The greatest nature writing

I thought Robert MacFarlane was good - he is, if often a bit self-conscious in style - only to find Roger Deakin even better. Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Or, Life in the Woods is an in-the-beginning must for environmentalists and nature lovers, its very bumptiousness part of its charm (and it has the most poetic prose chapter on spring, to end the book, that I think I've ever read). But soaring highest of all, at least of what I've now read, is J(ohn) A(lec) Baker, page after page of whose 1967 classic The Peregrine offers lyrical writing of an order I've never encountered at the same visionary pitch. At the same time this is a study with its feet firmly planted on rough soil, with an acute awareness - shared by Steinbeck in Cannery Row's description of the tide-pool - about the destructiveness and ferocity of nature in Baker's stated intention to 'make plain the bloodiness of killing'.

Baker lived all of his too-short life (he died in  1987 at the age of 61) in Chelmsford, Essex. As anyone who has walked rural portions, and especially estuaries, of that much-maligned county, there is as much natural wonder to be found here as anywhere, though you need to search it out. Baker's stamping ground was, as Mark Cocker writes in his introduction to the Collins edition of The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer, 'a roughly rectangular Essex patch of just 550km, which includes the Chelmer Valley from the eastern edge of Chelmsford as far west as Maldon and the confluence of the Chelmer and Blackwater Rivers', and the author wrote that 'before it is too late, I have tried to...convey the wonder of...a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa'.

As Thoreau more bullishly puts it, and more about the inner than the near-to-hand:

What does Africa, - what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a North-West Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? ...Be the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes...Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of though. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay.

But I'm letting Thoreau steer me, in his splendidly digressive way, off course. Baker's own introduction states how 'in my diary of a single winter, I have tried to preserve a unity, binding together the bird, the watcher, and the place that holds them both' - which he does by occasionally showing us how the watcher identifies with the bird.

But the first person is sparely used, never over-indulgent as it is in Thoreau, and the prose manages to be both rich and spare at the same time. Descriptions of the peregrine's soaring and then his stoops, those giddying plunges at speed, intoxicate the reader as they clearly did Baker. Daily descriptions of the scene have a physical force, partly through the Shakespearean use of vivid verb, some of them created or made intransitive, as here, all of which I recognise:

The sky peeled white in the north-west gale, leaving the eye no refuge from the sun's cold glare. Distance was blown away, and every tree and church and farm came closer, scoured of its skin of haze...New horizons stood up bleached and stark, plucked out by the cold talons of the gale...An iridescence of ducks' heads smouldered in foaming blue water...

In a freezing January, one of the coldest, and having killed a half-dead, bleeding woodpigeon, the writer records:

A day of blood; of sun, snow and blood. Blood-red! What a useless adjective that is. Nothing is as beautifully, richly red as flowing blood on snow. It is strange that the eye can love what mind and body hate.

The kill itself is brutal - here a soaring and a stoop, both thrillingly described in the previous paragraph, end in the final action:

And for the partridge there was the sun suddenly shut out, the foul flailing blackness spreading wings above, the roar ceasing, the blazing knives driving in, the terrible white face descending - hooked and masked and horned and staring-eyed. And then the back-breaking agony beginning, and snow scattering from scuffling feet, and snow filling the bill's wide silence scream, till the merciful needle of the hawk's beak notched in the straining neck and jerked the shuddering life away.

And for the watcher, sheltered for centuries from such hunger and such rage, such agony and such fear, there is the memory of that sabring fall from the sky, and the vicarious joy of the guiltless hunter who kills only through his familiar, and wills him to be fed.

Then there's this, of a close encounter with a tiercel perched on a post five yards away:

He looked round as I stopped, and we both went rigid with the shock of surprise. Light drained away, and the hawk was a dark shape against white sky. His sunken, owl-like head looked dazed and stupid as it turned and bobbed and jerked about. He was dazzled by this sudden confrontation with the devil. The dark moustachial lobes were livid and bristling on the pale Siberian face peering from thick furs. The large bill opened and closed in a silent hiss of alarm, puffing out breath into the cold air. Hesitant, incredulous, outraged, he just squatted on his post and gasped, Then the splintered fragments of his mind sprang together, and he flew very fast and softly away, rolling and twisting from side to side in steepling banks and curves as though avoiding gunshot. 

