For as long as he can remember, the writer and illustrator Aidan Meighan has been inspired by Nature. His early exploits might not have been entirely welcomed by those around him — collecting and storing slugs and snails in a cupboard at school, and stashing a dead adder in a drawer at his parents' home — but they paved the way for a career illustrating the beauty of the natural world, both in words and pictures.

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We're delighted, then, that with his new book The Folklore of Trees about to appear, Aidan came to join James Fisher on the Country Life Podcast.

Aidan talks about some of the 36 varieties of tree that he discusses in his book, the creative freedom of working as both writer and illustrator on a project, and how trees have left their mark on human history — not least in the form of the hill in Rome that owes its existence to the Ancient Roman habit of discarding empty olive oil containers.

'We absolutely could not survive without trees,' says Aidan, 'but trees would easily prosper, if not flourish, without us.. They're like guardians, arboreal guardians, to us, and I really think we ought to show them respect.'

You can find out more about The Folklore of Trees, and see how to pre-order a copy, at Aidan Meighan's website.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher
Guest: Aidan Meighan
Editor and producer: Toby Keel
Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Spring is when the meadows are ‘washed fragrant’ and freshness is breathed over the hills, writes John Clare in Spring Morning. It is a season when we are led by our noses, from the delicate rawness of the first snowdrops to the full-on hit of a newly wet pavement after an April shower.

Flowers are the most obvious scent-bearers and the earliest to perfume our hedges, from February onwards, is the almond-y blackthorn blossom. The daffodil is the most recognisable harbinger of spring, but its fragrance can divide opinion. Even delicately scented Narcissus jonquilla may quickly tend towards the overripe, its feculence provided by a compound called indole, which is also found in jasmine. Later in the season, we readily sniff out another distinctive odour in damper copses — wild garlic (Allium ursinum). Pungent yet delicious, it is one of the easiest of foraging plants to identify: simply crush a green leaf to conjure the base notes of pesto or aioli. It can also verge on overpowering. By the time the long, green leaves wilt, we’re more than ready to embrace the warm, parma-violet-and-honey scent of the bluebell, Hyacinthoides non-scripta, on our woodland walks.

Flowery fragrances are not designed to please us, although scent can have an astonishing effect on our brains, helping us to sleep (lavender), improving memory (peppermint) and calming us (roses). No, flowers have a baser motive, which is to attract pollinators. A scientist will explain that the pleasing, heady scent filling your nose is, in fact, merely a carbon-based compound. In her book Good Nature, Prof Kathy Willis, Baroness Willis of Summertown, explains that plants release these volatile organic compounds as a gaseous cloud and that scent cells are found not only in flowerheads, but in leaves, bark and sap.

The signature scent of spring comes not from beautiful blooms, but benevolent bugs. The technical term for the smell produced when rain falls on dry ground is ‘petrichor’. It’s a pleasing word and an odour that stirs us deeply. Yet it is made by a simple organism, as Paul Hoskisson, professor of molecular microbiology at the University of Strathclyde, explains: ‘Petrichor describes geosmin, one of the natural products made by bacteria, fungi and plants to influence their environments. Geosmin is made by the soil-dwelling Streptomyces bacteria to attract small invertebrates called springtails (Collembola) to distribute their spores, in the same way that plants entice animals and insects to disperse pollen and seeds. Streptomyces produce the spores when it’s dry or food is scarce — and also make antibiotics to protect their nutrients from competitors. Because geosmin is a volatile compound, it easily turns into a gas on contact with water, which is why we’re most aware of it when it rains.’

Humans are phenomenally sensitive to geosmin and can detect it at levels as minute as five parts per trillion. Although we have harnessed the Streptomyces bacteria to great effect — they account for some two-thirds of our antibiotics and antifungals and have been used in immunosuppressants, herbicides and cancer drugs — there is, as yet, no obvious commercial use for geosmin, advises Prof Hoskisson. In the meantime, we can delight in it when digging the garden, ploughing the fields or kicking through woodland mulch.

Geosmin accounts both for the earthy taste of beetroot and the muddy flavour of river fish, but, like liberally applied teenage aftershave, it can overwhelm. It is a problem if it taints our drinking water and even more so if it hangs over the surface of the UK’s largest freshwater lake, as those living near blue-green-algae-ridden Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland can attest.

If spring can be captured in florals and essence of earth, summer brings with it an evergreen favourite. Freshly cut grass is luscious and new-mown hay is more delicious still. Drying sweet vernal grass, a main ingredient of traditional meadow hay, produces a chemical known as coumarin. This closely resembles vanilla, which is deemed to have one of the most pleasing effects on our olfactory receptors. The Victorians became obsessed with it after the discovery that coumarin could be extracted from the beans of the South American tonka tree. ‘Hay’ was the fashionable scent of choice for cosmetics and perfumes and the craze continued after 1868, when chemist Sir William Henry Perkin worked out how to synthesise coumarin from coal tar.

It was another delicious summer scent that so enraptured Marcel Proust. Smell can strongly stimulate memory and the sensation that famously enraptured the French writer was a madeleine dipped in tilleul, an infusion made from the delicately scented flowers of the lime tree.

When autumn comes around, the hard-working bacteria go into overtime, producing more geosmin as leaves rot down. To the rich smells of crumbling dark earth we can add bonfire smoke and bracken, as an overcome Edward Thomas did in his poem Digging: ‘Today I think/Only with scents.’ Time spent in forests is known to improve our wellbeing, but the link between nature, our incredible sense of smell and its impact on our health is still a relatively under-studied field that is now being tackled by scientists at Oxford University’s Centre for Nature Recovery.

Winter brings a different aromatic experience. As frost pinches and piques our nostrils, some people are sure they can smell snow. In fact, what they are sensing is an absence of smell. Snow transforms the landscape and disguises our usual scent references; meanwhile, cold air molecules move more slowly and plants release fewer aromas.

The rarified palette of the Nordic landscape helped Sámi-Norwegian artist Máret Ánne Sara single out the smells of a childhood spent among reindeer herders for her current exhibition at London’s Tate Modern, SE1 (running until April 6). Working with Algerian perfumer Nadjib Achaibou, she created two scents: one that of reindeer under extreme stress (‘fear’), the other based on natives such as lichen and shoegrass (‘hope’). These fragrances waft from solid polymer blocks fixed to a walk-through installation in the shape of the internal anatomy of a reindeer’s nose.

Incorporating scent within exhibitions is a growing trend. London-based food historian and artist Tasha Marks has recreated the smell of Marie Antoinette’s rouge and powder, as well as that of her dank prison cell, for ‘Marie Antoinette Style’ at the V&A Museum, SW7 (until March 22). Marks frequently draws upon the natural world in her work — take the 2021 ‘Tranquillity’ exhibition at north London’s Wellcome Collection, NW1. ‘I was asked to create the smell of happiness,’ she recalls. ‘It was a forest floor full of petrichor: damp, dark and green.’

She has most recently developed fragrances for the Ashmolean Museum Oxford’s exhibition ‘In Bloom: How Plants Changed Our World’, which runs from March 19–August 16. Worth sniffing out.

'There was a time when I couldn't walk down the King's Road without being mobbed,' chuckles Levison Wood. This is no brag, though: it's said with the bemusement of a man who was catapulted to fame after his plan to trek the length of the River Nile made him into an unlikely celebrity alongside today's crop of modern explorers.

We're delighted that Levison joined James Fisher on the Country Life Podcast this week, to talk about how his early life roaming Staffordshire morphed — via a stint in the Paras regiment — into a career trekking the world, from the jungles of South America to the freezing mountains of the Himalayas.

His books and documentaries — one of which became the most-watched factual TV programme in Britain in 2015 — have made him a hugely well-recognised face, and he tells the tale of how his thirst for adventure, and his fascination with connecting with people around the world, brought him to where he is today.

