Ground beneath Our Feet

Camilla Cassidy is a writer based in North Yorkshire. Her work has been published in Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator and The Telegraph, among others. She is the author of Twilight Histories: Nostalgia and the Victorian Historical Novel (2023).

"Where do we stand? We might usefully take this question not as a metaphor but as a direct plea to think about the story of the ground on which we stand (and live, and play, and work, and be). Camilla Cassidy’s wonderful book forces us to do just that: to think critically about how rural England came to be closed off from the vast majority of the population. This, then is no ordinary, dry history of enclosure, lost in debates to which there is no answer, but a creative, often profoundly personal, yet also deeply read and archivally rich, telling of a set of ongoing stories about the making private of our land. At turns profoundly disturbing yet always attuned to how we might live better, The Ground beneath Our Feet is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how our green(ish) and (often deeply un)pleasant land came to be – and how we challenge enclosures past and present." - Carl J. Griffin, author of Protest, Politics and Work in Rural England, 1700–1850"A brilliant, indispensable history of how common land was enclosed. Camilla Cassidy brings us to the “stations” of the commons across the via dolorosa of enclosure – Mousehold Heath, Richmond Park, Kinder Scout, Stixwould, Otmoor, Speenhamland, and St George’s Hill – beating the bounds of our history from below. She is making a path by walking, part of a great and growing knowledge commons, a new perambulation." - Peter Linebaugh, author of Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard