Richard Jefferies was the most imaginative & least conventional of nineteenth-century observers of the natural world. Trekking across the English countryside, he recorded his responses to everything from the texture of an owl`s feather & `noises in the air` to the grinding hardship of rural labour. This superb selection of his essays & articles shows a writer who is brimming with intense feeling, acutely aware of the land & those who work on it, & often ambivalent about the countryside. Who does it belong to? Is it a place, an experience or a way of life? In these passionate & idiosyncratic writings, almost all our current ideas & concerns about rural life can be found. Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) was the son of a Wiltshire farmer. He never worked the land but made his living from writing, trekking across the countryside with his notebook. He spent much of his life struggling against poverty & tuberculosis, which would eventually kill him at the age of thirty-nine. As well as being in many ways the father of English nature writing, Jefferies also wrote the classic children`s book Bevis & the apocalyptic science-fiction novel After London. Richard Mabey`s introduction to his selection of Jefferies` work discusses the author`s life, his views on the paradoxes of rural life & his place in the tradition of nature writers.