That fascination with people also underlies his latest book, The Great Tree Story. He happily admits that he's no botanist, and couldn't tell one species of tree from another: instead, this is a tale of how the lives of people have intertwined with the trees around them for millennia. Take the yew trees that dot churchyards around Britain, for example: they weren't planted after the ancient churches were built; instead, the churches were built at the sacred spots where the oldest trees stood proud.

It's a fascinating listen; you can find out more about The Great Tree Story here.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Levison Wood

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

What do catflaps and some of the finest carpentry in the land have in common? Bruce Hodgson, that’s what.

The man who founded Artichoke is our guest on the Country Life Podcast this week, talking us through the history of the brand, as well as his own personal journey as a craftsman, and what the future holds for heritage crafts.

Bruce’s journey to Artichoke wasn’t what we’d call traditional. After ‘being asked to leave’ school, and a brief stint in the army, he returned to the thing that made him happy as a child. But it wasn’t straight into the Country Life Top 100 for him — he spent 15 years working as a carpenter before Artichoke became synonymous with elegance, timelessness and quality.

I'm jealous of him, in a way. I always loved working with my hands and making things when I was at school, but it was always a subject that was treated as a hobby, rather than a career. We as a nation have a rich history of building beautiful things, although in recent years it would be hard to tell...

So while Bruce may have set up Artichoke to make beautiful things, he’s not done yet. Not satisfied with creating one of the country’s most well-respected interiors companies, he’s determined to put making and craftsmanship back into the spotlight.

Whether it’s little steps, such as re-framing woodworking away from being just ‘a hobby’ and to be taken more seriously as a career, to larger projects such as the Inspiring Makers conference, apprenticeships, work experience and the Artichoke School of Furniture, it’s clear that in Bruce, making has a fine champion.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Bruce Hodgson

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

'We still see people out wearing colours which we know for a fact we haven't produced in 15 or 20 years,' chuckles Marcus Janssen, head of Schöffel, as he speaks about the company's gilets — the 'Chelsea Lifejackets' — to James Fisher on this week's edition of the Country Life Podcast.

Steve talks through some of the highlights of his amazing career, from coming face-to-face with tigers and great white sharks to discovering ancient ruins while diving in flooded cave systems.

Marcus took over at Schöffel after a career as a countryside journalist, stepping in to a role as head of a family-owned business which has been going for well over two centuries.

His love of the British countryside shines through as he talks to James about how a South African journalist ended up running a much-loved countryside brand whose roots are in Germany — and many of whose customers wear their gilets as much in the streets of SW3 as they do in the fields of Scotland or Gloucestershire.

Marcus also talks about the recently-inaugurated Schöffel Countryside Awards, run in partnership with the GWCT.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Marcus Janssen

Editor and Producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Special thanks: Adam Wilbourn

This article was first published in February 2024

Dartmoor is one of England’s last and most valuable wildernesses. It is also one of the most vulnerable. There are an estimated 8-10 million visitors to the Dartmoor National Park each year, a massive increase over the past 40 years. Those visiting the open moor, the Dartmoor Commons, have a footfall that inevitably has an impact on wildlife. The obvious casualties are ground nesting birds — the decline in numbers of lapwing, curlew, golden plover, skylarks, and other ground nesting birds on Dartmoor is well known. Heavily compressed ground caused by footfall, exacerbated by camping, is ground lost to insects and plants. There are plenty of insects, like ground nesting bees, which depend on undisturbed ground. Even members of the public with the best intentions may not fully understand what impact they, and their dogs, can have on wildlife.

Preservation of the moor and ever-increasing visitor numbers are uneasy bedfellows. Concerned by the deterioration in wildlife on the moor, the government recently commissioned an Independent Evidence Review of Protected Site Management on Dartmoor. This report, the Fursdon review, recognised the complexities of Dartmoor, where everyone seems to have a claim on the land. Much of this report deals with the impact of farming and the protection of environmentally valuable sites, noting that 'the absolute top priority for Dartmoor is improving its hydrology and re-wetting its blanket bogs'. This is a realistic ambition and perhaps one of the easier things to fix.

Environmental agreements can be used to improve outcomes. Farmers are understandably wary of attempts to restrict livestock numbers on the Commons (there are at present probably around 100,000 sheep), but Fursdon was sympathetic to farmers and emphasised the need for better relations between the statutory body, Natural England, and hill farmers. Natural England’s positive response to the report bodes well. 

'No one is suggesting restricting access to national parks. But the extent of recreational activity is a legitimate issue if we want to preserve the open moor'

While there are, rightly, no restrictions on the numbers of people accessing the moor, the increasingly acute problem of over-use and all and any recreation as distinct from access, is one that needs addressing. Many of the demands on the moor are mutually exclusive. For instance, planting trees for carbon sinks helps some birds, but threatens those birds that nest on open moorland; more recreation for the public comes at the expense of preserving Dartmoor as a wilderness.

Dartmoor cannot be all things to all people. Dartmoor and other National Parks provide us all with wonderful landscape, exercise and escape from towns and cities. No one is suggesting restricting access to national parks. But the extent of recreational activity is a legitimate issue if we want to preserve the open moor. It is for this reason that, as someone who owns land on the Dartmoor Commons, I sought clarification from the Courts on the respective rights of landowners and campers. 

The question in law is whether the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985 (DCA 1985) intended to grant access for all conceivable recreation on Dartmoor. We did not seek a ban on camping on the Dartmoor Commons and have, with other landowners, entered into an agreement with the Park Authority permitting camping. But retaining the ability to act pragmatically to protect vulnerable habitats when necessary is important. The Chancellor of the High Court judged that landowners retained the right to move campers on if they needed to do so. The Court of Appeal disagreed and said that the public has an unconditional right to camp without even so much as the landowner’s tacit consent. For this reason, the matter is now before the Supreme Court. In our view, the clear aim of the DCA 1985 was to remedy the lack of a public right to roam on Dartmoor, not to remedy the lack of a public right to camp.

Because the DCA 1985 did not define recreation, it is important to understand the context in which this legislation was passed. The promoter of the 1984 Bill, which became the DCA 1985, was Anthony Steen, the MP for Totnes, who worked closely with Devon County Council (DCC) on the Bill. The aim was to give the public the right to enter the Commons on horseback, as well as on foot, which appeared to have been a well-established practice. Neither Mr Steen nor DCC wanted to spoil the wilderness character of Dartmoor by creating a right to camp on the Commons. Mr Steen is clear that his overwhelming motivation was to preserve the special character of the moor. He truly understood preservation, better than so many ‘campaigners’ who purport to care about the flora and fauna.

To preserve Dartmoor as a wilderness, its vulnerability must be recognised. It is absurd to claim, as some do, that preservation in some sense depends on more use. In this regard, it would be unwise to rely solely on the state in the form of the Dartmoor National Park Authority, which is conflicted as it promotes increased public use of the moor. The way to resolve these conflicts is by reference to the 'Sandford Principle', enshrined in the Environment Act 1995, which stated that, where there is a conflict between the statutory purposes of national parks, any relevant authority 'shall attach greater weight to the purpose of conserving and enhancing the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage of the area comprised in the National Park'. We need to give due consideration to conservation and wildlife as the pressure for recreation increases.

Landowners have an important role to play in land stewardship, as Parliament recognises by placing certain duties on them. It would be unreasonable to exclude those who manage the land from exercising any measure of influence over the way that land is used in a form of environmental expropriation implied by the Court of Appeal. Landowners’ legal duties of environmental stewardship remain, but the means of fulfilling them would be removed under the Court of Appeal’s ruling. 

Camping has many environmental challenges. Most of the Dartmoor Commons is classified as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), which brings additional legal obligations for land managers. The Court of Appeal’s judgment makes it more difficult for landowners to meet them — sadly, not all campers observe the ‘leave no trace’ instruction. Campfires on dry ground are dangerous. While the scorching of the ground by open fires is bad enough, a bigger concern is widespread habitat destruction. Open fires are fuelled by whatever is to hand, either fallen timber or on occasion branches broken or sawn from trees. Litter, human excrement, and anti-social behaviour are occasional hallmarks of irresponsible camping practices that land managers must clear up. 

