A country diary

Weekly nature writing column.

A Country Diary, currently on the leader page of The Guardian, has been in existence for over 100 years. It also has its own page on the Guardian website. I have been writing a weekly country diary for 20 years – a detailed and almost devotional account of place. This is the core activity which has shaped my creative practice, informed my field research and given me a national-international profile as a nature writer. These pieces represent the overlapping of various areas of interest: natural history, landscape history, ecology, folklore, poetry, environmental philosophy, nature conservation, narrative non-fiction. All these areas of research converge in the simple act of walking, observing and writing. However, this field research and its creative output includes a lifetime of active research into these subjects and a challenge to articulate experience and an ecological perspective. The size of the pieces – c.300 words – provides discipline and focus and my diaries can be thought of as miniaturist or flash non-fiction. This is what makes my work distinctive. Pieces in my selection have also been published by The Guardian’s sister paper, The Guardian Weekly. This is published and distributed around the world, including material from Le Monde and the Washington Post, and is read by ex-pats, and English speakers with liberal left-leaning tendencies in every continent. I don’t know what the circulation figures are for these two papers but I receive letters from around the world and online comments which suggest that the work and the place does have far-reaching appeal and a broad audience. How far this reflects my ambitions to develop nature writing as a creative practice, I can’t tell but I am encouraged by the feedback and I believe it has a wide, if niche, impact. I am currently working on a compilation of country diaries for publication.