The Country Diaries: A Year in the British Countryside

The unique beauty of the British countryside has been celebrated down the ages in music, poetry, and art. It has also been celebrated in countless private diaries. This delightful treasury gathers together the very finest – from Rev Gilbert White’s journal of life at his famous home in Selborne to Beatrix Potter’s holiday diaries from Perthshire. Elsewhere, the thoughts of Dorothy Wordsworth and John Fowles rub shoulders with the words of Queen Victoria, Siegfried Sassoon and Roger Deakin. Together, these private records, which have been arranged as a diary of the calendar year, paint a rich and surprising portrait of a landscape and a life we think we know so well.

Reviews of The Country Diaries: A Year in the British Countryside

'This is an altogether life-enhancing compendium … It reminds us how the countryside is rapidly chanding, and how, today, one person's fallow field is another's luxury development or power station.' Daily Mail