Walter Murray was a young man tired of living in the city. Early in the 1920s, he persuaded a Sussex farmer to rent him a derelict cottage, which stood alone on a hill, with no running water or electricity. Most of the windows were broken, it was dirty, dark and ran with rats. He bought a brush and pail in the village, forced the rats to retreat, brought in rudimentary furniture. The local postman found him a dog, and with his new companion he began to explore his surroundings. In that year at Copsford he made a living from collecting, drying and selling the herbs he found locally: agrimony, meadow-sweet and yarrow. He became alert to the wildlife and plants around him. His life was hard - he copsford by walter j. c. murray a little toller nature classics library little toller nature classics library Little Toller Books republishes classics of nature writing and rural life. Designed in the spirit of the early editions, each book includes a new introduction and cover illustration. Published 4th March 2019 UK (2nd Jan 2020 US & Canada) 216 x 156mm, paperback internal illustrations by Dorothy Hartley ISBN: 978-1-908213-70-9 Sewn Paperback with Flaps, 168 pages on 90gsm Munken paper Price: UK 12 US $19 Distributed by Central Books T: 020 8525 8800 F: 020 8525 8879 E: orders@centralbooks.com W: centralbooks.com Also available from Gardners Books, Bertrams & Little Toller Contact Jon on 01300 321536 or jon@littletoller.co.uk walter j. c. murray (1900-1985) was a writer whose work has been compared Richard Jefferies. He served in the first world war, and thereafter lived in Sussex for the remainder of his life, becoming a school teacher and eventually headmaster of a small private school. COPSFORD WALTER J. C. MURRAY Introduced by raynor winn supplemented his income with occasional journalism, but it was here he met his future wife, who he calls The Music Mistress, and with whom he would later found a school. Copsford is an extraordinary book. Bearing comparison to Thoreau's Walden, Murray's intense feeling for his place is evident on every page. It is, though, no simple story of a rural idyll - life at Copsford was hard, and Murray does not shy away from the occasional terrors of a house that had its hauntings.

Known as the 'grandmother of herbalism', Juliette de Baïracli
Levy travelled throughout Europe and North America in
pursuit of her passion for herbs and holistic medicine, living
mostly in rural places whose nomadic communities helped
expand her knowledge of plants and living from the land.

In
the early 1950s, she settled in a thatched 'cabin' in the New
Forest for three years and raised her children in the woods.
Originally published in 1958, Wanderers in the New
Forest describes an extraordinary family life living wild:
drawing spring water from Abbots Well, bathing in Windmill
Hill Pond and sharing the water with their animal neighbours,
foraging for fruits and fungi or tending to their forest garden
of herbs, flowers and vegetables.

Juliette's friendships within
the local traveller community enabled her to record the impact
that post-war modernisation was having on their traditions,
ancient rights and intimate knowledge of the New Forest. This
new edition is illustrated throughout with photographs taken
by Juliette while living in the forest.

While working as Head of Libraries and Exhibitions at the Royal Horticultural Society, Fiona Davison came across a cache of letters from a young gardener who was denied a scholarship by the RHS on the grounds that she was female. Intrigued by what happened to young Olive, Fiona began to research the wider story of early female professional gardeners and discovered a group of pioneers who battled derision and prejudice to change expectations of what women gardeners could do.

An Almost Impossible Thing follows six women gardeners in the years before the First World War, and examines their lives in the context of suffragism, collectivism and Empire. Although gardens are often seen as a refuge, a place to escape from the troubles of the modern world, this book reminds us of a period when British gardens were an arena for radical and far-reaching experiments. A time when a group of convention-busting women were gardening with purpose and quietly changing the world.

Until the twentieth century most country dwellers made their short journeys on foot, via footpaths and bridleways which connected villages, and took people to neighbouring villages, to church, to market, to their places of work. In The English Path Kim Taplin (1943-2024) explores the way that poets and writers, from Jane Austen to Iain Sinclair, have written about these vital routes, which sustained rural life for centuries, and which were also powerful visions of arriving and leaving, but are today under constant threat.

Our new edition, the most recent addition to the Nature Classics series, has an introduction by the writer and broadcaster Mary-Ann Ochota, and a foreword by Phoebe Taplin, Kim's daughter.

In 2013, Little Toller Books set up The Clearing, an online journal for new writing about nature and place by both new and established writers. The aim was to create a dedicated space for writers to explore and celebrate landscapes, finding distinctive and sometimes startling visions of place: rural, urban, suburban, industrial, post-industrial, fantastical and natural.