This case is not about banning camping, but whether land managers have the right to direct campers away from trouble spots to better ones and best combine wild camping with day-to-day farming and best environmental practice. This was the pragmatic approach that worked well for many years after the DCA 1985. In appealing against the Court of Appeal’s decision, our motivation is the same as Mr Steen’s: to preserve Dartmoor’s unique character. Before and after 1985, the public could camp, but would move on if a farmer asked them so. We do not believe that the DCA 1985 changed the law as regards camping practices. In our view, the Court of Appeal’s judgment has fundamentally disturbed what was put in place in 1985 — and which is essential to safeguarding Dartmoor for future generations.

Alexander Darwall is a Devon-born landowner who works in finance.

What it's like to live and work in a National Park

Cumbrian farmer Douglas Chalmers weighs the pros and cons of living in a national park.

Credit: kodachrome25 / Getty

'The countryside faces either terrible harm or uplifting good. Which will it be? It really is up to us'

The countryside is for everyone and the problems facing it — and farming and the environment — will not be

'The countryside can pull us together, a connecting point for a nation that sometimes feels as though it is falling apart'

After 75 years, the job required of national parks has changed. They now need to be hothouses of Nature recovery,

Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Those 'who have ridden roughshod over men and women they should have protected must be held accountable'

Agromenes reflects on the Post Office scandal, and implores that we learn from the mistakes

Esteemed herbalist Nicholas Culpeper wrote in his 1653 treatise that ‘Providence has made the most useful things most common and for that reason we neglect them’. He was making particular reference to one of our most familiar of wild plants, shepherd’s purse, that leggy weed whose modest, but unmistakable white pancake racemes so readily decorate hedgerows, verges, waste ground and field margins.

Today, we certainly neglect shepherd’s purse, but it deserves more than a passing thought. Its name alone should claim our interest. Unusually for a plant, let alone a weed, it carries a double-barrelled Latin classification, Capsella bursa-pastoris, determined by Linnaeus and confirmed by his less-renowned German contemporary Friedrich Medikus, although it was assigned to the Brassicaceae (cabbage) family by British botanist Gilbert Burnett. It translates directly into the name by which we and the French and Spanish know it — shepherd’s purse, capsella being a small box, bursa a purse and pastoris the genitive of pastor, a shepherd.

Traditionally, a shepherd’s calling commanded the utmost respect — after dogs, sheep were among the first domesticated animals, the mouflon noted in Mesopotamia from 9000BC or earlier. Many Biblical patriarchs were shepherds: Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David. It was hugely symbolic that shepherds were said to be the first witnesses summoned to the Nativity by the heavenly host — ‘While shepherds washed their socks by night’, as irreverent choristers used to sing.

'A further peculiar characteristic, fairly recently discovered, is that Capsella bursa-pastoris hides a secret weapon'

Shepherd’s purse is, much like sheep, a native of the Mediterranean region, although it is now found worldwide wherever conditions offer accommodation, an archaeophyte of ancient distribution — in this country, its discs of unscented sprays appear almost all year round, largely unremarked. After bracken, it is said to be the second most prolific wild plant on the planet — although it reproduces entirely by seed dispersal, a single plant produces them by the hundred. They germinate so readily that the plant can produce several successive generations in a year. Those seeds that don’t spring instantly to life may stay dormant, but viable for long periods.

A further peculiar characteristic, fairly recently discovered, is that Capsella bursa-pastoris hides a secret weapon. It is a proto-carnivore, those tiny copper-coloured seeds containing a mucilage that attracts and kills nematodes, the roundworm plant parasites, which are shed into the ground, enriching the soil.

The name of shepherd’s purse, seemingly naïve and folkloric, pre-dates Linnaeus historically. It was described as Bursa pastoris and illustrated in a herbarium of 1486 published in Louvain (a copy is held in the library of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh). The direct English translation was noted by John Gerard in his 1597 Herball, confirmed by Culpeper and further recorded in 1657 in Adam in Eden, or Nature’s Paradise by William Coles, a botanist well known in his day, but confounded in due course by his adherence to the doctrine of signatures, the ancient belief that, if a plant — root, leaf, bloom or fruit — in any way resembled a human organ, it was God’s signal that it could be used to treat a malfunction or disease in that organ. Coles wrote that it was ‘called Shepherd’s Purse or Scrip from the likeness of the seed hath with that kind of leathearne bag wherein Shepherds carry their Victualls into the field’.

That said, shepherd’s purse was by no means the only popular name by which medieval folk knew the plant. It commanded widespread regional recognition. Among rural children, it was called mother’s heart, for if the mature triangular seed pod was pressed it would burst and shed its contents, figuratively causing maternal heartbreak.

In Durham, it was bad man’s oatmeal, in Yorkshire it was blindweed, in East Anglia it was called lady’s purse, in Somerset it was poor man’s purse. Across the countryside, it was variously known as caseweed, cocowort, toywort, pepper and salt, pick-pocket, pick-purse, shepherd’s sprout, St James’s weed, shovel weed, sanguinary, witches’ pouches, rattle pouches, clapper pouch and whoreman’s permacety.

As did so many wayside plants, it offered curative properties for the taking. The Greeks and Romans valued it as a treatment for dysentery, diarrhoea and stomach cramps. Culpeper declared that it stopped ‘all fluxes of blood either caused by inward or outward wounds’. A poultice would help inflammation and St Anthony’s Fire (ergot poisoning) and was effective against ‘flux of the belly, bloody flux, spitting blood and bloody urine’. It controlled menstruation and treated jaundice if tied to the wrists and soles of the feet. Drops of juice in the ear healed ‘the pains, noise and mutterings thereof’.

'Official medicine, however, does not recommend its consumption'

Traditionally, an amulet containing its seeds was deemed good for infant teething, a tea from its infused leaves would ease heart, blood and gynaecological conditions and could stem dysentery. An ointment could be applied to skin complaints and the juice was used to ease sore eyes. Seeds could be ground into a flour and mature seeds served as a pepper substitute. In parts of Asia, the plant is grown commercially and features in Japanese, Chinese and Korean cooking. Foragers recommend the flowers and the younger and fresher leaves both raw, when they taste like cress, and cooked to produce a cabbage-like flavour, with the seed pods adding crunch to a salad.

Modern analysis has identified calcium, iron, potassium, sodium, sulphur and zinc, vitamins C and K, and traces of acetylcholine, bursic and fumaric acids, choline flavonoid glycoside and tyramine polypeptides. Homoeopathy suggests shepherd’s purse as a treatment for heart and circulatory problems, including low blood pressure, headaches, bladder infections, diarrhoea and pre-menstrual problems, nosebleeds in children, superficial burns and cuts. It also proposes extracts of shepherd’s purse, lime blossom and hawthorn for high-blood pressure. Official medicine, however, does not recommend its consumption, citing possible adverse effects on heart conditions, kidneys, thyroid and the central nervous system.

The Legacy: Philip Wayre, the man who saved the otter

The heartwarming tale of how this film-maker and naturalist restored the otter to English rivers.

The Legacy: Sir Joseph Banks, the naturalist who created Kew

The Lincolnshire landowner who was described by David Attenborough as a 'passionate naturalist' and 'the great panjandrum of British science'.

Credit: Tony Evans/Timelapse Library/Getty Images

The Legacy: Miriam Rothschild, the pioneer of organic and wildflower gardening

The celebrated entomologist and Bletchley Park codebreaker was also way ahead of the times when it came to gardening.

19,000 miles of exquisite beauty: Britain's incomparable coastline

Our beautiful, infinitely varied coast has become central to our national concept of what makes Britain so special, says Peter

Stand by a stream and you might just hear the gentle chatter in its rippling rhythm. Look up at a tree canopy on an autumn day and see a cathedral of colour. Stand on a hilltop and look out over fields and rivers, villages and market towns. J. R. R. Tolkien’s imagination was populated by these encounters with the British landscape and he richly threaded both knowledge and memory through his work as a fantasy writer.

