Hi, how are you doing?

Welcome to the June edition of Witness Marks. If you’re new here and would like a quick tour of the village (and the newsletter), start by reading this post here.

And in case you missed it, I was featured in ’s HOME a couple of weeks ago, giving readers a tour of my desk with its many strange wonders. You can catch up here – it’s free to read for the next few days:

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Me & My Desk: Melissa Harrison

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a month ago · 241 likes · 13 comments · India Knight

Witness Marks goes out on or around the 15th of each month; in between times you can find me chatting away in Substack Notes. The first part is free, while the second part, the Village News, sits below a paywall. A subscription to that costs £3.50 a month if you pay via Substack Desktop (Apple and Google add a bit on top if you pay via the app). Paying subscribers can also access all the back issues of Witness Marks, AND they can listen to me read out and discuss my first novel, Clay.

Last night I was tired, and stopped reading early. I switched my bedside light off and began to fall into sleep. When I turned over my eyes must have flickered open, because I saw there was a bright glow around my bedroom curtains. In a village with no street lights this usually means a full moon (which I knew it wasn’t), or that Violet across the road’s security light has been triggered – or, in rare cases, that I’ve switched my porch light on and forgotten to turn it off again. I got out of bed and parted the curtains only to find that despite it being well past 10.30pm it just wasn’t dark yet, the midsummer sun only 7.5° or so below the horizon looking north (as my bedroom window does). It’s June, and we’re very nearly at the longest day.

Of course, June’s light nights should not have come as a surprise, but I’ve been travelling a lot the last few weeks and I don’t feel as tuned in to my cottage, the village and its seasons as I normally do. Added to that, the weather took a stormy turn, with thunder day after day and some heavy downpours that the farmland fields drunk up but which spoiled the June roses, making them blotch and droop. There were even a couple of evenings when I got under the electric blanket to watch telly (there are no medals for martyrdom in this house). Between one thing and another the sense of things building inexorably to the natural year’s dizzy climax has rather been lost.

Haymaking began on what counts here as ‘high ground’, and then stopped again when the weather turned wet. Within a few days a bright green aftermath had begun to appear on the few mown fields, which – if rain and sunshine continue together – might well offer up a second cut this year. I wonder if this weekend will be enough of a weather window for more farmers to make a start on their hay.

Elsewhere, our local barley is developing fine green awns and shifting in the breeze, while the wheat is still stiff and ‘blue’, dotted with the crimson spots of corn poppies here and there. We have two fields sown this year to a conservation mix, this time dominated by the blue flowers of phacelia. Bees love it, birds eat the seeds and it’s a great soil improver, fixing nitrogen and suppressing weeds. Further afield there are a few acres of potatoes which are putting out their purple and yellow flowers. I’m glad the rain has come while the crops are still growing; I hope it will contribute to a good arable harvest and perhaps mean less abstraction from rivers (though I did see the irrigators out a couple of weeks ago, not that far away). As the seasons change, and the weather becomes less predictable (and more prone to extremes) what’s already an incredibly difficult job becomes even harder and more precarious for those without deep pockets. And in the face of growing food insecurity and the environmental depredations of agribusiness we really need our smaller, mixed family farms to survive.

By mid-June most nightingales have paired and the males’ night-time performances have ceased – all but those unlucky few who have failed to find a mate and sing on after dark, hopeful and lonely. Around the village they can still be heard by day, now and again – brief snatches and phrases, nothing like the outpourings of May. When I hear them by day I always think of R. F. Langley’s visually, taxonomically and rhythmically precise Suffolk-set poem, with its quiet subversion of Keats:

To a Nightingale

Nothing along the road. But
petals, maybe. Pink behind
and white inside. Nothing but
the coping of a bridge. Mutes
on the bricks, hard as putty,
then, in the sun, as metal.
Burls of Grimmia, hairy,
hoary, with their seed-capsules
uncurling. Red mites bowling
about on the baked lichen
and what look like casual
landings, striped flies, Helina,
Phaonia, could they be?
This month the lemon, I’ll say
primrose-coloured, moths, which flinch
along the hedge then turn in
to hide, are Yellow Shells not
Shaded Broad-bars. Lines waver.
Camptogramma. Heat off the
road and the nick-nack of names.
Scotopteryx. Darkwing. The
flutter. Doubles and blurs the
margin. Fuscous and white. Stop
at nothing. To stop here at
nothing, as a chaffinch sings
interminably, all day.
A chiff-chaff. Purring of two
turtle doves. Voices, and some
vibrate with tenderness. I
say none of this for love. It
is anyone’s giff-gaff. It
is anyone’s quelque chose.
No business of mine. Mites which
ramble. Caterpillars which
curl up as question marks. Then
one note, five times, louder each
time, followed, after a fraught
pause, by a soft cuckle of
wet pebbles, which I could call
a glottal rattle. I am
empty, stopped at nothing, as
I wait for this song to shoot.
The road is rising as it
passes the apple tree and
makes its approach to the bridge.

In terms of book news it’s been all go since The Given World was published last month. I’ve done nine events so far, with six more to come – including one at ’s very own Storytellers on July 6th (and not long after that we’ll be into festival season!). I’ve been on the radio and in the newspapers, and the book has been reviewed in the Guardian, The Times, the Financial Times, The Spectator, Caught by the River and The Tablet. Honestly, it’s a wonder you’re not all sick to death of it, and me! If you're one of the lovely people who have come to one of my events, thank you so much – your support has been absolutely wonderful.

And speaking of reviews, I wrote about Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel, Land, for the Guardian. I didn’t like it much, though I know lots of people really enjoy what she does. You can read my piece here. Fiona Mozley also reviewed it, in her case for the New York Times: ‘The problems with Land stem from its reluctance to question the moral clarity of its core characters. They are all unimpeachably good… [Land] is deflated by characters whose confrontations with the forces around them are too shallow to constitute a serious reckoning with the moral dilemmas the novel poses at the start.’

I also wrote my usual ‘Nature Notebook’ for The Times, this time about giant wood wasps, skylarks at London City Airport, and the sandy, litter-blown verge of the A12 not far from my house (it’s nicer than it sounds, honestly!). You can read that here.

A little tease, above, for an exciting thing that’ll be happening on July 17th: Peter Rogers, who produced, starred in and wrote the music for ‘The Stubborn Light of Things’ podcast, and the composer, performer and multi-instrumentalist Laura Cannell, have collaborated on some music that creates a vivid soundscape for The Given World – and I know I would say this, but it is absolutely incredible. There’ll be a limited run of CDs and it’ll be available online to download. Follow Peter on Bandcamp to receive an alert when it comes out.

Three things that aren’t on screens

Each month I collect together three things that have interested me, for good or ill, and which can be found in the world beyond your phone or laptop:

👉🏼 A nice thing: Gomi are a small, Brighton-based company making sustainable and fully repairable power banks (below), phone chargers, cables and speakers from recycled beach plastic and repurposed e-bike batteries. Not only is it well made and genuinely ethical but their stuff is pretty gorgeous to look at, too, and you can even have your items personalised. Find out more at gomi.design.

