Little Toller Books - Böcker

In 1957, after travelling in southern Iraq, Gavin Maxwell returned to the West Highlands of Scotland with an otter cub called Mijbil. Written within thew sound of the sea, in a remote cottage where they set up home together, this enduring story ev...

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Known as the 'grandmother of herbalism', Juliette de Bairacli Levy travelled throughout Europe and North America in pursuit of her passion for herbs and holistic medicine, living mostly in rural places whose nomadic communities helped expand her k...

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In the 1970s, John Seymour's book, The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency was a huge, international best-seller, inspiring a new generation to "down-shift" to a new way of life. The book has remained in print ever since. But years earlier, Seymour ...

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About two-thirds of Britain's small, traditional orchards have been lost since 1960. This is a loss in ecological diversity, in community knowledge and the intricacy of local distinctiveness. In 2007 the pomologist Liz Copas and cidermaker Nick Po...

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Ash is one of the most common trees in the British Isles - there are nearly as many ash trees as there are people. Perhaps this is why we take them for granted. Poets write of oak, yew, elm, willow, rarely ash.No books have been written about ash ...

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Edward Thomas's death in the Second World War robbed the world of a great poet, a fine writer, and a pioneering environmentalist. Published in 1909, The South Country is the happiest of all his books. Lyrical, passionate, acutely sensitive to life...

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Adrian Bell's travels through East Anglia and lowland Britain reflect a world on the brink of change. Published in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, his down-to-earth descriptions of the countryside were shaped by his own life working the ...

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Clare Leighton was one of the finest engravers of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, when she settled in the countryside with her long-term partner, the political journalist Henry Noel Brailsford, she turned her creativity to the land. Gardening...

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During the early 1970s Richard Mabey set about mapping his unofficial countryside. He walked crumbling city docks and overgrown bomb sites, navigating inner city canals and car parks, exploring sewage works, gravel pits, rubbish tips. What he disc...

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Through the story of one man, Caleb Bawcombe, a shepherd whose flocks graze the Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset borders, we meet men and women of humble birth - poachers, gypsies, farmers and laborers - striving to survive on the land. As we read,...

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Wild Life in a Southern County traces the course of a spring which rises on an Iron Age hillfort and gradually broadens into a brook, flows through a nearby village and hamlet, skirts a solitary farmhouse and its orchard, before draining into wate...

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Unhappily land-locked in his early adult life, Frank Fraser Darling's fortunes changed when he began visiting Scotland's west coast in the 1930s. Surviving treacherous boat journeys, a broken leg, and hell-bent storms, he made temporary homes with...

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John Wyatt first encountered the Lake District during a boyhood camping trip to Windermere. He was overwhelmed by the freedom of the landscape and the closeness to nature he felt. It was as if he belonged here, amongst the fells, the crags and the...

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At the end of the 1960s, Kenneth Allsop, a famous television presenter and literary man-about-town, left London and settled amid the sunken lanes, ancient forests and chalk streams of west Dorset. He was at his very happiest here. He thought it th...

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Jocelyn Brooke's love affair with wild flowers and home-made fireworks began when he was growing up in Kent and exploring the countryside of the the Elham Valley. But there was one particular flower, especially rare and beautiful which became an o...

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In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, Robert Gibbings launched his home-made punt on the River Thames and began a slow journey downstream, armed with a sketchpad and a microscope. From the river's source at the edge of the Cotswold Hil...

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In 1948, shortly after settling with his family in the village of Blaxhall, Suffolk, George Ewart Evans started recording the conversations he had with neighbours, many of whom were born in the nineteenth century and had worked on farms before the...

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W.G. Hoskins was one of the most original and influential British historians of the twentieth century. He realised that landscapes are the richest record we have of the past, and with his masterpiece, The Making of the English Landscape, he change...

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Rivers are great workings of nature, time and geology. They have long been at the very centre of human culture, sustaining us with water, food, power and stories. Our thoughts flow like a river. A river's journey, from source to sea, is a metaphor...

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Neil Sentance revisits his native Lincolnshire riverlands and fields, farms and market towns, to explore the history of his family and the landscape which shaped them. But this is not a lament for a lost world. Peopled by characters forgotten by h...

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A century before Charles Darwin, decades before the French Revolution, Gilbert White began his lifelong habit of measuring and observing the world around his Hampshire home. Daily rainfall levels and temperature shifts were recorded with home-made...

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In 1927, Ronald Lockley took a 21 year lease on the small island of Skokholm, just off the Pembrokeshire coast in South Wales. A keen ornithologist, he began studies of the bird life on the island, and on neighbouring Skomer, famous today for its ...

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The Slender-billed curlew is one of the world's rarest birds. A beautiful, fragile creature, it once bred in Siberia and wintered in the Mediterranean basin, passing through the wetlands and estuaries of Italy, Greece, the Balkans and central Asia...

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Food is fundamental to life. The way we produce it is the most pressing issue of our times. In recent years, several family-run farms in the downlands of West Dorset have decided to radically change their approach to working the land. When the art...

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Of all weathers, snow is the one that has always affected Marcus Sedgwick the most. While many people's idea of the perfect holiday involves sun, sea an sand, he instead makes trips to cold, snowy parts of the world: Russia, Scandinavia or the Arc...

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In mid to late March 1913, as the storm clouds of the Great War which was to claim his life gathered, Edward Thomas took a bicycle ride from Clapham to the Quantock Hills. The poet recorded his journey through his beloved South Country and his acc...

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Soon after Dexter Petley began writing down his observations of people on the borders of rural Kent and Sussex during the 1960s and 1970s, he realised that his stories were acquiring a broader significance. Between the riverbank where he taught hi...

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Iain Sinclair, the celebrated author and psycho-geographer, walks back along the blue-grey roads and cliff-top paths of his childhood in south Wales, rediscovering the Gower peninsula. Provoked by the strange and enigmatic series of paintings Afal...

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John Fowles' writing life was dominated by trees. From the orchards of his childhood in suburban Essex,to the woodlands of wartime Devon, to his later life on the Dorset coast, trees filled his imagination and enriched his many acclaimed and best-...

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