The Sussex Ouse is a short river (less than fifty miles from its rising to the sea), and it flows through a rich countryside of woods and fields before flowing down between a gap in the range of hills known as the South Downs, until it reaches the port of Newhaven.  I live in this area and walk bits of her route regularly and would say that it is on the whole a cosy landscape, containing a few pretty villages and the ancient market town of Lewes.  Although it may lack drama, the route is steeped in history and this has given Olivia Laing a considerable amount of material to enrich the account of her walk which took place over the course of seven days in September, a couple of years ago.  I could not help but be impressed by the huge list of sources at the back of her book which takes up eight pages of small print – although the walk may be short, Olivia Laing’s readers won’t be lacking information about it.

We learn about the authors personal crisis early in the book

In the spring of 2009 I became caught up in one of those crises that periodically afflict a life, when the scaffolding that maintains us seems destined to collapse. I lost a job by accident, and then through sheer carelessness, I lost the man  I loved.

Olivia “lost the knack of sleeping” and at periodical intervals throughout the day she felt that she was drowning. The idea came to her clear out her life by walking the length of the River Ouse and while reading the account of her journey, we keep coming back to that underlying sadness in little asides and remarks indicating that the clearing out was a tough job to do.

The walk commences in an area of thickets, small woods and muddy fields bounded with barbed wire fences – maybe a place fitting for Olivia’s current state of mind.  However, we are soon treated to some descriptive nature writing,

The first pipistrelles were crossing Coos Lane as I reached the water.  It was just after sunset and everything had stilled, the sky shot faintly with rose.  The reflections in the lake seemed sunk very deep.  The water pleated as the carp sank and climbed, occasionally breaking the surface to shivers.  Beneath them, the slow clouds made their way east.  At the far side of the lake the trees were reflected in sooty green and when the fish jumped there the ripples ran in white concentric circles.

Olivia launches into many passages like this and they capture the quiet stillness of much of the route, which is only disturbed by the noise of passing cars from the roads which are never too far away.  As ex-Deputy Books Editor of the Observer newspaper, Olivia Laing’s book is full of literary references.  Sometimes these seem slightly overlong (ten pages of Kenneth Grahame of Wind in the Willows fame for example) and I found myself skipping through some of these, but also realised that they are well written and do relate to the landscape she walks through.

The writing is of a style that will be bound to gain Olivia an invitation to next year’s Charleston Festival.  Apart from the considerable amount of material on Virginia and Leonard Woolf, she herself often moves into exploring the numinous aspects of her walk,

We navigate by omens such as these.  You don’t have to be a poet to be prone to apophenia, to seeking meaningful patterns in the scattered, senseless data of the everyday life.  In a certain mood, the earth itself can seem a ouija board, calling out its advice, discharging symbol after symbol, relentless and malevolent, though to ordinary eyes nothing more has happened than a single black and white bird winging down the sky.

You have to like this sort of digression to really enjoy this book for there is quite a lot of it.  I don’t mean to sound churlish, but the synergy with the whole Woolf thing is sometimes a little too laboured and as one who does not take over-much to it all, I found it a bit of a struggle not to giggle at times.  My male brain tends to see a walk as a walk, and perhaps an opportunity for some self-reflection, rather than a journey through a symbolic landscape.

Having said that, the history side of the book is excellent – Olivia Laing provides a lovely potted history of the Piltdown Man archaeological scam, a blow by blow account of the little known Battle of Lewes and a fascinating chapter on the terrible floods that came on Lewes in 2000.  It would not be fair on  the author to commend this book only for its excellent local history (which should make it an essential purchase for anyone who lives in East Sussex), when in reality this is a highly literary walking journal which adds another volume to the burgeoning Woolf-related library.

I feel sorry for making some slightly disparaging remarks about the tone of the book for it really is a very good production all round. Many people will love it and its quality is without doubt.  However when I look on my recent reviews I couldn’t help but compare this book with the travel journal of another woman writer – Susie Kelly who in her book, The Valley of Heaven and Hell managed to combine huge amounts of history with without the same high-mindedness of some of Olivia Laing’s writing.   I’ll probably give this one a five star review on Amazon, because this book does contribute a great deal to the literature of the area in which I live and despite my hesitations about its tone, its quality is beyond doubt.

Neil Ansell had the opportunity to rent a dilapidated cottage deep in the hills of Mid-Wales, in countryside so remote that you could walk twenty miles in one direction without encountering another dwelling.  What started as short-term let, turned out to be a five-year period of solitary living, far removed from the services we expect to find today – hot water from a tap, central heating and plumbing.  The rent of £100 a year reflected the lack of services but failed to take account of the incredible beauty of the location and the land available to the tenant.

Neil has a great affinity with nature and things which would phase other people were causes of delight.  I am not sure how I would feel about sharing my home with twenty of thirty bats for example.  Even Neil however baulked at the spring-invasions of mice – fortunately the pretty field mouse variety rather than the disease carrying house mouse.  The mice reduced Neil to hanging food in carrier bags from ham hooks embedded in the ceiling.  The only way Neil could reduce the population of mice was to trap them and carry them across a river where he released them.  No doubt killing them would have had no effect other than to make space for others.

Neil found that his life settled down into natural rhythms, “I had a daily routine dictated by the simplicty of my lifestyle, and an annual routine too, led by the seasons, the elements”.  He even developed his own rituals, such as seeing in the New Year from the summit of his hill or walking overnight into the hills at the Summer Solstice so he could watch the dawn from a mountain top.