👉🏼 An interesting thing: I can’t remember who told me about Juliet Nicolson’s The Book of Revelations: Women and Their Secrets from the 1950s to the Present Day – I think it was someone on Substack, so thank you if it was you. I listened to the audiobook and was hooked. Divided into three sections, ‘My Mother’s Generation’, ‘My Generation’ and ‘My Daughter’s Generation’, it’s a careful, thorough and ultimately revealing account of the pressures and restrictions women have been placed under and are still placed under in a male-dominated society: the details may change, but the effects remain the same. It’s a fascinating lens through which to look at class, too.

👉🏼 A thing that made me go ‘hmm’: Shopping for an eyebrow pencil the other day (stay with me) I was irritated to discover how hard it is to find a wooden one that you sharpen, rather than one encased in a plastic tube. I found one in the end (thank you, Rimmel) but it got me thinking about how hideously reliant on plastic the cosmetics industry is and how un-recyclable most products are, either because they’re made of mixed materials (eg mascara spoolies, bottle pumps, lipstick tubes), contain solvent residue (glass nail polish bottles), are made of black plastic (loads of brands have black packaging) or are so small they’re mechanically filtered out at the recycling centre and sent for incineration or landfill (lip balm tubes, mini pots, lids). Both Boots and Superdrug have take-back schemes which send items for manual processing; look for the cardboard bins in shops. However, they ask that the packaging is clean and empty, which with hydrophobic products like foundation can be damn-near impossible to achieve. I don’t know what the answer is, but I increasingly feel when I’m buying make-up that I’m going ‘La la la’ and sticking my fingers in my ears, which I don’t like.

Anyway, back to nice and interesting things: the Suffolk artist Spadge Hopkins has been hard at work making a series of limited-edition steel bird sculptures based on the species mentioned in my novel All Among the Barley, from the nightingale (above) to the peewit (aka lapwing), the landrail (aka corncrake), dorhawk (aka nightjar), swift, yellowhammer, fieldfare and long-tailed tit. The sculptures are on sale through Suffolk Wildlife Trust and at Orford Quay from 15^th to 21^st June, Snape Maltings (Quay Gallery), 30^th July to 5^th August and at the Festival of Nature launch at Seckford Theatre on Sunday 20^th September. Best of all, £50 from each sculpture will go towards Suffolk Wildlife Trust’s Mission 2030 campaign to bring nature back to Suffolk. Find out more, and order a sculpture, here.

Do you remember Bookbanks, the brilliant new charity I wrote about a few months ago which is working to get free books into food banks? It’s been going from strength to strength, powered by the impressive energies of writer Emily Rhodes. Now the team are opening a new branch in Ipswich, and they need more local volunteers. Could that be you? If so, apply here. And if you want to help them reach their goal of 30 bookbanks giving out books to low-income families by 2030, you can donate here.

That’s it for the first, free part of this issue of Witness Marks; below the paywall you’ll find the Village News, including SNAKE PERIL, CAKE MYSTERY, NATIONAL GARDENS SCHEME CORPSE CONTROVERSY and MAN IN FLAT CAP AND TRANSITIONS LENSES RIDES MINIATURE STEAM ENGINE ON CHILLY DAY (short film).

If you’d like to subscribe but £3.50 feels like a stretch, reply to this email (if you’re reading this in your inbox) or send me a private message on the Substack website. No questions asked.

If you don’t want to subscribe but you’d still like to support my various endeavours, you can leave me a tip by going here; or you can donate to support the free Encounter app by going here.

Thank you so much, either way!

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I’m in the absolute thick of it at the moment, turning up at bookshop after bookshop and hoping for a chair rather than a stool, and then talking my head off about The Given World. If I’m honest, it’s all getting a bit ‘If it’s Thursday, this must be Ardleton’ (or Wefford, or Lodeshill). Obviously I’ve caught a cold.

Literary events – particularly at bookshops – are a vital part of the publishing ecosystem. They can drive sales and help create momentum for a book in the early days and weeks after publication, and when a book is seen to have momentum it encourages orders from other bookshops, and creates a tailwind. Signings create income for bricks-and-mortar bookshops, which remain the absolute heart of the book world: events hopefully bring new customers in through their doors. And they give writers a precious opportunity to meet their readers in a friendly environment, to tell them about the thing they’ve been working on for so long, and to find out how it’s being received. If you have a local indie bookshop do keep an eye on their events calendar and show up in support if you can. If there’s an author whose work you love, check their socials and book a ticket to hear them if they’ll be appearing anywhere near you. And if you’re at a festival over the summer, and there’s a literary tent, stick your head in. People who go to book events (not to mention the absolute heroes who run them) are the best people in the world.

Whether they’re held at a bookshop or a library, in a tent at a music festival or on a stage at a literary one, literary events have (like anything else) their own unique rhythm and character, something that becomes very apparent when you’re doing several in a row. But most people will only go to one in a blue moon, which means you might well turn up and not really know what’s going on.

To that end, may I present:

A (mostly lighthearted) guide to book events!

So. The most common format for a literary shindig is 40–45 minutes of either conversation between the author and an interviewer, or (if it’s non-fiction) the author presenting their book. That’s usually followed by 15–20 minutes of audience questions, and then a book signing. Some events are free; some are ticketed; some include a copy of the book in the ticket price. Bookshop events are usually in the evening. Sometimes there’s wine! Usually white, because of spillages, but occasionally red too. Crisps are not unknown. All very civilised.

The presentation/conversation bit often includes a reading by the author: short, if you’re lucky (three minutes is PLENTY, imo). I’m just going to be honest: not all authors should read their own work. And that’s all I’ll say on that subject 👀

Here are some useful things to know:

Sometimes the writer and the interviewer (if there is one) are given microphones, and sometimes they aren’t. If they don’t have mics, and your hearing isn’t the best, please do ask to sit at the front. Most writers aren’t trained actors and can’t project their voices (also, many of us are introverts who started off under the unfortunate misapprehension that the job of a writer was something you could do largely alone). Whatever you do, please don’t sit at the back and then shout CAN YOU SPEAK UP PLEASE DEAR at intervals. It’s rude.

When it’s time for audience questions, nobody wants to be first. There will be people in the audience with a burning desire to ask something, but will they put their hand up first? They absolutely will not. If you have a question, and you want to be helpful, ask it immediately, before silence chokes the room like dog’s fart on a hot day. The writer will be so grateful you will be able to see their shoulders drop by three inches.

But please, for the love of god, make it a relevant question and not a statement or an anecdote. It’s the thing every author and interviewer dreads: the audience member who’s been sitting on a hard chair for 45 minutes growing ever more impatient about those pesky people on stage just talking and talking, and them not getting a turn; and now, goddammit, they have the floor, and nobody’s going to stop them! Don’t be that person. Also – and I’m speaking from recent experience here – if your question needs prefacing with, ‘This may sound aggressive, but…’, have a little insight and sit yourself back down.

Finally, when it comes to heckling, you won’t be surprised to learn that book events are generally far too decorous. However, if you must heckle, MAKE IT FUNNY.

To the signing queue!

Firstly, it is TOTALLY FINE to bring from home your own copies of the author’s new book, or of older books of theirs (best not bring library copies, though). But please don’t stand in the bookshop with your phone out, ordering books from Amazon (and ideally, don’t do it when you get home). You’re in a bookshop which pays taxes and employs people, and those people have given up their evening to serve you wine in the sincere hopes that you’ll buy a book. From them.