This year, his novel The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring celebrates the 70th anniversary of its original publication, in 1954. The story is of an unassuming, home-loving character named Frodo Baggins, who agrees to undertake a perilous quest that sees him depart a pastoral landscape and venture into increasingly doomladen terrain that is mountainous and brutal. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Nature’s beauty and harmony is evermore imperilled by a growing and all-encompassing threat.

One has only to see Tolkien’s watercolour of Hobbiton village, which he painted in 1937, to see how steeped his Middle-earth is in the shapes, colours and patterns of the countryside. The writer’s affection for Nature ran deep and, although he chose to write a fantasy, he detailed it with attention to the colours, forms and sounds of natural and farmed places and spaces.

In knitting together the real, the fantastic and the whimsical in a very British rural landscape, Tolkien was looking back in part to Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Indeed, in Grahame’s novel, the chapter entitled The Piper at the Gates of Dawn draws on the realms of myth and folklore to conjure an otherworldly, riparian adventure for Rat and Mole. Across the breadth of his work, Tolkien emerges as a Nature writer.

If you find yourself taken by his reinvention of real places, let this encourage you to explore John Garth’s book The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien. In it, Mr Garth relates how, in the late 1930s, Tolkien wrote a letter to his publisher in which he proposed a new character who might suit as the focus of a follow-up to his hugely popular The Hobbit. The character the author sketched out would become Tom Bombadil, who features significantly in The Fellowship of Ring. For Tolkien, Bombadil would express and embody ‘the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside’.

He began writing The Fellowship of the Ring in early 1937 and his fantasy scenario is suffused with situations and dramatic tensions that evoke a sense of where the world found itself at that time. If there’s a lesson that Frodo and his fellow hobbits learn, it’s that you can’t isolate yourself from the troubles of the wider world.

It’s pertinent here, too, to note that the author had served on the front lines in France during the First World War and had seen there the extent to which Nature had been apocalyptically destroyed by conflict. This experience of a natural world lost to war didn’t only resonate with Tolkien: his contemporaries C. S. Lewis and John Masefield had also served. All three writers would go on to create notable fantasy novels, each one steeped in the joy found in Nature, as well as the human traditions and imaginative impulses arising from it.

Tolkien’s delight in the beauty and harmony of Nature is expressed in his creation of a pastoral idyll in the homely community of Hobbiton and The Shire at large. The early pages sees the author draw, in part, on his familiarity with the country of Warwickshire and Worcestershire. Indeed, the fertile Vale of Evesham had particular resonance as the home of his mother’s family.

Consider the sense of rustic homeliness being left behind by Frodo and his brave companions as they take their first steps away from Hobbiton: ‘As they began to climb its first slopes they looked back and saw the lamps in Hobbiton far off twinkling in the gentle valley of the Water… When the light of the last farm was far behind, peeping among the trees, Frodo turned and waved a hand in farewell.’

Places and characters that nurture are the forces of good in Tolkien’s novel and when Frodo and his fellow adventurers rest in the enchanting halls of the elves’ Rivendell, a sense of harmony abounds. Frodo, in repose, falls into a sensory experience of the natural world, as he imagines ‘an endless river of swelling gold and silver flowing over him’. As the protagonist’s adventure continues, however, he ventures into increasingly barren and hostile places, distinct for the absence of harmony.

Such places in the story are noted for being polluted; where rivers and pools run foul, these uninviting settings are indicative of rapacious forces of self-interest at work. Where danger is present, so, too, is a vivid absence of life: ‘The lands ahead were empty of all save birds and beasts, unfriendly places deserted by all the races of the world.’

Tolkien created heroic characters in full sympathy with their surroundings, yet it is his love for trees that finds sustained and fulsome expression. Relatively early in the novel, as the hobbits move beyond sight of the home they have left behind, Merry makes an observation about the unknown world of the Old Forest: ‘I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along…’ This sense of the consciousness of trees returns later, when our heroes find shelter and renewal with Galadriel’s community of elves deep in the woods of Lothlórien.

This chapter sees Tolkien write with vivid affection for woodland: ‘As Frodo prepared to follow him, he laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree’s skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.’

The realm of fantasy aside, this was a man writing about the natural world around him. As scholar Dr Dimitra Fimi has highlighted, Tolkien was committed to reimagining real landscapes he knew deeply. Indeed, he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1956 that ‘I am historically minded. Middle-earth is not an imaginary world… it feels familiar, even if a little glorified by the enchantment of distance in time’.

The word ‘enchantment’ is key. Tolkien invests his writing with exactly this quality, taking places and seasons familiar to us, but making them anew within Middle-earth. Nature has a nurturing power and it’s in that power that much of the heroes’ strength in his landmark story is derived: being in sympathy with the earth, the water, the sky — and the histories of those natural places.

The Country Life Podcast

Listen to all the episodes of the Country Life Podcast.

A walk across the Cheshire Plain, the 200-million-year-old landscape where yesterday’s old industrial sites are today’s nature reserves

Fiona Reynolds heads out for a walk on the Cheshire Plain, where industry and farming are juxtaposed to startling effect.

The Isle of Skye and the world’s last manual turntable ferry

You may no longer see droves of cattle crossing the waters to the Isle of Skye, but the world’s last

Credit: Robert Canis

Elmley Nature Reserve – an island of nature in Kent that vibrates with birdsong

Spending two days in the wilderness on the Isle of Sheppey shows how much we've lost and how much we

For show business, W. C. Fields coined the axiom: ‘Never work with children or animals.’ The farming version of this sagacity is: ‘Never look after other people’s animals, be they pets or livestock.’

Today offered further proof of this law, which is as immutable as gravity. In a reciprocal favour to my neighbour, Will, I am caring for his farm as he attends a wedding ‘down south’. His sheep-and-cattle enterprise in the hills above Hay-on-Wye runs like perpetual-motion clockwork. My only real job is the moving of his small herd of Limousin cattle from their secure night paddock to their day-grazing on an open hillside and then escorting them back in the evening.

All went well this morning at 7am; I let the Lims out, supervised their crossing of the lane, in the manner of a lollipop man, to the hill and fastened the electric fencing behind them. They know the routine by heart. The sun was shining, the skylarks were singing in a sky the perfect blue and fragility of eggshell and the air, even in these far-off hard hills, carried the soft caress of spring. I went home and tended to my own livestock.

At 5pm, I returned to Will’s farm to bring the cows home. As soon as I got out of the Jeep, I knew it was trouble. Trouble with a majuscule T. Usually, the cattle would be waiting at the exit to the lane, standing with the sort of patience that humbles humans. Instead, they were grouped silent and still on the other side of the field, as if arrested in the child’s game of statues. I walked across, knowing — with heavy feet, heavy heart — and pushed through the herd cooing: ‘Okay girls, okay girls.’ You don’t want 10 x 400kg of Limousin milling about in a panic.

Down in the ditch was the ‘Trouble’, the source of the bovine vigil. A heifer, on deciding to browse the hedge on the other side of the ditch, had overreached herself and slid into the abyss. The evidence was sufficient even for a Watson. At the edge of the ditch were two downward parallel grooves from her front hooves—and a curved single furrow from her rear hooves—as she had skewed around and down into the chasm. In an attempt to extricate herself, she had walked downhill… where the void got deeper, as did the red-clay ooze at its bottom. Abyss. Chasm. Void. The channels for rainwater on Welsh Border hills are formidable. She was 6ft down. I could have stepped on her back.

'How to extract a panicked, foam-mouthed heifer up to her belly in mud in a trench?'

I do not cow-shame, so I will not tell you the name and number of the heifer that got stuck in the mud. And I did not blame her for browsing the hedge; she had chewed at the twigs and flower tassels of elm. English elm may be, courtesy of Dutch elm disease, near extinct as a tree, but it is common enough as a shrunken specimen in the hedgerow and it is catnip to cattle.

