Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside

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So, you will find everything about Blythe and yet oddly little, from this book or any other, which is refreshing. The book includes an introduction from Blythe’s close friend Richard Mabey, as well as shorter contributions from Julia Blackburn, Mark Cocker, Ian Collins, Maggi Hambling, Alexandra Harris, Richard Holloway, Olivia Laing, Robert Macfarlane, James Hamilton-Paterson, Hilary Spurling, Frances Ward and Rowan Williams.

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Blythe was a Lay Reader in the Church of England who brushed off suggestions that he might become ordained with the counter-argument that laity have a specific place to play in the work of the church, as part of the quietly gathered congregation, rather than standing outside and above their number – he was ahead of his time; it is only in recent days that the church is slowly opening up to the importance of laity.

Akenfield, a portrait of a rural life rapidly disappearing from view, was immediately acclaimed as a classic when it was published in 1969. One evening, after a Paris literary do, they slept together; he told a friend they were both curious “to see how the other half did it”. Photograph: Picturebank/Alamy An endless source of inspiration … the River Stour in Wormingford, near Blythe’s home. Although he regrets the spoliation of the countryside and vanishing of a precious way of rural life – flowery fields, small mixed farms, abundant wild creatures and small but intimately known and loved horizons – Blythe celebrates more than he laments, because he is a man whose cup has always been not so much half full as brimming over. I think we did the film at exactly the right time - although we didn't know it then - because it captured a world on the cusp of very great change.

Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside - Goodreads

His father, Albert, had served in the Suffolk Regiment and fought at Gallipoli and Blythe was conscripted during the second world war. The old people who thrived in The View in Winter were those, Blythe concluded, who were able to preserve their “spiritual vitality, a vividness, an imaginative sort of energy”. From here, Blythe has spent almost half a century observing the slow turn of the agricultural year, the church year, and village life in a series of rich, lyrical rural diaries. When I wrote Akenfield," Blythe said, "I had no idea that anything particular was happening, but it was the last days of the old traditional rural life in Britain. He was almost as reticent about his faith, but his writing was deeply suffused in his Christian beliefs and his knowledge of the scriptures.There’s a world you can inhabit, your feet are on the ground, and that means you can walk around, breathe deeply and look slowly. We should be grateful to have him and his beautiful pages, and for the privilege of spending so many ordinary and yet rare and precious days in his company, as he shares his view of one small corner of his, and our, world. Before ever opening the book, the reader is pulled into the summertime of a ‘Dorset Landscape’, (executed in 1930 using watercolour, chalk and graphite), standing on a high hill that casts a shadow in the foreground, looking down upon a stream around which a cluster of trees are leaning heavily in the wind, and beyond, another steep hill rises, partly prepared for cultivation, a lone tree standing near the crest.