Since then The Clearing has grown an international audience, garnered enthusiastic reviews, supported writing projects and has helped emerging writers at the beginning of their careers.

In Going to Ground is some of the best and most distinctive writing from The Clearing's archive of hundreds of essays and poetry. Its themes are natural, political, historical, archaeological, ecological, scientific, personal, urgent and true, from more than thirty extraordinary writers.
Contributors include: Tim Dee, Nancy Campbell, Tim Hannigan, Ann Lingard, Kathleen Jamie, Eleanor Anstruther, Kerri ni Dochartaigh, Nic Wilson, Alex Woodcock.

In the depths of winter in 1705 the young Johann Sebastian Bach, then unknown as a composer and earning a modest living as a teacher and organist, set off on a long journey by foot to L beck to visit the composer Dieterich Buxterhude, a distance of more than 250 miles. This journey and its destination were a pivotal point in the life of arguably the greatest composer the world has yet seen. L beck was Bach's moment, when a young teacher with a reputation for intolerance of his pupils' failings began his journey to become the master of the Baroque.

Hailed a masterpiece when it was first published, the story of Gavin Maxwell's life with otters on the remote west coast of Scotland remains one of the most lyrical, moving descriptions of a man's relationship with the natural world.

During the early 1970s Richard Mabey explored crumbling city docks and overgrown bomb-sites, navigated inner city canals and car parks, and discovered there was scarcely a nook in our urban landscape incapable of supporting life. The Unofficial Countryside is a timely reminder of how nature flourishes against the odds, surviving in the most obscure and surprising places.

Clifford Webb (1894-1972) was one of Britain's foremost wood engravers and a successful illustrator of children's books, but today his work is often overlooked. Held in high esteem by his peers, he studied under Eric Gill and Walter Sickert, and later taught at St Martin's, but much of his work was either deliberately destroyed or otherwise failed to survive. Now, the renowned wood engraver Simon Brett has painstakingly assembled much of what remains of this extraordinary artist's output for this first book about Webb.

Sophia Kingshill has written here the history of a unique family tree, travelling back 3,000 years to discover the enduring myths and the vibrant folklore that continue to enchant us and ensure the mermaid's survival.

Silbury Hill has perplexed generations of people - a large and ancient man-made hill, its purpose remains a mystery. This book is Adam Thorpe's personal exploration of this vast landscape structure.

A celebration of the life and work of Rena Gardiner (1929-1999), the only book on the subject.

Chris Drury's artwork and Kay Syrad's prose poetry combine here to form a sensitive and authentic portrait of a group of men and women whose lives are shaped by the land. It is a rich exploration of work, soil and the sustainability of their farming practice.

The wonderful, eccentric ballooning adventure of the owl twins Twit and Howlet is from the imagination of Barbara Jones, an artist and writer now celebrated as one of the most influential champions of folk and vernacular art in Britain. Originally published in 1970, it became an instant classic.

Smallholder farmers produce seventy per cent of the world's food, but they're often overlooked, and their livelihoods are under threat from large scale industrial farming which has a huge impact on nature, our landscapes, health and society. Over the last two years the Gaia Foundation commissioned a team of internationally renowned photographers documented the working lives of small-scale farmers from six continents. The resulting book, We Feed The World, is a testament to their resilience, rooted in their intimate relationship to the land and waters across the planet. From Uganda to Somerset, Ibiza to Colombia these intimate portraits and stories tell a story of diversity, community, nutrition, feminism and the fight against climate change.

Home Country is Richard Mabey's memoir told on ridgeway and in beechwood, from the childhood dens built in the grounds of a derelict mansion and his dogged searches for lapwing nests, through his explorations in the fringes of outer London, to the rediscovery of his roots in the Chilterns when he became responsible for a 16-acre woodland of his own.

A century before Charles Darwin, decades before the French Revolution, Gilbert White began his lifelong habit of measuring and observing the world around his Hampshire home. Daily rainfall levels and temperature shifts were recorded with home-made instruments.

In 1931, after two decades of wandering the world, Llewelyn Powys moved into an isolated cottage in Dorset, where he embarked on a series of essays embracing what he called 'the poetry of life'. In their evocations of land and sea, of childhood and old age, of wildlife, they are a poignant love letter to the English Countryside.

Rackham's call for a radical shift in our attitude to trees; how we plant them, how we care for them. An important and ground-breaking book.