Secondly, even if you know the author, when you get to the front of the queue, tell them your name*. As an author myself I can’t tell you how discombobulating it is to see so many faces you recognise, or which at least look familiar, but which are appearing out of context, one after the other after the other, while you’re in a state of quite some stress. Even if it feels unnecessary, saying, ‘Could you sign it to me – Lorraine?’ (or whatever your name is) is such a kindness, I can’t tell you. And if the author looks at you blankly, even if you’ve met before, please do forgive them. Even if they appear relaxed, internally they are most likely performing a very peculiar high-wire act for which they have not been trained. And if you present your book without telling them your name and they say, ‘And remind me, how do you spell it?’ they’re not asking you to spell it: they’re asking to be reminded what it is. Replying ‘Oh, the usual way’ is unforgiveably cruel.

* Obviously this doesn’t apply to life partners or best mates. But acquaintances, ex-colleagues, online friends, one-time neighbours etc? The rule applies.

While we’re on the subject of spelling: if your name is long or complex, has alternate versions or is spelled in a way that the writer may not be familiar with, do let them know before they wade in with a Sharpie. Personally, I abhor Sharpies for signings, partly because of show-through and partly because of their terrifying permanence; I now favour an erasable rollerball. I wish I had discovered such a thing prior to a literary festival in Ireland at which I royally fucked up several people’s beautiful Irish names due to being ignorant and flustered. Meadhbh, if you’re reading this, I’m so sorry. The fault was all mine.

If you don’t want the book dedicated to you, but to someone else, that’s absolutely OK. It’s also OK if you just want it signed and not dedicated. And if you’ve bought more than one of the author’s books, you are clearly one of the best humans, and they will be delighted to sign and/or dedicate them ALL.

While the author is scribbling, it is totally acceptable, and in fact absolutely lovely, to tell them what their books have meant to you, or why you like their writing, or what place their work has in your life. For me, hearing how a book has landed completes the circle: then and only then do I really understand what it is that I’ve made. Most of us toil away in solitude, writing for an imaginary reader who may never actually materialise, if we can’t complete the book. Meeting real ones is always really, really lovely, so don’t feel it’s gauche or ‘too much’ to tell them how you feel. Having said that, asking them for their home address or contact details is generally a bridge too far.

And don’t be offended if the author, their publicist or the bookseller gently moves the conversation along: it’s not a judgement on your interestingness, but simply well-mannered concern for the people waiting patiently behind you in the queue.

Sometimes – particularly at festivals – you might see an author sitting alone at a signing table with nobody in their queue. There are several reasons for this: often festivalgoers don’t want to carry books around, which is understandable, so nobody comes to buy one; sometimes – especially when an event features two authors – one simply attracts more attention than the other, who must nonetheless remain at the table; alternatively (and this has happened to me) one of them has simply run out of books to sign and sell, while the other author’s publicist organised a bigger stack. Whatever the reason, the result is an author signing no books and feeling like a Billy no-mates. A lovely thing to do is go and chat to them, just so they don’t feel so obviously and devastatingly alone. You could even offer to get them a drink!

That’s all I can think of for now, but do please let me know in the comments if you have questions about book events, memorable anecdotes or (ideally) scurrilous gossip about my fellow writers. And if you’d like to come and get a book signed, my next event is at Framlingham Library in Suffolk, on June 8th. Tickets here.

Thanks for reading!

The skies were cloudless and once we were up I watched the Isle of Wight slip away below us. The French coast appeared, we passed over busy Dieppe and then we were above the infinitesimal tesserae of the French countryside. The pilot came on the intercom to tell us to look out of the windows because a day as clear as this one was a rarity – not that I needed reminding. I was transfixed by the land below, the sinuous rivers, the accretions of towns, the dark forests, the gathering mountains, white-tipped in places – and then, as we began to descend, there was Florence with its red-tiled roofs, its towers, belvederes and cupolas and the grand dome of the Duomo at its heart. I have never had a clearer sense of passing over Europe. It was wonderful.

After a night in Florence I took a train heading north, into the foothills of the Apennines. I was there to visit my friend, the writer, teacher and gardener Fiona Melrose, who is setting up Mela Rosa, a writing retreat. I’ve admired Fiona since I read her Women’s Prize-longlisted debut Midwinter, set largely in Suffolk where I live now; since then she’s written two more novels, each one very different, revealing a creative versatility that (if I’m honest), I envy a great deal. During the last few years she’s also been hard at work teaching and mentoring, skills I completely lack. I wanted to find out more about her life in Italy and the place she is pouring all her considerable energies into.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, I fell in love with it.

The train stopped at Vicchio, a small market town set on a wide, flat and well-farmed floodplain surrounded by the grey watercolour shapes of the distant Apennines. The Mugello is an intermontane valley formed by alluvial deposits of the Sieve river, and it is astonishingly fertile, Vicchio’s busy weekly mercato full to bursting with fruit and vegetables, mountain herbs (including the fragrant Pebre di l'Appennino I brought home), truffles, honey, dried wild mushrooms and pecorino cheese.

From the table-flat floodplain the road rises by a dramatic 820 feet, first in a series of sinuous curves and then in 12 hairpin bends that had me holding my breath and tucking my elbows in in Fiona’s car. The slopes grew increasingly wooded around us as we wound our way up, ears popping, past stone-built farms and houses, fields, olive groves and terraces opening up here and there and sudden glimpses of mountain vistas between trees. I would discover that on some mornings a sheet of white mist would cloak the valley below, burning off only slowly as the sun rose.

I asked Fiona to tell me in her own words about the setting for her retreats, and the spirit in which she’ll be welcoming people to them:

Tell us about the house and land where Mela Rosa is set. What makes it such a special place to visit, and what changes are you making there?

The retreat centre is just 45 minutes north of Florence: 20-something acres of mixed agricultural and forest land in the Tuscan Apennines. The main house, Torre Roti – a medieval tower built of local stone – and the retreat teaching space are 800 years old. Just a couple of minutes’ walk away is a hotel where my guests will stay: Villa Campestri, a Renaissance villa and oleoteca, with a swimming pool and restaurant, surrounded by olive groves.

Tuscany is so much more than the few valleys we tend to think of as ‘Tuscan’. Tuscany is also forested, has a long wild shoreline and an archipelago of islands. This is deep Italy, Italia profonda – what you might call ‘authentic Italy’ in marketing parlance.

So far, I have merged three fields to create an orchard where I have planted over 70 heritage fruit trees. Some cultivars are Roman, and also include the retreat’s namesake apple, Mela rosa. Over time I will convert this into an agro-forestry food system. As much as possible I feed myself and visitors from the orto (kitchen garden).

Portions of the land are recovering from overgrazing, aggressive clearing and pesticides; to help them back to health I’m using a mixture of careful seeding and managed abandon. There is a river, and several traditional stone-walled agricultural terraces. They are centuries old, and offer amazing shady recesses during the bleaching heat.

There are endless (good natured) arguments with the local menfolk who cull every last blade of grass and shrub before it has produced a berry or flower. These same men complain about the lack of fireflies. I have constellations of these in June. Also wild boar, deer, foxes, badgers, porcupines, martens and hedgehogs. We even have wolves, further up the mountain!

What is a writing retreat and what can it offer? What’s your approach to creating these spaces for people?

Retreat is a return to the known place inside the writer where creativity is possible. It’s about time and space to read and write, of course, but is also an invitation to think differently. I offer the practical support a writer needs to do that, as well as a scaffold of mentorship that goes beyond the time they spend here.