Five years of solitude was broken up by visits from friends, but Neil became accustomed to his way of life and found that he welcomed the return to quietness when they departed.  He writes,

I couldn’t fee lonely.  Loneliness is the product of an isolation that has not been freely chosen.  You can feel more lonely in the midst of a crowd of people if those people are not giving you the human contact you desir, in the same way that poverty surrounded by affluence feels harsher, more shocking, than poverty shared.

While it is interesting to read how Neil looked after himself, the major part of the book is a sort of extended nature diary – fascinating for anyone who loves the ebb and flow of the seasons and the changing wildlife that accompanies them.  The hills of Wales are remarkable rich in wild-life of every description and Neil went out of his way to cultivate a relationship with it – maintaining a large number of nest boxes for example, which he patrolled regularly to check on the progress of his many bird families.

He became remarkably attuned to the life around him and was aware of every bird in his patch and any new arrivals which turned up.  He rescued an ailing raven at one point and took it indoors to care for it, until passing it on to experts who could nurture it back to a full life.  I was reminded of a time I went for a walk I knew well in the company of an enthusiastic bird-watcher – he kept pointing out birds which I hadn’t even noticed before and began to realise that the area I lived in was far richer in wild-life than I had imagined.

Neil already had an interest in “food for free” having lived in Sweden where “foraging in the wood in autumn is practically a national pastime”.  He gathered chanterelles, parasols and ceps, preserving them in olive oil with dill and coriander seeds.  He made thirty jars of jam each year from berries found in the woods, and he gathered wild strawberries – a pleasure I have shared while walking in South Wales.

Neil had two mild winters and then a third winter when he was snowed in for six weeks.  Fortunately his hoard of logs supplied warmth enough, and he was able to draw flocks of birds and individaul rarities to his home with strategically placed seed and nuts.

The solitary life was a phase which could not last forever. Neil is now a successful BBC journalist and lives with his family  in the city of Brighton. He still returns to his Welsh cottage but things are not quite the same – in his epilogue he gives the impression of returning to the location of an earlier part of his life, now long gone.

Neil has recorded a video for Penguin Books with some footage of the cottage which lets us get a good idea of where he spent his five years with nature and self-sufficiency.

The story begins simply enough with a set (flock? batch? colony?) of doves, which were kept in a converted coal shed.  But it does not take long before birds are in the house, when Esther’s daughter Bec is given a cockatiel, named Bardie, for her 12th birthday.  On the principle that “one bird swiftly begets more”, a stream of injured, dying, abandoned, runty fledglings arrives in the house, leading Esther to find out how to raise infant birds.  More birds follow, but it is when an infant rook arrives in a box with the unlikely name Chicken that the story really gets under-way.

Esther learns that a rook should be fed on a mixture of rodents, chicks and insects, but replaces this diet with minced-beef, eggs and chopped-up nuts on which she soon thrived.  Within weeks she was testing her wings and then flew onto the kitchen table.  A house was constructed for her (never “cage” -  and she was only put in it at night), but Chicken seemed to have a strong building instinct and began to pick at the plaster on the wall beside her house, leaving large holes.  She was with the family constantly, playing with rubber mice, picking at the hems of jeans, flying on to the tops of cupboards and generally possessed of an insatiable curiosity.

It was unlikely that Chicken could be returned to the wild, and so as she became adult, Esther began to clip her wings (by removing the secondary feathers) so that she could not injure herself by flying into neighbouring gardens where cats lurked, or by flying around the house and being entangled in light fittings.

Chicken soon became fully integrated into the family and her “house” was eventually moved into Esther’s study where both bird and human work together.  Esther works by writing, while Chicken works,

One notable feature of Chicken’s behaviour is her obsessive interest in “caching”, collecting and storing food.  She does it,

Spike the magpie also has this habit, but his caching site of choice is books,

The physical qualities of books delighted him, the secret interstices that lurk between pages, the presentation of a manifold profusion of caching sites.  The turning of each page was an opportunity, each a place where an item could be stored safely, unseen, remembered:  half a prawn, a piece of Brie, a tiny sliver of cod.

The ability to tolerate life with a bird must be a rare gift.  As I read the book, I couldn’t help but think of the mess (of various types!) that must be frequently cleared up.  Esther Woolfson seems to take this in her stride, even when another Corvid, a magpie called Spike joins the household.  She notes that,

. . . with corvids at least, their seems to be a connection between self-expression and defecation, for addressing Chicken in a particularly interlocutory way will bring about an answering, head-bending calling, followed by the luscious, liquid sound by the squeeeeak! splat! that seens its natural adjunct.

Not many people would be able to tolerate that in their home!

The birds have a built in clock which drives them to seasonal behaviour of nesting.  A house bound bird, Chicken builds her nest under the dining table, from torn-up newspaper, an old sock, a couple of floor cloths.  She will not tolerate any attempt to tidy the edges of the nest and her hormones compel her to “engage the broom in combat”.  When she lays her eggs, she has to be hand-fed until one day she seems to lose interest in sitting and leaves the nest, allowing Esther to slowly dismantle and remove her temporary home.

The book is a wealth of information on crows and their behaviour, both in the home and in the wild and Esther explores the folklore and mythology of these great black birds which have inspired such mistrust and superstition over the years.  The book actually covers all birds, whether wild or domestic and I learned about aspects of their behaviour and habits which I had not encountered before.

Esther Woolfson writes elegantly and precisely.  While imparting much factual information, part of the book’s charm is in the speculation about bird-life and the relationship of birds with humans.  There is a richness of experience here which can only inspire readers to take more notice of the birds in their gardens.

In conclusion let me congratulate artist Helen MacDonald on the many excellent drawings which illustrate this book.