I saw a pair of great tits some days ago. (Massingham Major, you are a dirty-minded boy, and if you snigger again, you will do five hundred lines.) The squeaking-wheel song of Parus major is...

Warm familiar scents drift softly from the oven,And imprint forever upon our heartsThat this is homeand that we are loved.

We live, all of us, in sprung rhythm. Even in cities, folk stir without knowing it to the surge in the blood that is the surge and urgency of season. In being born, we have...

The air was fresh and crisp and had a distinct smell which was a mixture of the dried leaves on the ground and the smoke from the chimneys and the sweet ripe apples that were...

Why does no one speak of the cultural advantages of the country? For example, is a well groomed, ecologically kept, sustainably fertile farm any less cultural, any less artful, than paintings of fat angels on...

We need only to close our eyes and we are back on the Third Line, walking up the lane, through the yard and entering the bright, warm kitchen. We are home again.

Every nation must have prayerful men and women to intercede for the country’s well-being.

What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and I don’t...

Little girl, little boyIf love has a wayFill their fields with laughterAnd scatter the sun on their dayAnd if it should happen to rainMake their raindrops kissesStraight from heaven aboveThat touch their hands and facesAnd...

Townsfolk have no conception of the peace that mother nature bestows, and as long as that peace is unfound the spirit must seek to quench its thirst with ephemeral novelties. And what is more natural...

I’ll save a spot for you on the hood of my truck.

I know perfectly well that it is impossible, according to arithmetic and scholarly books, to live in a far valley off a handful of ewes and two low yield cows. But we live, I say....

Because I seeA rainstorm in JuneJust before the sunThe black of nightJust before the starsAnd, girl, I see your ghostJust before our dawn

If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which...

And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

For the author as for God, standing outwith his creation, all times are one; all times are now. In mine own country, we accept as due and right – as very meet, right, and our...

How you live your life is up to you. You have to go out and grab the world by the horns. Rope it before it ties you down and decides for you.

Or awa’ upon Islay, in January, the wind was honed to a cutting edge across the queer flatness of Loch Gorm and the strand and fields ’round. The roe deer had taken shelter in good...

Not by human dwellings–not in crowded cities alone, are the sights and sounds of life. The wildest places of the earth are full of them.

In East Sussex, let us say, an old farm sleeps in sun-dapple, its oast-house with its cowls echoing the distant steeple of SS Andrew and Mary, Fletching, where de Montfort had prayed and Gibbon now...