Many writers can unfold plot-points along a timeline and write a solid sentence (and so can AI). Very few writers actually have something to say. This is true across genres. And yet that’s what readers crave: meaning, connection, resonance. That is what survives.

Retreats here offer a kind of rewilding of the creative, feeling self. There are more than enough courses and workshops that tell someone ‘how to write’. What both I and my teaching partners work towards is to set writers up for a life’s work: to engender a way of being in the world, as opposed to bashing off a ‘how to write a book’ checklist.

Unfashionably, I believe that you either are a writer or you aren’t. I think writing courses sell the idea that if you just spend enough money and do one course after another, anyone can write a novel. I don’t believe that. If you are a writer, it is a way of being, in a very elemental way. Having said that, we are fast losing access to all the conditions that make that way of being possible. There is too much noise: 10-point plans and three easy hacks. The fundamentals behind this kind of content are absolutely necessary. But it’s exhausting. Instead, a retreat initiates the kind of creative archeology that can help writers return to that identity.

Writers already know how to write. But many have lost their confidence because of the hustle that tells them they don’t. Retreats here are a world away from the commerce of publishing. There is a time place for that. In the mean time it should be all about the work. Deep work: a story, voice and perspective that sings; radical attention; a solid draft; sentences that vibrate on the page; a profound nourishment for a life’s work. And generous, active community, ease, gorgeous food, sun-basking, fire-gazing, meadow flowers, candles, fireflies. Beauty.

If all this has you longing for some time in Tuscany you can book your place at Mela Rosa by going here: retreats for 2026 include a week-long intensive novel incubator, and Between The Lines, a writing and attention retreat with Julia Bell. The maximum group size is just eight, and it’s also possible to book a retreat exclusively for your own group. You can find Fiona on Substack here, and follow Mela Rosa on Instagram here.

Me being me, I’m most looking forward to going back and finding out more about the wolves and wild boar that Fiona shares the mountain with. I would like to glimpse a beech marten and a porcupine – oh! and a firefly! – and find out more about the incredibly diverse suite of plants and flowers growing wild on the land around the old stone tower. I want to watch the kitchen-garden develop, and see the newly planted fruit trees grow; in fact, there’s so much I want to see that I’ll need to be strict next time I go there, and make sure that I actually sit down and write!

For now, I commend this magical place to you. It really is something else.

I’ll be back with a proper edition of Witness Marks on June 15th. Until then, do make sure you enjoy these late spring weeks as they turn into early summer. And thanks for reading!

This is just a short message to let you know that it’s publication day for The Given World today. I’ve been living with the Welm Valley, Lower Eodham and its many and varied inhabitants for so many years now, and it feels very strange (though very necessary) to let the world I’ve created go out into the real world at last, and find itself a home.

You can buy The Given World from all the usual places, though I would encourage you to visit your local bricks-and-mortar independent bookshop if you can; many of them will have signed copies in stock, too. You can also order it from Bookshop.org, which supports indies, or you might want to buy the audiobook instead, which is read by the brilliant Alex Jennings and is on Audible, Google Play, AND is included free with Spotify Premium. And did you know that authors get paid when you borrow books from libraries? So many choices!

There’s a short extract of the book on the wonderful Caught By The River website, where it is the Book of the Month for May. You can find the Guardian’s review here, and an archived (non-paywalled) version of the FT’s here. There’s an interview with me in The Observer here.

I talked about the books I loved as a child, and the state of my TBR pile, in Mathew Lyons’ The Broken Compass Substack. You can find that here. And my friend Josie asked me three excellent questions for her Substack What Is Here?, which you can find, well, here. I wrote a piece about my funny little cottage for Harper’s Bazaar, which isn’t online but I can show you, below.

I’ve got a lot of events coming up, and I’d be delighted to see you at any of them. We are in the process of adding a couple more dates, but please accept my apologies if I’m not currently scheduled to visit your area. As a very anxious driver I’m doing all the travel by train, which from Suffolk mostly means going in to London (two hours) and then back out again from there: it’s fun, but a bit gruelling (especially when there are delays). Plus, it might be that no bookshops in your area have invited me!

Thank you so much for all your support here on Substack, and in the real word beyond this newsletter. I’m so lucky to have found people who get what I’m trying to do, and who are willing to cheer me on. You’re all such wonders, and I’m so grateful.

With love,

Hi. How are you doing?

Last month I said there wouldn’t be a newsletter in May – yet here we are! Writing that was a way of taking the pressure off myself in the run-up to the publication of The Given World, but secretly I was hoping there would be enough time between all the other things I’m supposed to be doing to put something together. And there was!

Welcome to the May edition of Witness Marks. If you’re new here and would like a quick tour of the village (and the newsletter), start by reading this post here.

Witness Marks goes out on or around the 15th of each month; in between times you can find me chatting away in Substack Notes. The first part is free, while the second part, the Village News, sits below a paywall. A subscription to that costs £3.50 a month if you pay via Substack Desktop (Apple add a bit on top if you pay via the app). Subscribers can also access all the back issues of Witness Marks, AND they can listen to me read out and discuss my first novel, Clay.

I wasn’t expecting any reviews of The Given World until the weekend after publication on May 14th, or at the earliest, the weekend before. But on May 5th the first one appeared in The Guardian, by the writer and academic Alexandra Harris whose book The Rising Down I read last year and absolutely loved. I’d have missed it altogether, only someone on Instagram mentioned it: instantly I was flooded with adrenaline, my heart in my throat, my spine rigid. I almost couldn’t bear to read it at all.

“The Given World follows the inhabitants of one village in a river valley, a place ‘as old as anywhere’, for six months between the equinoxes of a year. The time is now, or an imminent future when the seasons seem to have ‘ceased their metronome’. At first, the central figure appears to be Clare, who knows each flagstone of the ancient priory that has been the centre of her life. The six months are her dying time, from diagnosis to last thoughts. But, in a way that pays tribute to the solitary Clare’s understanding of interconnectedness, the novel goes out from the priory to trace a web of lives. In the breezeblock bungalow next door, a desperate farmer tunes in at dawn to American evangelists on the radio. Like Saj the postman, we call at addresses where literary fiction rarely bothers to ring the bell.”

It is a very unsettling experience to expose your actual soul over 70,000 words and have it rated in the national press (even if it gets a good score). But bloody hell, what a review: I’m not sure I’ve ever had someone get what I’m trying to do in the way that Harris has, and I feel so grateful for it.

A couple of days later the FT published their review, which I’m also very pleased with. But now to find out how it lands with the people who matter most: its readers. You!

May has become, as I’ve got older, by far my favourite month of the year. It truly takes my breath away, the surging forward, the green growth, the feeling of hope and possibility and all the much-missed and now returning birds. There’s a sense of relief at life doing its miraculous thing once more, but these days the joy comes with an undertow of almost exquisite sadness. How many more springs will I see – or will there be?

There’s no answer to that, of course, except to go out and wade around in it, to drink in its smells and sounds and take in every detail, from the way the setting sun lights a stand of cow parsley to the unsettling scent of hawthorn, and from the sound of the first swifts screaming in overhead to the good feeling of warm spring sun on your skin. Sometimes it’s almost unbearable. Sometimes I can’t believe that I get to be alive and to witness the world unfolding in all its damaged beauty once again.