Indeed, in olden days, elm leaves and bark were fed to the beeves and shaven bark steeped in water made a slime that was given to calves as a nutritional supplement. The English elm is no such native thing, being brought here by Bronze Age farmers, quite possibly as cattle fodder. Apart from its value as feedstuff, elm has demulcent and astringent qualities, making it veterinary medicine as well. So, no, I do not judge her for her browsing.

Yet how to extract a panicked, foam-mouthed heifer up to her belly in mud in a trench? Luckily for her, I have form on the extraction of bovines from mire. I ran or, at least, perambulated as fast as Wellies allow, up to Will’s farmyard. I fancied using his brand new John Deere tractor, but that was locked in a barn to prevent its GPS system being nicked, a rural crime of dismaying familiarity, the stolen artefact usually ending up east of the Oder.

I had the keys, however, to his other tractor, an International 784 with a front loader. Boxy. Red. Forty years old. A children’s board book sort of tractor. I swung up into the cab — I’ve put in some hours on Internationals — and the nose-catching diesel scent, the yellow-foam spill from the tear in the black vinyl of the seat were homely.

I hitched up a trailer, any trailer, for ballast. Found a chain you could moor a ship with. Rummaged around in the fuliginous back of the stone barn and pulled out a stack of hessian sacks someone from another time, that of Hardy or Eliot, had thought ‘might be useful one day’. And they were right.

I threw the sacks in the trailer. Got back in the 784, pulled the throttle well down and really shifted it along to the stuck-fast cow — her herd gathered still in observance, not as rubberneckers, but as concerned confréres — before angling the tractor uphill, to face her, and laying down twin-lines of sacks, a hessian trackway, because a grassy Welsh Borders hill after the rains of winter is a geomorphic exercise in slickness. You need some grip.

Then I went down into the ditch and fiddled the chain under the heifer’s front legs. At which point, to an observer, I must have looked molten, or perhaps a creature from the swamp, muddied up to my chest. It’s odd the things the farmer sees, obliged by the job to encounter Nature. On the ginger back of one of the Lims, a magpie pecked with intent, an avian de-louser, a textbook example of bovine-bird symbiosis. Anyway, back to the rescue.

After moving the tractor to the ditch edge, then hitching the chains and thus the cow to the front loader, I prayed and started raising the front loader. For a moment, the tractor tipped forward under the weight of the heifer, but there was then a schloup as she came free of the mud, like a cork out of a bottle. Her front legs scrambled for relatively terra firma as I reversed slightly. And she was landed. Drama done. Five minutes later, the herd and I crossed the lane to the night paddock. I noticed that Marjorie, the heifer with ear-tag number 54, seemed to have been dipped up to her waist in pink dye.

Twice crowned victor of the Wainwright Prize for Nature writing, for ‘Where Poppies Blow’ and ‘Meadowland’, John Lewis-Stempel’s latest book, ‘La Vie: A year in rural France’, is out now 

John Lewis-Stempel: The beauty of the beach in winter

On a dull February morning, John Lewis-Stempel is consumed by childhood memories of the allure of the seashore, from the

Credit: Paul Panayiotou/Getty Images

A dairy farmer's view of Jaipur, the city where traffic stops for sacred cows

Jamie Blackett files his final Farming Life column from the pink city in India, and reflects on how different cultures

Helen Rebanks: Farming, food, the meaning of life... and dogs stealing birthday cakes

Helen Rebanks, the bestselling author who became Britain's favourite farmer's wife, joins the Country Life podcast.

John Lewis-Stempel: On top of the mirey, merey moor, in the heart of James Herriot Country

With the wet December sleet pelting down on his tweed cap, John Lewis-Stempel and his terriers ascend Chimney Bank on

St Albans Cathedral in Hertfordshire has two faces. From the High Street, the easiest way in, there’s a new Welcome Centre snuggled cleverly between the Norman Abbey and 20th-century Chapter House. Entering that way into the south transept, there’s an eye-catching view of the Crossing and Rose Window. It’s a spectacular, if slightly confusing way to enter a cathedral, as you have to work your way westwards to find the glorious nave, said to be the longest in England.

From the south and west, St Albans sits on a green hill, its nave and squat Norman tower commanding the view. It is a popular cathedral and, on the day of our visit, it’s wonderfully full of young mums with buggies, purposeful yoga participants and guided tour parties. This is a welcoming place — and proud of it. Therefore, I want to walk this small city — listed 2nd on a recent 'places to live' ranking — to see how its cathedral connects with the people and the geography of the surrounding area.

It’s one of England’s oldest foundations, named for St Alban, who is said to have sheltered the priest Amphibalus in the 4th century. Their elaborate and beautifully presented tombs are testament to its celebration of the past — and the seven painted martyrs in the nave screen, crafted by my dear friend, the much-missed Rory Young, show how the cathedral is also forward-looking, confidently commissioning new art.

'I’m glad I’ve seen more than one face of this city, which, like the cathedral, feels both welcoming and full of character'

It’s a gorgeous, albeit freezing cold day as I set out and, after my cathedral visit, the sun won’t last long. I choose a figure-of-eight walk, centred on the River Ver, and turn eastward first. The young river bubbles as I follow it from below the cathedral, passing busy allotments and flowing under Cottonmill bridge into Sopwell Nunnery greenspace. This is the riverside approach to the former nunnery and is now a nature-friendly walk. It’s flooded after the recent rain (although wet woodlands are important, the interpretation signs remind me) and I’m glad of the boardwalk.

I climb to an old railway track, where I join a lane running alongside the golf course towards Sopwell village. At this point, I rejoin the River Ver, now on the Ver Trail, and follow it southwards, turning back towards the city just before the bypass roars over me.

The cathedral feels a long way away now. I’m in a densely populated housing estate, in St Julian’s district (named after a medieval leper hospital near Watling Street) and I take a long footpath between wonkily fenced back gardens. It’s school coming out time and I’m quickly surrounded by infants and then the juniors, navigating prams and bicycles, all of us eager to be home before the light fades.

After passing the charming flint and steepled church of St Stephen’s, I stride across parkland towards Roman St Albans. Now, the landscape opens out and the cathedral, up to my right, is lit pink and orange by the glowing, sinking sun. I reach the huge mound, which is the remains of the Roman wall that once surrounded the hypocaust, and follow it, my eyes on the beautiful cathedral on its hill. Then I descend again to the river, once devoted to fishing and milling, now the play areas of Verulamium Park.

I cross the Ver by Kingsbury Mill to reach Fishpool Street, which once formed the main London road and must be one of the most charming streets in England with its brick-and-tile houses, former inns and shops jostling for space. Relaxed now that I’ll be back before dark, I walk slowly up the hill to the cathedral, in time to meet the pupils of St Albans school as they finish their day. It’s all lovely, but I’m glad I’ve seen more than one face of this city, which, like the cathedral, feels both welcoming and full of character.

The last peak conquered: Climbing Moel Eilio

A windy climb up Moel Eilio in Snowdonia ticks an outstanding North Wales box, as Fiona Reynolds shares.

A walk of wonder: The enduring beauty of the Kingston Lacy beech avenue

Fiona Reynolds takes a stroll around ancient Badbury Rings leads to Kingston Lacy, where an 188-year-old avenue of trees stands

Hadrian's Wall in an English summer: Wind, rain, and unforgettable beauty

Solitary daily pacing of Hadrian’s Wall, in the footsteps of Roman soldiers, brings back family memories for Fiona Reynolds.

Stonehenge, Avebury and the stone circles of Britain, with Professor Vicki Cummings

One of Britain's top experts on stone circles, Professor Vicki Cummings, joins the Country Life podcast.