Three pages later there's a no less compelling passage about a meeting with a tawny owl in a wood just before sunset. Other birds appear and are noted, though unfortunately many of them are the peregrine's prey, seen either before the attack or as kill to tell Baker where his main object has been. Their vocalisings are vividly captured - 'the squelching call of snipe', the scolding of blackbirds' alarms, robins' song 'clear as spring water'.

But I realise that I could go on excerpting passages for a lot longer, glorying in the language as I take pleasure in typing it out and hoping something will rub off. Just read it. And re-read. I'll go even further than my title by declaring that it's a towering masterpiece by any literary standards and has gone on to my all-time-favourites list. I'm saving The Hill of Summer for a time closer to what it describes, though I realise it is probably even better to savour the opposite of what one's going through. Which, these past few days, has felt like the bleak heart of winter. In the meantime, here's the only reasonably close photo I've ever managed to take of a bird of prey - a mere buzzard, I fear, but it was splendid to see this summer in the well (but not over) maintained common near Jill's place in Lower Southrepps.

UPDATE: I realise I let the centenary day of Finnish independence pass unremarked, though I did go to the superlative celebratory concert from Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican last night - all Sibelius, of course, part of the team's symphonies cycle - and reviewed it this morning on The Arts Desk. Was expecting an encore after the bleak, abrupt ending of the First Symphony, but there wasn't one. This bird-related beauty was Jukka-Pekka Saraste's choice of encore to mark the composer's own 150th anniversary in 2015. Here it is from Leif Segerstam and the Danish National Radio Orchestra:

Bank Holidays: Chagall and St Cedd

It must be a record: two May Bank Holiday Mondays in a row of perfect late spring/early summer weather. On the second, which I'll get round to eventually, we headed out along the river Medway from Tonbridge to the church of All  Saints Tudeley, with its twelve Chagall windows, which we only got to hear about during our Chichester Easter weekend (there's another in the cathedral, as that entry shows). On the first May Monday, we badgered our friends Daisy, François and Garance to excurt from their cottage fastness in the grounds of Layer Marney, the Tudor church and towers of which I briefly extolled back in 2007 and intend to revisit later on the blog,

and drive to the remote Saxon chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall at Bradwell-juxta-Mare (no Latinophobic 'On Sea', if you please) on the south bank of the Blackwater estuary. Our plan had originally been to do a big hike around the Dengie peninsula back in March, which would have involved complicated train and bus connections; but an icy east wind put us off and we settled for an Ingatestone circuit instead. And here we hardly laboured at all, since it's a short walk from car park to chapel; and then, having planned to do a big loop via Tillingham, we succumbed to the summery laziness of a picnic and a nap on the shelly shingle of the mudflats. Picnic snaps, though fun, would ruin the higher purpose of this entry and the privacy of our dear friends, so I'll leave it at shells and channels. Someone may have strewn the cracked mud in the first picture, but I didn't and I like to think it's natural.

Some time in the third century AD Carausius, renegade Count of the Saxon Shore, built a nominally Roman fort here. There's hardly anything of it to see now, compared to Richborough and Pevensey which were probably also Carausius's doing, but the bricks of Othona - as it has been putatively identified, and the name lives on in the discreetly tree-ringed Christian community close by - went into the construction of the chapel and monastery by Cedd, one of Iona-based Aidan's 12 English missionaries, in 654 AD. That makes it the oldest substantial church in England.

I say 'substantial', but the church has lost its rounded chancel or apse and two side chapels. They were demolished when it was turned into a barn in the 17th century; it had remained in use as a chapel-of-ease to Bradwell as late as the 16th century. As my pious guidebook notes, 'St Peter's, which for a thousand years had served man's spirit, came to serve his bodily needs, until the time came when Essex remembered her past.' That happened when the chapel was reconsecrated in 1920 and restored. It's now a centre of pilgrimage and a place of daily worship for the Othona community. The inside has a few simple modern touches like the incorporation of stones from Lindisfarne, Iona and Lastingham, where Bishop Cedd died of the plague in 664 AD.

The only false note is the vestry building close by, 'a major visual crime' as Pevsner rightly observes. Looking out towards the North Sea from the south wall blots that out.

And from the saltmarsh, only the church can be seen.

After our lazy two hours, we did at least manage a very brief walk to the north, looking over the Blackwater Estuary to Mersea past the ruins of World War Two defences.

Looping round gave us other perspectives on St Peter and the first of the rape fields which, whatever you think of them, give a special yellow May colouring to the flat landscape.