Lines from Elizabeth Jennings’ tender, grief-struck poem ‘Into The Hour’ come to me often at this time of year:

The apple-blossom's handsome on the bough
And paradise spreads round. I touch its grass.
I want to celebrate but don't know how.

After I’d read the Guardian review I felt a bit overwhelmed, so I did what I usually do at such times and took myself off outdoors. What I wanted was not so much to be walking but to be enclosed somewhere green and rich in life and private, somewhere that didn’t care about me, so that for a little while I could feel myself disappear.

I made for the Fairy Wood, a little copse surrounded by fields that has a narrow, winding path through it (hence the name the village children have given it) – and once under its canopy I remembered that at one of its margins lies a pond. As it’s not visible from the right of way I’d forgotten all about it – but I knew that it was exactly where I wanted to be.

I sat on its sloping banks, almost completely hidden by foliage, and waited until everything close by had forgotten I was there. The wren which had sounded the alarm at my arrival ceased its loud ticking and sang again. A pair of mallards splashed down and swam about. I heard, but didn’t see, a shrew squeaking in soprano as it dashed about in the leaf litter on a mad, unceasing quest for food. The sun sparkled on the water, the ducks spoke quietly to one another. Nothing happened. It was wonderful.

At the end of April I wrote a piece for The Times about the need to change the way we feed the birds. People got very exercised about it in the comments, with one man believing (incorrectly) that the blackbirds he feeds via a bird table would actually die if he stopped.

The thing is, I can understand people’s resistance: we don’t only feed the birds for their benefit, but for ours – though that’s something many of us would struggle to admit. Growing plants from which garden birds can forage naturally doesn’t create such a direct reward pathway between our actions and their resulting behaviour, a pathway which makes us feel generous and beneficent and, well, a little bit godlike. Yet feeders crowded with birds not only spread disease but gather them helpfully together for predators; is our viewing pleasure really more important than the risk to their lives? It’s an obvious ‘no’ from me, but then I think of the solace my dear old dad took from his bird table at the end of his life, and I wince.

Every time I post something on Instagram and couple it with music from The Stubborn Light of Things podcast I get messages from people in raptures about it – and rightly so. I thought I’d remind you that you can buy the soundtrack via Peter Rogers’ Bandcamp page and keep it forever, for just £7. You can also download the entire Stubborn Light podcast from the same place and pay whatever you like for it – or nothing, if you prefer. It was a gift to the world back then, and remains so.

Three things that aren’t on screens

Each month I collect together three things that have interested me, for good or ill, and which can be found in the world beyond your phone or laptop:

👉🏼 A nice thing: The Adventures of Portly the Otter: Untold Tales from The Wind in the Willows is a delightful new book from the brilliant M. G. Leonard, children’s nature writer par excellence, and the illustrator Polly Dunbar. Portly is mentioned in TWintW, but here Leonard makes him her main character: a curious little otter who is (at first) frightened of water. Leonard is a fantastic storyteller and I am (obviously) all for updating classic children’s books in this way. The indie bookshop edition has sprayed page edges, which I am insanely envious of. Order a copy here.

As a side note, otters are, in fact, born not knowing how to swim, and must be taught – perhaps evidence that their aquatic lifestyle is relatively new, evolutionarily speaking. Water voles are thought to have taken to rivers and streams even more recently, and lack the adaptations otters have, such as webbed paws.

👉🏼 An interesting thing: Does a film at the cinema count as ‘not on a screen’? I’ve decided (somewhat idiosyncratically) that it doesn’t because it’s a real-world outing to experience some culture, not two hours spent scrolling the interwebs. I went to see Mark Jenkin’s new film Rose of Nevada, a time-slipping marine mystery set, as all his films so far have been, in coastal Cornwall. Made with the assistance of film students, shot on colour 16mm, developed by hand and with the dialogue and ambient sound dubbed on afterwards, it is odd, dreamlike and challenging – in a very good way. There’s a genuinely scary scene of a near-disaster at sea that had me leaning forward tensely in my seat: how it was shot using a literal clockwork camera (a Bolex) is anyone’s guess. Guardian review here.

👉🏼 A thing that made me go ‘hmm’: the inexorable rise of men’s and women’s ‘whole body’ deodorant, ie nasty chemical fragrance for your Parts. I mean: could we just not? Just once, and particularly for the sake of the younger crowd, could we collectively decide: you know what, we’re all fine as we are, without your ‘helpful’ new product: this time we’re actually not going to extend the range of bodily things we need to fix/fear/feel paranoid about/be forced to take a position on.

No? Oh.

Anyway, that’s it for the first, free part of this issue of Witness Marks; below the paywall you’ll find the Village News, including: SILLY COW, SLOW DUCKS, GOD CAKES and an extremely satisfying HAM SCANDAL. If you’d like to subscribe but £3.50 feels like a stretch, reply to this email (if you’re reading this in your inbox) or send me a private message on the Substack website. No questions asked.

If you don’t want to subscribe but you’d still like to support my various endeavours, you can leave me a tip by going here. Thank you!

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Hi. How are you doing?

I meant to write this on Friday but I was overwhelmed by spring. I heard my first cuckoo of the summer, gaped at brand new oak leaves, and had to wade, laughing, through a short…

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Hi, how are you doing?

I have somewhat reluctantly returned from the foothills of the Tuscan Apennines where I went to stay with my friend Fiona Melrose, who is hard at work setting up the most breathtaking creative retreat. There’ll be more on that in a separate post; for now, just picture blue mountains, wildflowers, the rushing sound of a river, and birdsong everywhere.

Welcome to the April edition of Witness Marks. If you’re new here and would like a quick tour of the village (and the newsletter), start by reading this post here.

This newsletter usually goes out on or around the 15th of each month; in between times you can find me chatting away in Substack Notes. The first part is free, while the second part, the Village News, sits below a paywall. A subscription to that costs £3.50 a month if you pay via Substack Desktop (Apple add a bit on top if you pay via the app); subscribers can also access all the back issues of Witness Marks, AND they can listen to me read out and discuss my first novel, Clay.

There are worse things to come back from Tuscany to than an English April. In Suffolk the bluebells, which were just beginning to appear before I left, are now in flower, and the little woods and copses where they grow are footed in an ultraviolet haze; when the breeze drops and the sun warms them, the perfume is delicate but very beautiful. The wild garlic is coming out too, and with it the yellow archangel, and the margins of many of our village lanes are constellated with greater stitchwort. The roadside daffs may be fading, but we no longer need them: like the boosters that fall away from a rocket, their job of powering us into spring is done, and we have our own momentum now.

My friend in the next village heard her first nightingale of the year while I was in Italy, and I hope this week to hear mine. Each year there are four or five pairs at a Woodland Trust site near me, and usually we’ll hear one or two more in open countryside. The males arrive first and choose a good location, usually – depending on its condition, and whether he has competition – close to wherever he bred the previous year. Straight away he begins his loud and long nocturnal recitals to attract the attention of females flying in: a tiny, dun bird, black eyes wide in the darkness, singing love down from the sky.

Once he has found a mate the night-time singing all but stops, bar dawn and dusk; you will hear them during the daytime sending out short volleys of song, but without a practiced ear it can be hard to disentangle, at this time of year, from all the other birdsong going on. So to hear a male in full voice it’s good to go at night, when nothing else is singing, and early in the season, before they have all paired up.