Normally, at this time of year, CPRE: The Countryside Charity (CPRE) directs our gaze heavenwards, as it asks the public to take part in its yearly Star Count — the biggest annual citizen-science project of its kind. This year, however, in order to focus resources and energy on getting those in (and out of) Government to pay attention to the priorities outlined in its manifesto ahead of the General Election, there will be no Star Count (but please do stargaze all the same).

Data from 2023 showed that only 5% of British people are able to enjoy a dark, starry sky due to light pollution and 75% have an obscured view. As well as affecting our sleep, health and wellbeing, light pollution confuses migrating birds (sometimes fatally) and plays havoc with the reproductive, feeding and sleeping patterns of pollinating insects, bats and other nocturnal animals. The CPRE believes that local authorities should have legal powers to control light pollution through planning regulations.

‘Starry skies are one of the most magical sights our countryside has to offer. But, sadly, light pollution means most people in England can’t see many stars at all, especially if you live near aa big town or city. It is like a veil of light being drawn across the night sky, disconnecting people from such an important part of our heritage,’ explains Emma Marrington, CPRE spokesperson. ‘Action to reduce light pollution is needed now by government nationally and locally, so that more people can benefit now and in the future.’ Included in the charity’s manifesto is a call for more rooftop renewables, particularly solar panels, on buildings such as warehouses and car parks, which could become ‘clean power stations’, taking advantage of ‘opportunities to generate huge amounts of cheap, low-carbon electricity on rooftops in every part of the country’.

The CPRE also wants continued protection for the green belt, ‘a new generation of regional and country parks’ and more farmland covered by Environmental Land Management Schemes for biodiversity. An interactive dark-skies map and the CPRE’s general manifesto can be found on the charity’s website (www.cpre.org.uk).

Stonehenge, Avebury and the stone circles of Britain, with Professor Vicki Cummings

One of Britain's top experts on stone circles, Professor Vicki Cummings, joins the Country Life podcast.

Meet the dry-stone wallers who restored a 300-year-old sheep pen in Cumbria

Craftsmen Steven Allen and Trevor Stamper hope restored this historic sheepfold as part of a wider campaign to help support

Credit: Getty Images

83% of England's rivers show 'high pollution' levels as sewage and agricultural waste flow into the waterways

Data collected by more than 640 anglers across the country have found that our rivers are in a perilous state.

Credit: Bramley Motor Cars/Autotrader

The Queen's old Range Rover — one which she used to pick up the Obamas — has come up for sale

This SDV8 Autobiography model was specially prepared by Land Rover and used by the Royal Household, and could now be

The Mease, the Tees, the Dee, the Cree, the Chess, the Pang and the Clun… the Piddle and the Polly, the Box, the Yox and the Yeo. Two thirds of the 1,500-plus rivers that twist their way through the counties take their names from the Celtic culture of the pre-Roman era — and some may be even earlier.

Often, the names given to rivers simply mean ‘water’, which is why there is a lot of repetition and tautology — take Avon (river in Welsh), of which there are five in England, three in Scotland and one in Wales. The five Ouses take their name from the Celtic word for water, as do the Ure, Wear, Wye and Don. Other river names give some extra detail about their appearance. The River Rothay, which passes through some of the most picturesque scenery in the Lake District, means ‘red one’ from the Old Norse.

The River Megget in the Scottish Borders takes its name from the old Gaelic word meaning ‘whey-coloured’ and the River Lugg in Powys stems from a Welsh root meaning ‘bright one’; the Calder is a ‘river of stones’ and the River Lune tells us that its waters are ‘pure and healthy’. The five Stours come from the Celtic for ‘fast flowing and powerful’ and the Trent comes from a Celtic word meaning ‘trespasser’, which is a delightfully euphemistic way of saying it is prone to flooding. Another group of river names make reference to their course. The Dart, which still twists through low hills of ancient oak woodland, stays true to its Celtic ‘river of oaks’ and the River Iwerne, which gives its name to Iwerne Minster in Dorset, means ‘yew-tree stream’.

‘The fact that so many river names have remained as place names have evolved reflects their importance in the landscape,’ says Dr John Baker, associate professor of Name-Studies at the University of Nottingham. ‘Streams are more likely to have changed name over time and taken on the names of local villages, but some are still very old.’

In A Dictionary of British Place Names, A. D. Mills tells us that a small group of rivers seem to belong to an unknown early Indo-European language that may have been in use in Neolithic times, passed on to Celtic settlers arriving from the Continent during the 4th century BC. Among this ancient group is the Humber, the Itchen, the Severn and the Colne, all of which have an etymology that is unclear and still baffles toponymists.

The rivers of the Cotswolds have some of the most beautiful and onomatopoeic names of all — the Windrush, the Churn, the Dikler (a stream where rushes grow thick) and the Evenlode, which inspired Hilaire Belloc’s poem. In Wiltshire, the River Ebble, which runs through the Chalke Valley to meet the Avon in Salisbury, conjures up perfectly the sound of the river as it trails strands of water crowfoot. Further west in Somerset, the caramel-coloured River Barle (from the Anglo-Saxon beorgwella, meaning hill stream) bubbles under an ancient stone clapper bridge.

Bournes are also streams, especially ones that flow intermittently or seasonally, and, in the chalky areas of southern Britain and the Yorkshire Wolds, they are frequently known as winterbournes. The Gypsey Race in Yorkshire, so called because of its comings and goings, is the most northerly winterbourne in the UK and has attracted a good deal of folklore for its so-called ‘woe waters’ when the stream is flooded, which have coincided with periods of misfortune, including the Great Plague and both World Wars. In Scotland, where fast-running streams are very common, a bourne becomes a burn, but they also have cleugh (a gorge that is a course of a stream), a glen (a hollow traversed by a stream), a grain (tributary), a pow (a slow-moving stream) and a syke (a small stream). In the Lake District, old Norse influences produce becks for streams, gills for rivers in a valley and forces for waterfalls. The evocative Sour Milk Gill near Grasmere derives its name from its white swirling waters, which flow out of the tarn in a series of cascades.

River names are not always poetic, but many have inspired poets. The River Duddon, which means ‘black valley’, was the unlikely choice for a series of sonnets by William Wordsworth, who remembered the river from his early life. At the time of publication, critics were surprised that the poet should choose to write about an ‘insignificant river with a barbarous name’, but Wordsworth wrote that ‘you could catch a glimpse of heaven in its clear waters’. His friend and contemporary Samuel Coleridge wrote a sonnet to the more lyrical River Otter, which flows through Devon, and John Keats wrote his famous ode To Autumn after walking along the Itchen in Winchester, Hampshire.

Whereas most river names have remained the same for millennia, a handful have changed or go by two different monikers. The Asker in Dorset was once the Lodour, meaning ‘pool stream’, the Swift in Leicestershire was once the Lutter and the Rother in Sussex was known as the Limen until the 16th century. In Oxford, the Thames is known as the Isis and the Granta in Cambridge became the Cam by a process known as back formation, where a river takes its name from a place associated with it.

Unsurprisingly, rivers have had along history as boundaries and borders. The River Mersey, which is derived from the Anglo-Saxon meaning ‘boundary river’, was once the border separating the ancient kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria, then later the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire. The River Tweed, which is thought to represent an old Celtic name meaning ‘border’, still forms the historic line between Scotland and England. At a local level, rivers and streams have long been used as parish boundaries, but as well as dividing, they also unite — the wriggling blue lines that thread across maps still knit us together.

The etymology of river names has as many meanderings as the rivers themselves and, although original meanings are often lost in the silt of history, there are still tantalising glimpses of the last surviving remnants of a language spoken by our ancient ancestors.

'The countryside can pull us together, a connecting point for a nation that sometimes feels as though it is falling apart'

After 75 years, the job required of national parks has changed. They now need to be hothouses of Nature recovery,

What it's like to live and work in a National Park

Cumbrian farmer Douglas Chalmers weighs the pros and cons of living in a national park.