We had a close encounter with those ubiquitous, hay-fever inducing fields on our Kent expedition, which could more properly be described as a hike. 40 minutes after leaving Charing Cross, we were making our way through Tonbridge - an unprepossessing high street, until you hit the castle and the Medway- and took a slightly circuitous route around the suburbs to the north of the river until we found the path we should have taken in the first place. Within minutes we were in deepest country- and river-side, with only the odd kayakers and dog-walkers punctuating the birdsong.

I don't know if you quite get the proper sense of spring lushness and bright buttercup meadows from this, but the perfect May afternoon it certainly was.

We consumed our hastily assembled picnic on a bend of the river with a food-curious swan lurking just beneath us. I'm afraid I have to be in this photo to give a sense of the idyll; the ones of J take in more of the landscape, but of course he permits no close facials here.

Crossing the first bridge, our route then took us through what seemed like an endless field of rape, with the right of way barely distinguishable after a while,

vineyards

and orchards with some of the apple blossom still hanging on (we're told the late spring will yield bumper crops in the autumn).

The landscape began to undulate as we came closer to Tudeley, in the foothills (if such they can be called) of the High Weald. Copses of spring beauty punctuated the fields on route to the church.

Then we crossed the graveyard of All Saints to reach the wonders within this historically unprepossessing but neat and beautifully situated church.

Chagall, who only turned to glass design late in life (we saw some splendid specimens in Nice), received the commission for the east window in 1968. It commemorates the death in a sailing accident of Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, daughter of a Tonbridge worthy who like Chagall was Jewish by birth (his wife was, if I remember right, French Catholic).

The window carries the legend of death and resurrection. In the lower third the girl lies in the sea, observed by a grieving figure (the Virgin?).

There's a fluidity about all the design rather unusual for stained glass; Pevsner observes that Chagall uses the medium 'as if he were working in water-colours'. Centrally placed are the mother with her two daughters, the dead one wraith-like, and you can just see the bottom half of the red horse accompanying her to the ladder

that leads upwards to the crucified Christ.

 Over the next 15 years, with further funding from the d'Avigdor-Goldsmids, Chagall designed 11 more windows to cover the entire church. For the artist, 'the Bible is a synonym for Nature', so birds, beasts and natural settings are important. In the first window, west in the south transept, is Eve offering Adam the forbidden fruit.

while animals predominate in what I think must be the fifth window,

and deep blue governs the four jewelled side windows of the chancel.

Angels are everywhere here, the one to the north tumbling towards Chagall's signature

and the one on the south bearing under the left wing the inscription VAVA, Chagall's pet name for his wife.

Light was most suffusing the golden 'joy and hope' windows on the south side of the nave

where the detail is more impressionistic, other than the smaller angel swimming in light yellows.

At what cost was this unity of vision achieved? Well, many parishioners weren't too happy about the removal of the old windows - do I catch a whiff of antisemitism? - but were partly appeased when these were placed in the vestry with a light box behind them. A sample shows they were rather charming in their own right.

And so, after this long examination of an art gallery more precious than I could have imagined, we completed our loop by passing through the hamlet known as the Postern, with its scattering of farm buildings and handsome Georgian houses. The oaks were all in glorious early leaf

and mixing with the hawthorn flowers in the hedgerows

We'd done the whole circuit in an afternoon, and arrived back in town with time for me to go straight to the LSO's free-for-all Berlioz concert conducted by Gergiev in Trafalgar Square, which I've written about with great enthusiasm for the circumstances on The Arts Desk. Just three snaps on a beautiful evening then (marred only by the roars of the English Defence League dregs-of-the-dregs). Elmgreen and Dragset's rocking-horse boy on the Fourth Plinth looked more ironical than ever seen from below, where I was sitting.

Eventually I moved centre-stage for the Witches' Sabbath of the Symphonie fantastique and discovered the hard core all attentive there. Didn't snap during the main performance, of course, only the encore, the Rakoczy March from The Damnation of Faust.

I ended the TAD piece with a little eulogy for the fire-breathing tuba-man at Embankment station. He really was playing the notes when the fire came out.

Ultimate busker class, that, and a delightful end to a second, equally perfect Bank Holiday Monday.

The only way is Essex - 1

Whatever that means exactly - thank you, reality TV - there are at least three ways to approach England's most maligned county, pictured above: step inside one of the many old buildings (in this case the Norman remainder of Waltham Abbey); ramble in deepest farmland only a 25 minute journey from the City of London (a distant diplo-mate approaching Mountnessing Church); or brave the urban blight to reach your destination (the end of a horrid walk from Waltham Cross railway station to the Abbey). At least another option - the marshes and the sea - was ruled out by the biting winds and freeze of the Thursday and Friday we took off.