Not all do, of course; one year, when I lived in another village, a nightingale sang all summer from a thicket very close to the A12. Although it was wonderful to hear him – and I could, from my bedroom – it was heartbreaking to know he hadn’t found a partner and that in all likelihood the sound of the traffic had drowned him out.

Nightingales are vulnerable in so many ways. They’re already at the northern edge of their breeding range here, so they’ve always been more concentrated in southern counties, but that range has been contracting and their numbers falling for decades and it’s thought that only around 5,500 pairs breed on these islands now. They nest very close to the ground and need thick scrub to protect them: blackthorn is good, or banks of bramble, or the dense understory that can form in woods. But we’ve been tidying up what’s dismissively termed ‘scrub’, and a barely controlled deer explosion has done the rest, removing the kind of thickety fastnesses nightingales need. And we allow our dogs to go crashing about in the undergrowth (I’ve been guilty of this) which makes fewer and fewer places feel safe for them to nest.

And as their song fades we hear instead the loudening hum of a growing catastrophe: for nightingales are insectivores and insect numbers are crashing, with study after study showing terrifying declines. We could lose our few remaining night-time singers for good, and it might not be long now. Little sacrifices to human indifference: our own, all but literal, canaries in the mine.

In this month’s book news, I have been asked to mention once more the rather nice fact that if you order your copy of The Given World from Mr B’s Emporium in Bath you get a free and exclusive A5 print of the cover artwork. Simply go here and select ‘signed edition’ when you order.

You can also pre-order copies from the wonderful Bookseller Crow in South London, which will be hosting a conversation between Substack’s own Lev Parikian and yours truly on publication day, May 14th. Tickets here: do come, it’ll be lovely.

Extremely excitingly, the brilliant Alex Jennings CBE has recorded the audiobook of The Given World. I am beyond excited about this, as he is one of my very favourite actors – have you listened to his recording of Waterland by Graham Swift? It is OFF THE CHARTS. I’ve heard a sample of the prologue and it gave me full-body chills. If you’re an audiobook person do look out for it.

There’ll be further news soon of my various upcoming events and signings, so keep an eye on your inbox if you’d like to say hello.

A little reminder, above, of why you might want to download the free app I’ve made to help you connect to nature, assuming you’re in Britain or Ireland (apologies if not). I’m very proud of Encounter, and you would be extremely welcome on board. The Apple version is here; the Android version is here.

I was very pleased to be asked back to judge the 2026 Tune Into Nature Music Prize. It’s always so interesting to listen to young musicians’ differing interpretations of the brief and to discuss what they’ve made with the other judges. Our winner this year was Will Pearce with a deceptively simple and very catchy song about a two-spot ladybird. “Ecology is amazing and bugs are really cool,” says Will. “My goal is to communicate this through odd but accessible music.”

You can learn more about all the shortlisted artists, and listen to their entries, here.

Three things that aren’t on screens

Each month I collect together three things that have interested me, for good or ill, and which can be found in the world beyond your phone or laptop:

👉🏼 A nice thing: The dawn chorus is building towards its extraordinary climax as more and more of our summer visitors return. Blackcaps and willow warblers are back, and the nightingales are arriving; it won’t be long, I hope, until I hear my first whitethroat and cuckoo. Wherever you live, it’s worth getting up early at least once between now and midsummer: honestly, you won’t regret it. Set an alarm so you can be somewhere green half an hour before sunrise, whether that’s your garden or a local park. Hear it build from the first tentative notes to a swell of song from all directions, and then, if you want, you can always go back to bed.

👉🏼 An interesting thing: Slightly Foxed is a wonderful literary quarterly that focuses on lost or forgotten books from literary fiction to thrillers, biographies to children’s titles. The articles aren’t stuffy or over-intellectualised, they’re warm and enthusiastic, written by book lovers for fellow book lovers. I can’t tell you how many gems I’ve discovered via the cream pages of Slightly Foxed, including Adrian Bell’s Corduroy, which set me on the path to writing All Among the Barley, and Christopher Neve’s Unquiet Landscape, a line from which forms one of the epigraphs of my new book, The Given World. The magazines are also beautifully produced and make lovely gifts.

👉🏼 A thing that made me go ‘hmm’: I went to see Teeth n’ Smiles at the Duke of York’s Theatre, a revival of a David Hare play starring Rebecca Lucy Taylor, aka Self Esteem. She was excellent: convincing and charismatic. The music was great, too. But the play itself – well, it just seemed to meander about. No standing ovation, which – given Self Esteem’s devoted fanbase and the readiness of crowds these days to applaud almost anything – spoke volumes. Still, I do love to go and see a play, so I enjoyed it.

That’s it for the first, free part of this issue of Witness Marks; below the paywall you’ll find the Village News, including TALENT SHOW CONTROVERSY, PHEASANT HOOLIGAN, MORRIS MYSTERY, SLOW BONGS and UNEXPECTED USE FOR A BANANA. If you’d like to subscribe but £3.50 feels like a stretch, reply to this email (if you’re reading this in your inbox) or send me a private message on the Substack website – no questions asked.

If you don’t want to subscribe but you’d still like to support my various endeavours, you can leave me a tip via the button below.

Tip jar

Finally, there won’t be a proper edition of Witness Marks next month. My novel The Given World is being published on May 14th and I’ll be spending much of the month on trains, travelling around to signings, readings and events. However, I will send out an update letting you know where I’ll be so you can come and say hello; and there might be some other bits and pieces of news, too. Stay tuned – and enjoy spring!

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Hi, how are you doing?

Welcome to the March edition of Witness Marks. If you’re new here and would like a quick tour of the village (and the newsletter), start by reading this post here.

Witness Marks goes out on or around the 15th of each month. The first part is free, while the second part, the Village News, sits below a paywall. A subscription costs £3.50 a month if you pay via Substack Desktop (Apple add a bit on top if you pay via the app); subscribers can also access all the back issues of Witness Marks, AND they can listen to me read out and discuss my first novel, Clay. But if £3.50 feels like a stretch, reply to this email (if you’re reading this in your inbox) or send me a private message on the Substack website. No questions asked.

A tug-of-war has been taking place between the armies of winter and the forces of spring. A couple of warm, sunny days brought the first brimstone butterflies out of hibernation and had me switching my oil-filled radiator off; then came a run of grey, dull days and some gusty winds that moaned and whined around the eaves of my cottage, after which the temperatures fell and I got under my heated blanket again. But winter won’t return, however much it feels like it: white cherry plum petals speckle the village lanes, and along the farmland hedgerows the blackthorn is coming into bloom. It’s light when I wake, the hawthorns are frilled with green leaf buds and – best of all – our local chiffchaffs are back.

You might already know all about chiffchaffs, in which case you can skip this bit. But if you don’t, let me introduce you, for this is a bird of two halves: utterly boring by at three separate metrics, completely and utterly wonderful by one. They’re the consummate LBJ, or ‘little brown job’ – well, a grubby olive green, technically, but visually they’re totally unremarkable, just really nothingy to look at – which barely matters anyway as they are usually quite difficult to see, lurking about in trees and more or less indistinguishable from a leaf.

