Journeying through England on horseback the intrepid seventeenth-century traveller Celia Fiennes recorded every sight & experience of her adventure in her journal from her delight at countryside cakes & the beauty of remote landscapes to the challenges of disagreeable landladies choppy sea crossings & a troublesome horse. Describing potteries in Staffordshire cheesemaking in Cheshire dyers in Exeter & tin miners in Cornwall her writings give an unrivalled glimpse into an England of bustling industry & rich variety. Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside
- but it has profoundly shaped us too. It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists writers musicians & people who live & work on the land
- as well as those who are travelling through it. English Journeys" celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside from stargazey pie & country churches to mans relationship with nature & songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts & love-struck soldiers)."