Credit: Anne Coatesy/Alamy

Far better than its bite — what's really going on in the secret world of tree bark

A vital source of food, a pharmacy and a haven for wildlife, a tree's living skin is a surprisingly sophisticated

The Country Life Podcast

Listen to all the episodes of the Country Life Podcast.

Amid the biting wind and freezing rain of winter, two dry-stone wallers have completed the restoration of a 300-year-old sheep pen on the common land of Brant Fell in the Howgills, Cumbria, within the Yorkshire Dales National Park. ‘Being a farmer’s son, with sheep on this moor back in the day, I was delighted to be able to rebuild this historic sheep pen,’ says master craftsman Steven Allen of Tebay, who worked together with Trevor Stamper from Shap. ‘I hope the commoners use it for many years to come.’

Commoning (where farmers exercise rights over land that is privately owned for grazing and to gather resources such as firewood) has been going on in this country since 1215 and was initially instituted to boost poor rural communities. Sheep (and sometimes cattle, pigs or horses) graze without fencing, knowing which patch (or ‘heft’ or ‘lear’, depending where in England you are) is theirs through generational flock memory.

‘Historic sheepfolds are used by commoners today to separate out hefted sheep back to individual farms, to treat sheep and for gathers. Gathers are when multiple commoners and their dogs work together to guide sheep off the fell for tupping, shearing and lambing throughout the year,’ explains project officer Claire Braeburn.

At one time, about half of Britain was common land, but, from the 16th century, commoners were excluded for the sake of agriculture; now, only 3% of England is common land, including stretches of Dartmoor, the Lake District and the Shropshire Hills.

The Foundation for Common Land recognises that, with the withdrawal of funding and environmental targets, commoners, whose very existence is beneficial to wildlife and delicate upland ecosystems, not to mention our historic landscape, need support. As such, this restoration is part of Our Common Cause: Our Upland Commons, a £3 million project supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which is honing in on 12 areas of common land totalling 18,000 hectares (44,479 acres) and also providing assistance in the form of, for example, flood management, education and support to farmers taking part in the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme.

Credit: Catherine Clarke/Getty

Organic farmed salmon is a 'misnomer' and certification should stop, claim fish conservation charities

In an open letter to the Soil Association, WildFish and more than 30 other organisations have questioned the organic certification

Credit: Getty Images

83% of England's rivers show 'high pollution' levels as sewage and agricultural waste flow into the waterways

Data collected by more than 640 anglers across the country have found that our rivers are in a perilous state.

Norman Foster on the Country Life podcast: 'The Green Belt is one of our greatest inventions'

Lord Norman Foster, one of Britain's great architects, joins the Country Life podcast.

Hope for hedgehogs as new research looks to revolutionise robotic lawnmowers

Scientists at the University of Oxford have developed a tool that could prevent hedgehogs from being mangled by robotic lawnmowers.

The Soil Association has been told to stop certifying Scottish farmed salmon as organic by more than 30 community groups and NGOs. The open letter was drafted by the conservation charity WildFish, which claims that issues with toxic chemicals and sea lice parasites render the certification a ‘misnomer’.

In the letter, which was shared with Country Life, WildFish argued that ‘the negative environmental impacts of the open-net salmon farming industry are completely counter to the organic principles of the Soil Association’. The signatories also claimed that the certification schemes for Scottish salmon ‘require lower standards than might reasonably be expected by consumers’ and that ‘breaches of the standards are rarely enforced’. The letter was signed by groups including the Blue Marine Foundation and the Pesticide Action Network.

‘So-called “organic” Scottish salmon is a misnomer,’ says Rachel Mulrenan, Wildfish senior director. ‘The fish are raised in the same way as all Scottish farmed salmon – in open-net cages, where all the waste from the farm flows straight into the surrounding lochs and sounds, including faeces and uneaten feed.’

'"Organic" salmon farms are permitted to still use highly toxic chemicals, which can kill surrounding wildlife; they still use wild-caught fish to produce feed and for parasite control (typically, wrasse used as cleaner fish), with unknown environmental impacts; and they still allow for build-up of sea lice parasites, which can spread to, and prove fatal for, wild Atlantic salmon and sea trout.

In response to the letter, a Soil Association spokesperson said: ‘Organic farms must follow strict rules to minimise impacts on the environment and animal welfare, and when problems occur, they must prove they are taking action in order to use the organic logo. We recognise there is still much work to be done to further improve fish farming, and that is why we are working with the sector to drive improvements forward. Without our involvement millions of fish would be living in worse conditions. We were one of the very first organisations to develop organic aquaculture standards in the 1990s and while we only work with a small percentage of fish farms, our rules are having a wider impact with many of these also being adopted by the non-organic sector. But there are still many challenges to be tackled and we take all concerns seriously, which is why we are currently reviewing our aquaculture standards and we will consider all the points raised today in our open process.’

The Soil Association also said that the chemicals mentioned by WildFish, such as deltamethrin, are used in extremely rare and exceptional circumstances. 'These can only be used as a last resort, and our licensees also need to be able to demonstrate they have taken other measures before resorting to these medicines. Medication must also be administered under the control of a veterinary surgeon. It is essential that farmers can follow veterinary advice to treat their animals to ensure animal welfare and prevent suffering. However, vet treatments are highly restricted in organic farming as producers must take – and be able to demonstrate – a preventative approach where animals must have more space and be kept in conditions that reduce the likelihood of parasites and disease.'

Farmed salmon is big business, with the value of salmon sold in 2022 exceeding £1.2 billion, and 169,194 tonnes produced that year. However, concerns have long been raised about the environmental damage done by mass salmon farming. A report by Wildfish released in 2023, titled Responsibly Sourced? Claimed to show the use of chemical pesticides in Soil Association Organic certified salmon farms, and undercover footage on another organic certified farm showed salmon suffering from ‘deformities and disease’. According to WildFish, that farm still remains organic certified.

However, at that time, the Soil Association disagreed, saying that WildFish ‘inadvertently identified salmon featured in its report… as organic. They are not. Soil Association organic standards do not stand for animal suffering. The fish stock filmed do not have organic status and would never be labelled as such to consumers.’

Credit: Getty Images

83% of England's rivers show 'high pollution' levels as sewage and agricultural waste flow into the waterways

Data collected by more than 640 anglers across the country have found that our rivers are in a perilous state.

Britain braces for Pacific pink salmon invasion

Two years after large numbers were spotted in British rivers, the Pacific pink salmon is set to make a return,

Norman Foster on the Country Life podcast: 'The Green Belt is one of our greatest inventions'

Lord Norman Foster, one of Britain's great architects, joins the Country Life podcast.

The Country Life Podcast

Listen to all the episodes of the Country Life Podcast.

More than 80% of rivers in England show signs of high levels of pollution, likely caused by sewage and agricultural waste, according to the results of a citizen-science water testing project. The survey, conducted by anglers, is the first and largest of its kind, and found that of 163 rivers where regular samples were recorded, 83% ‘failed to meet the phosphate standard for good ecological status in at least one sample’. It also showed that 44% of site averages for phosphate failed the England-wide upper standard for good ecological status.

The Water Quality Monitoring Network report was launched in response to the deteriorating water quality impacting rivers and the angling experience, as well as concerns that the Environment Agency was not monitoring rivers correctly. As of December 2023, 641 anglers from 240 clubs have been actively monitoring pollution on 190 rivers from across 60 catchments. The high phosphate levels are of extreme concern, as the substance causes an excessive growth of algae, which starves rivers and their inhabitants of oxygen. 

After the publication of the first report, the Angling Trust, as part of its Anglers Against Pollution Campaign, has called on future governments to ‘deliver a clear plan to tackle river pollution’. ‘The first annual WQMN report proves that across the country rivers are suffering from too much phosphate which is extremely damaging in freshwater,’ says Angling Trust CEO Jamie Cook. ‘We need to see much more enforcement and an update of existing laws to tackle the scourge of river pollution and hold polluters to account.’