Chiffchaffs are also as common as muck, and they’re not even declining: they can’t claim the dubious glamour of rarity, hyper-localisation, or being in peril. And finally, their song is among the most boring of the entire avian kingdom, a regular, mindless DINK DINK DINK DINK DINK DINK DINK: the original monkey with a miniature cymbal. No melody, no variation, no inflection; on and on it goes, right across the UK (for they are nothing if not democratic in their distribution): in urban parks, suburban gardens, woodland and open countryside, all summer long.

But that’s where things start to get magical, because that repeated chirp is the soundtrack only to the warmer months. Like swifts, swallows, whitethroats, cuckoos and many other species, chiffchaffs bugger off again after they’ve bred here, disappearing in late summer and heading off for warmer climes where there are more bugs for them to eat. But of all our many summer visitors, they’re pretty much the first ones to return (or the first that most of us will notice, anyway), arriving here in mid-March, just as the world starts really waking up after winter – from which moment that familiar dink dink dink can be heard again. They’re heralds of good weather, little shouty promisers of spring: the advance guard of a huge wave of migratory birds that move around the globe to follow blooms of insects so they can breed where there’s enough food to eat to raise their chicks.

By August we may well be sick of them mindlessly dinking, but in March, when we’re all tired of winter and longing for sunshine, the sound of a male setting up shop in a copse of trees – well, it’s like a sudden dazzle of sunshine, or a shot of vitamin C. So this year, listen out for chiffchaffs and note down the date you first hear one. And then, next March, you can keep an eye on the forecast for a favourable wind direction, and get ready to welcome them back for the summer again.

As you can see, I’m still laboriously hand-signing tip-ins for special editions of The Given World for indie bookshops: title pages that will then be bound into the finished hardbacks, ready to go on sale. I decided to do them in small chunks so that my signature on the later ones doesn’t go bananas, which I think is a good move although it does make progress through the vast stack feel incredibly slow. Various indies will be stocking the signed copies, but if you order from Mr B’s in Bath you can opt to receive an exclusive art print, too. The Given World will be published on May 14. One of the title pages – just one – has a little drawing as well as signature on it.

It was my turn for the Nature Notebook in The Times yesterday. I wrote about what goes on along a farmland hedge at night, from pheasants letting off the exploding alarm clocks of their go-to-bed calls to browsing deer, badgers digging latrines, toads hunting slugs and a barn owl drifting along before dawn and dropping down silently on its third and final field vole of the night; and I warned about the danger to ground-nesting birds of dogs running about in open countryside, something I wish I’d understood better when Scout was still with us (I mistakenly thought that as long as she wasn’t chasing birds she was doing no harm). You can find it here.

For the Guardian I reviewed Daffodil Days by Helen Bain, a technically ambitious and conceptually ballsy novel about the final months of Ted Hughes’ and Sylvia Plath’s marriage. I took issue with the way it’s structured, which I think makes unnecessary work for the reader, but other than that I thought it was an astonishing achievement. If you’re interested in the book you can read about Bain’s research trip to North Tawton in Devon, where the couple lived for 15 months, here.

I’m looking forward to speaking at Watching Narrowly: a Natural History Book Day at Gilbert White’s house, The Wakes in Selborne, next weekend. Tickets are £50 for the whole day or £15 for individual events. You can book yours here.

I very much enjoyed being a guest on James Kindred’s Big Bad Beautiful Brains podcast, out now. We talked about the relationship between complex trauma and neurodiversity, developmental topographical disorientation (the inability to form cognitive maps), creativity, very loud house music and lots more. You can listen here.

Finally for this month, an update on the Encounter app. We have two guest contributors now: Substack’s own , covering the north of England, and Vanessa Wright, covering Scotland. We hope to add more contributors as time goes on, so we can make the app’s content increasingly local for our users.

I’m so proud of what we’re making, I can’t tell you: it seems so obvious to me that this app should exist. But we need to find a way to secure its future: if you can help with a monthly donation towards running costs I’d be so grateful. You can support Encounter by going here.

Three things that aren’t on screens

Each month I collect together three things that have interested me, for good or ill, and which can be found in the world beyond your phone or laptop:

👉🏼 A nice thing: Amy Jane Beer, whose book The Flow won the Wainwright Prize in 2023, has produced a magical and heartfelt children’s book about rivers, illustrated by Elin Manon (above). People think it’s easy to write books for kids, but I can say from experience that it very much isn’t. Moreover, lots of children’s books that have an environmental aspect fall into the trap of being either worthy or patronising – something A River Running Through You deftly manages to avoid. One for all the small people in your life.

👉🏼 An interesting thing: I really loved Les Bicknell’s exhibition, POWER, which has just come to the end of its run at Snape Maltings. He accepted what was potentially a poisoned chalice: to be Sizewell C’s artist in residence. This controversial project to build a new nuclear power station is causing anguish in my part of Suffolk as a vast building project gets underway, including the creation of new bypass roads, coach parks and other highly disruptive infrastructure. Views on the subject have become increasingly polarised and I’ve found myself unable to engage with either position, but Bicknell’s exhibition did what art does best: ask questions, suggest new angles, remain agile and mobile, and open up a subject rather than shutting it down. I took a few photos and posted them to Instagram here.

👉🏼 A thing that made me go ‘hmm’: something weird is happening to prepositions. It began with ‘excited for’, the wrongness of which (except in the rare case when you mean ‘on behalf of’) being a hill I will happily die on; but in the last few years it feels as though a general sense of instability has begun to permeate the entire prepositional field. I’ve started to collect examples of ‘preposition drift’, including ‘embarrassed of’, ‘curious as to’, ‘fascinated with’, ‘interested by’ and ‘nervous of’. Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just me? I’m conscious that I’m probably guilty of saying ‘different than’ and ‘bored of’, so I am not beyond reproach.

That’s it for the first, free part of this issue of Witness Marks; below the paywall you’ll find the Village News, including egg wars, a mislaid child and bin trauma. After last month’s crisis for Comedy Corner, will there be a new joke on the gate of the smallholding on the edge of the village? You’ll need to read on to find out.

If you don’t want to subscribe but you’d still like to support my various endeavours, you can leave me a tip by going here. Thank you!

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Just a quick note to say that the audio narration has now been restored on ‘A Strange Procession’, the last edition of Witness Marks. If you’d like to listen to me read it (instead of Substack’…

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Hi, how are you doing? I am, as I type this, liberally spattered with mud.

Welcome to a rainy February edition of Witness Marks. If you’re new here and would like a quick tour of the village (and the newsletter), start by reading this post here.

And in case you missed January’s free post about what really constitutes warm clothes (and other things) in the countryside, you can find it here:

Witness Marks goes out on or around the 15th of each month; in between times you can find me chatting away in Substack Notes. The first part is free, while the second part, the Village News, sits below a paywall. A subscription to that costs £3.50 a month if you pay via Substack Desktop (Apple add a bit on top if you pay via the app); subscribers can also access all the back issues of Witness Marks, AND they can listen to me read out and discuss my first novel, Clay. But if £3.50 feels like a stretch, reply to this email (if you’re reading this in your inbox), or send me a private message on the Substack website. No questions asked.

Having written a book about the joys of walking in the rain, I’m apparently no longer allowed to complain about it. But god, it’s been relentless, hasn’t it? Our fields are either thick with mud, waterlogged or underwater, the lanes are ‘clatty’ and full of hidden potholes, and the field drains, roadside ditches and dykes are running fast and high. My old cottage door is sticking on its wooden sill, I haven’t managed any gardening and the skies for much of the last few weeks have been grey, grey, grey.

