To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.

Barry Lopez

A shining fours stars out of five, and another winner from my wonderful local library.

Low key, honest, and beautifully formed, Julia Blackburn’s writng walked me through a strange prehistoric landscape collecting fragments of bone, flint and revelation. A walking meditation on lost lands, fossilised footprints and the things we leave behind. As I turned the pages I ceased to hear the storm outside. Find a quiet spot and read this fascinating book.

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The ground where she sat was turfy and springy. She leaned over a little tussock and examined it carefully, teasing out with her fingers the tiny plants of which it was composed, the mosses and the lichens. The combination of smallness and complexity in the plants fascinated her. She put her head right down on the tussock as though it were a pillow, and closed her eyes, listened to the sea, the birds, the wind. She never regretted having come to live here. She opened her eyes and saw, inches from her face, a tiny spider scale a blade of grass.

Deirdre Madden, Nothing Is Black (Faber and Faber, 1994)

It was a deliciously hot spring day – a day when there is both sun and crispness in the air and flowers look young and well groomed and dewy, not swooning and languid. And beech leaves are light as spring muslins, not black-green shrouds as later they come to be.

Molly Keane, The Rising Tide

“I know every cow-clap in this valley,” said Gwyn. “I know where to look for sheep after a snowstorm. I know who built the bridge to Foothill Farm. I know why Mrs May won’t go in the post office. I know how to find the slates that point the road over the mountain if you’re caught in a mist. I know where the foxes go when they’re hunted.”

Alan Garner, The Owl Service, 1967