In response, a Defra spokesperson said: ‘We are taking comprehensive action to tackle water pollution in our rivers and seas – with more investment, stronger regulation and tougher enforcement. This includes setting highly ambitious legally binding targets to reduce water pollution from agriculture and phosphorus pollution from treated wastewater.

‘We are also taking swift action against those who break the rules, including increasing funding for Ofwat, giving them new powers, and changing the law so that polluters face unlimited penalties and are rightfully held to account.’

‘A failure by the next government, whoever wins the election, to address this failure would be a betrayal of anglers across the country,’ said Stuart Singleton White, head of campaigns at the Angling Trust. ‘With a general election approaching, we are urging political parties to make clear commitments in their manifestos that they will enforce existing laws far more thoroughly and bring in new strengthened environmental laws to protect our waterways from pollution and phosphate overload.' 

Credit: Nigelb10/iStock via Getty Images

Is your pony 'nice and fluffy' — or carrying too much weight? How warm winters are making for heavy horses

The arrival of an overweight pony on The Archers highlights a growing problem with heavy horses, says equine charity World

Hope for hedgehogs as new research looks to revolutionise robotic lawnmowers

Scientists at the University of Oxford have developed a tool that could prevent hedgehogs from being mangled by robotic lawnmowers.

Norman Foster on the Country Life podcast: 'The Green Belt is one of our greatest inventions'

Lord Norman Foster, one of Britain's great architects, joins the Country Life podcast.

Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

What to expect in 2024, from the Shipping News in cockney rhyming slang to a secret wolf-reintroduction

Our annual tongue-in-cheek look at what 2024 might hold in store, from the Shipping News in cockney to the resurgence

I got lost in the middle of a wood once. It was night, I was on the tail of a runaway terrier and the torch gave out. It was winter, rain-clouded, moon-less — as close to laboratory black-out as anyone could hope to avoid in real life.

How to get back to the house, in such blindness? I looked back at that December midnight and wondered if, by some strange energy, some subconscious tampering with fate and time, I caused the bulb to blow. Previously, I had spent hours in the wood, where we kept pigs and sheep, learning to identify trees by touch. The braille of bark. That night I had my test.

After some initial stumbling, I found, in sequence: The Old Oaks (deeply, vertically fissured bark, fingernail deep, in mosaic ‘tiles’); The Beech Sorority (smooth, eel-skin, seal-skin, but as cold as stone); The Birch (sloughing off its skin, like unwanted paper bandages); and The Gean, or Wild Cherry (bark with hoops of pores, or ‘lenticels’, that I used as my abacus when sheep-counting). Then it was a left turn, straight up the steep path and out of the wood.

If my fingers had met polystyrene bark (elder), gunstock bark (hazel, polished by the passing bodies of pigs), punch-spongy bark (Californian redwood: an early owner of the wood had a grandiose dream, for pluvial far-west Herefordshire, of arboretum creation) orientation would also have been enabled by feeling trees.

A navigatory aid for the sightless. Almost limitless are the human uses of tree skin; when Ötzi, the Copper Age man, was dis-interred in 1991 from his mummifying burial in Alpine ice, he had with him two small birch-bark boxes, one of which carried embers for, paradoxically, starting a fire made from wood. Over the millennia, bark has been the all provider for humans, from bread to books. If beech is the popular graffiti tree, lovers having carved their initials on it forever (the Romans even had a proverb for amatory, arboreal tattooing: crescunt illae; crescent amores, ‘As these letters grow, so may our love’), its bark may well have been the material of our first rune-scribed books. In Nordic languages, ‘book’ and ‘beech’ can be synonymous: buch.

However, on that mole-fumbly winter night of the lost dog, I was not unaware of the simple tactile pleasure of the various barks. Neither did I forget their lovely aesthetic in daytime: how silver birch seems permanently wrapped in Ice Age moonlight, the way that a wet winter oak on the horizon is ink-stained or the ornateness of the lattice-work of sweet chestnut. There is yet more art to bark: under the surface. The legless larvae of bark beetles tunnel away, creating abstract patterns. Each of the 67 British species fashion distinctive galleries. The esoteric etchings of bark beetles are beautiful, but sometimes deadly; the wood-carving grubs can transport fungal spores. Between the 1970s and 1980s, almost all English elms above the size of a shrub were eliminated by Dutch elm disease, caused by the fungus of the genus Ophiostoma and carried by various bark beetles. It was one of the most dramatic extinctions of modern times, utterly altering the national landscape. In such instances, the grooved carvings of the beetles are the tree’s epitaph.

Bark only appears inert. It is the tree’s living skin and, like the human epidermis, exists in layers. The coarse outer skin is a shield and, under this, the ‘plumbing’ of phloem tissue passes sugary food from the leaves to the rest of the tree. Phloem has but a brief life: after serving as pipework, it dies, turns into protective outer bark or rhytidome, notably full of tough cork cells.

A surprisingly sophisticated substance, bark. Tree species wear a coat to withstand the tribulations of their particular environment. The white bark of silver birch reflects the destructive UV rays of sunlight, a necessary aid for a pioneering tree, oftentimes lacking the shade of companions. The thick-plaited bark of Scots pine is a firewall against the periodic, historic conflagrations of pinewoods. Protection can be proactive, too — bark has chemical tricks up its sleeve to ward off pests and pathogens. When under attack from leaf-devouring insects, the oak tree releases tannin in the bark as deterrent vapour and Scots pine produces a toxic sticky resin.

Alas for trees, their tender young skin, rich in phloem sucrose, is deer-nip, sheep-nip, rabbit-nip, squirrel-nip. A tree stripped of its bark is a dead tree and a deer, sheep, rabbit or squirrel will de-skin a tree overnight. The fatal botanical consequence of skin-stripping a tree is an ancient understanding. According to the Roman author Tacitus, the old German law for someone who peeled, or allowed to be peeled, a living tree was to have his navel cut out and nailed to the tree and then be driven around the tree until all his guts were wound about its trunk.

An animal’s desire to nibble bark may be driven by more than hunger. I learned this from our miniature Shetland pony called Willow, who got knocked in the knee when playing with pals Zeb, George and donkey Snowdrop. To ease the pain of his bruised and swollen joint, Willow the pony hobbled to a willow bush, Salix alba, and gnawed its bark for a day. The skin of willow produces sap containing salicin, which is analgesic, anti-inflammatory and antipyretic. Salicin is the metabolite of aspirin. Such self-medication by animals is technically ‘zoopharmacognosy’ and is, doubtless, the origin of human medicine. We watched the animals. To this day, African ethnic groups prepare a concoction made from the shrub Vernonia amygdalina as treatment for parasitaemia and diarrhoea, echoing their primate neighbours.

For fauna and flora, bark can be a world entire. Food. Medicine. Home. That deep, dark night in the wood of the lost, when I finger-tapped the oaks I also touched the crumbly lichen and the velvet moss existing in their crevices. On one oak, there was a sprouting of fern, the prehistoric plant, and in my midnight search I was rendered as original as Ötzi. The fissures and crevices of bark are a haven for wildlife; the bark of mature oak shelters more than 700 species of lichen alone. Unwrapped, bark in these isles would comprise a habitat of millions of square acres, with an insect, a spider in every niche. On their invertebrate tail come, in turn, the hungry birds, the tits and the woodpecker. As does every habitat, bark has its specialist killers. The supreme hunter of bark in these isles is sly, serial, almost overlooked.

Watch it now, the little treecreeper, as it climbs the oak or the pear or the whatever tree. Only the treecreeper has a bill long enough yet fine enough to probe the abysses of mature bark and successfully remove insects, their larvae and their eggs. Upwards the tree-creeper goes with its tweezer-beak, inspecting methodically, an avian Crippen. Up the bird goes, in a spiral, a counter helter-skelter.

After the treecreeper, others will ascend on the hunt, gripping the tree’s skin with claws, even with scales, as snakes can climb. All of them using, in their own way, bark to live, like so many other species of the natural order.

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