The original aim had been to fly south for a long weekend, but half-term fares proved prohibitively expensive (seems we've sorted one objective now for the near future). So I thought we should capitalise on our delighted discovery of Layer Marney, Tollesbury, East Mersey and Copford while staying with the Le Franc family back in 2007 and the subsequent revelation of lovely Saffron Walden in the company of the Kafalas a year later by getting to know a neighbouring county better. Armed with the excellent Pathfinder Guide, we planned out some options.

With the grey and the bitter cold of Thursday forbidding our intended hike around the coastal Saxon church of Bradwell Juxta Mare, we caught a train from Liverpool Street to Ingatestone, and were immediately charmed by what Pevsner calls the 'friendly Neo-Tudor' of the 1846 station building. The glory is the medieval church tower of St Edmund and St Mary

with its black diapers of lozenges and crosses (there too is the top of the 'three-light brick w window with Perp panel tracery' - Pevsner again - and the first set of two-light windows).

Predictably the church was locked. We phoned the warden (correction, 9/3: rector), who claimed to live not very close and seemed unwilling to drive to Ingatestone and let us in. As J pointed out, I should have said something along the lines of 'we've come a long way to see this', but I wasn't at the time aware of the Petre tomb chest, treasure of the interior; if I had been, I'd have made a bit more of a fuss.

Ingatestone High Street is a mix of old and new, chiefly remarkable to me for the fact that I purchased a by then essential blue woolly (looking) hat for £2.99 in a hardware store over a friendly chat with the people in the shop. There's a very flinty mosaicy type mural on one of the less attractive more recent buildings which looks as if it dates from Festival of Britain time.

Then we were off over the fields, past Sir William Petre's 16th century red-brick Ingatestone Hall. The monastery-dissolver and recusant Catholic had the mural's Queen Elizabeth to stay here, which still makes the town and the odd visiting tourist excited.

Crossing the stream of the Wid, you climb gently to the deliciously secluded church of St Mary Buttsbury.

The body of the church (locked again, naturally, in spite of what the welcoming board at the gate may say) is 14th century, but its attraction is the timber, weatherboarded west belfry. The porch is attractively weatherboarded too.

Ironwork on the north door caught my eye before I found out that much of it was 13th century.

There was now a longish stretch by stream and through fields, past a burnt out car below Kitchen Wood

and up to the church of St Giles at Mountnessing, isolated next to a Georgian hall and farm (though a road runs close). Here's another fine bell tower and west end

though there's apparently less to see inside than at Ingatestone. Which was just as well, since our third church was also locked and the contact numbers in the porch had faded away. Anyway, here we sat out of the biting wind to devour the sushi lunch purchased at Liverpool Street Station. The diplo-mate wanted a photo of the occasion but was as usual coy about revealing his entire lovely visage.

The rest of the walk is lost to visual documentation because my battery had run flat and something went wrong with the transferring of pictures from J's mobile phone. Here's a similarly cloudy-day image taken by another of Mountnessing proper's early 19th century post-mill a couple of miles further on. Gareth Hughes' Geograph project photo includes 'visiting Dutch and Belgian windmill enthusiasts'. Interesting if not especially penetrating observation on the unconscious that here I started to hum the Van der Valk theme (you don't need to be old enough to have seen that series to guess that the hero was an Amsterdam detective).

The dark began to descend, as did we back to Ingatestone. Had this been a collect-churches-for-charity walk like our annual Norfolk expedition, we could have notched up nine in our eight miles, since the town boasts a fair few 19th and early 20th century edifices of various denominations. So back to London, where serendipity found us two returns on the spot for Rufus Norris's ambitious celebration of Yoruba culture, Feast, at the Young Vic. Splendid company work here, dominated by the handsome, well modulated mezzo tones of Noma Dumezweni (J's New Best Friend), the character panache of Naana Agyei-Ampadu and incredibly sexy dancing - not enough of it, sadly - by Cuban Alexander Varona (image by Richard Hubert Smith).

The problem lay with most of the various playwrights' contributions: few made clear the advertised connection between scenes from the Yoruba diaspora and the various reincarnations of the 400 or so deities known as Orishas, so it came across as a rather loose, hit-and-miss revue.

Still, it was a steamy far cry indeed from the wintry wildernesses of Essex. That's enough of a chronicle for now: glorious Waltham Abbey to follow soon.