the successful Campaign to Save Radio 4 Long Wave while in plaster following a rock-climbing accident on Skye. His poem ‘The metric system’ won…
Mid-week book review – Stoats, Weasels, Martens and Polecats by Jenny Macpherson
This is a very interesting book about a very few species and a very good New Naturalist. The New Naturalist series put out some rather unattractive books a while ago with terribly reproduced and somewhat irrelevant images. Those days have certainly passed. This is a well-produced volume with good photographs, graphs and figures. The author…
Mid-week book review – The Last Crow by Bob Berzins
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Another novel about the murky upland world of somewhere near you? Badgers, grouse moors, lords, rich businessmen, snares, machetes, rifles, Hen Harriers, modern slavery and so much more. It’s a good follow-up to Bob’s previous novel Snared (see review here). If you enjoyed Snared then I’m sure you’ll enjoy this too. And, just like Snared,…
Sunday book review – The Flitting by Ben Masters
This book, out of 52 I reviewed in 2024, was my choice of wildlife book of the year – I recommend it highly. You can buy this book from Bookshop.org and I have set up a booklist to make that easy through this link https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/MarkAvery Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will…
Sunday book review – England’s Green by David Matless
An interesting read – perhaps more so for those of us who have lived through the whole of this period than youngsters – but maybe not. I got on much better with this book from the moment I decided not to take it too seriously but just enjoy the ride. There is something a bit…
Sunday book review – Birds of Louth by John Clarkson and Phil Espin
This is the second edition of the 2007 title. The poignant thing about this book is that the senior author, John Clarkson, passed away in 2023 and this edition thus stands as memorial to him as well as a fine book about one part of one English county. I used to think that Lincolnshire was…