It rained the night the dancers came, a thin, icy rain that drifted down from a fathomless and starless sky. Apart from the exterior lights of a pub, and the wavering white LEDs of the torches carried by locals and visitors, it was a cold and pitch-black January night: many – perhaps most? – of the smaller villages in East Anglia have no streetlights, something I have grown to love. Sixty or so people milled around at the crossroads, chatting, wrapped up in coats and scarves and hoods. It was difficult to recognise anyone, or even to tell men from women. There was a sense of anticipation, but also a faint nerviness: even those of us who knew what was coming couldn’t be quite sure of the form it would take. God help the stranger who stumbled across what was coming by mistake.

A dull, repeated drum beat; distant fires. Down the dark hill marched a strange procession, lit by lanterns and flaming torches: stony-faced men in antique costume, women shrouded in black with garlands of twigs and ivy on their heads. The crowd, now silent, parted to let them pass. They took up position, the women grouped silently around their instruments: melodions, recorders, drums, a tea-chest bass. The men stood in a rough half-circle facing outwards, hands behind their backs, outstaring the spectators. It was time for the dancing to begin.

Molly is a form of folk dance peculiar to East Anglia in which farm labourers – lacking employment in winter, when the land could not be worked – would dance in rural villages in exchange for money. Little is known about its original form, and what we have now is based partly on the scant record, the rest drawn from speculation and imagination. ‘Molly’ was once a word for a man who dressed as a woman, and there is always an element of cross-dressing to it; the sense of disguise also extends to facial features, which may once have been blackened with soot and are now often painted grey or dark green. As well as the bearded, dress-wearing Molly there are other obscure roles that lend the spectacle a note of chaos and disorder not unlike the strange symbols that can arise in dreams: a ‘whiffler', a ‘broom man’ and (appropriately enough) an ‘umbrella man’, though he could not keep anyone dry.

The dances themselves are heavy, rhythmic, deliberately ungraceful: this is not Morris, with its bells and whistles and waving handkerchiefs. The dancers’ hobnailed (or blakey-shod) boots strike the ground hard; the ‘box-man’ roams the crowd demanding money and may menace you if you haven’t come prepared. And the strangest thing of all is this: you stand there under the flaming torches, suffering the changeless rain, and you know that by day these men probably work in IT and take their kids to the football at weekends; you know that the black-clad, ivy-crowned women are local artists, or serve on the parish council; you know that the money that’s collected goes to charity and not to buy ale for ploughmen – and yet for an hour or so, as the dancers stamp and the music skirls, it doesn’t feel like that. It doesn’t feel like that at all.

Here’s a nice thing to kick off the news section with: Mr B’s Emporium are taking pre-orders for my new novel, The Given World, which comes out on May 14 – and if you order from them you’ll also receive a free, exclusive, A4 art print. If you think you might want to read The Given World when it’s published, this would be a good place to order your copy from. You’ll also be supporting a bricks-and-mortar indie bookshop: the Emporium is in Bath, and also offers a lovely subscription service.

On March 21st (the spring equinox!) I’ll be speaking at Watching Narrowly: Natural History Book Day at The Wakes, Gilbert White’s house and gardens in Selborne, Hampshire. Most readers of this newsletter will already know how much Parson White means to me and how important he’s been to my writing, which makes this event a really special one for me. Best of all, there’ll be lots of other brilliant writers and naturalists there too, including Nicola Chester and Tristan Gooley. Tickets are £50 for a full day’s programme of events, plus access to the house and garden. I think it’s going to be magical.

I wrote for The Times about our local river bursting its banks (as it often does in winter), and about trying and failing to see a congregation of roosting kites. You can read my piece here: it’s sometimes paywalled, sometimes not; or it is for some people and not others. Honestly, god knows.

And for the Guardian I reviewed poet Rebecca Parry’s dazzling puzzle-box of a debut novel, May We Feed The King. You can find that here.

Three things that aren’t on screens

Each month I collect together three things that have interested me, for good or ill, and which can be found in the world beyond your phone or laptop:

👉🏼 A nice thing: Obviously, £6.95 is a deeply offensive amount to ask for a chocolate bar, but having been given some of what’s basically posh crack for my birthday I may now find it hard to go back to my usual Waitrose 49%. Fatso sell the most amazing dark chocolate in chunky bars, with flavours including Morn’n Glory (don’t love the contraction) which is cornflakes, toast and marmalade (!), and Nan’s Stash, which is peanuts, toffee and digestive biscuits (!!)

Support my newly ruinous chocolate habit

👉🏼 An interesting thing: The Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life is a farm in the Catskills where people go to read and talk and think together. You don’t get a certificate, you don’t get grades: it’s not about achievement or prestige, it’s about depth, meaning and purpose. It sounds like utter heaven to me. The closest we have here is the wonderful Gladstone’s Library in Wales, where I’ve stayed several times (including as a writer-in-residence), but the Matthew Strother Center is more structured in what they offer. Applications for three fully funded, week-long retreats in June close on February 22. If accepted, you’d just need to cover your travel.

👉🏼 A thing that made me go ‘hmm’: Cambridge Botanic Gardens is using AI to allow visitors to have “conversations” with plants in the Glasshouse. Per the blurb, “Talking Plants invites you to take part in a live experiment exploring how artificial intelligence can help us connect more deeply with the plant kingdom.” Per me (after screaming into a cushion in several registers): IT REALLY CAN’T, because a) learning ≠ connection and b) you can’t connect with a plant via a chatbot because PLANTS AREN’T CHATBOTS and CHATBOTS AREN’T BEINGS OF ANY KIND. I find this idea so utterly wrongheaded it’s given me a migraine.

That’s it for the first, free part of this issue of Witness Marks; below the paywall you’ll find the Village News, including poo trauma, eldritch scarecrow, Boney the local scoundrel and an unexpected sinkhole – all for just £3.50! A bargain, if you ask me.

If you don’t want to subscribe but you’d still like to support my various endeavours, you can leave me a tip by going here. Thank you – and see you next month!

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Hi, how are you doing?

Welcome to the January edition of Witness Marks. If you’re new here and would like a tour of the village (and the newsletter), start with this post here. And if you haven’t yet got round to reading last week’s post about what really constitutes warm clothes in the countryside (and a proper torch, and several other things) you can catch up via the link below; it’s free, but will auto-paywall on February 8th. It’s proven to be a really popular one!

Witness Marks goes out on or around the 15th of each month; in between times you can find me chatting away in Substack Notes. The first part is always free, while the second part, the Village News, sits below a paywall. A subscription to that costs £3.50 a month if you pay via Substack Desktop (Apple add a bit on top if you pay via the app). If that feels like a stretch, reply to this email, or send me a private message on the Substack website. No questions asked.

We’ve had some proper winter weather, and I could not be more pleased. This despite the soaring heating bill, the cost of extra firewood, the days spent working under a heated blanket on the sofa because the study costs £8 a day to heat and without a radiator on remains at a stubborn 8 degrees C; despite the chore of hoovering condensation every morning from single-glazed, metal-framed cottage windows or, occasionally, waiting for the ice on the inside of the panes to thaw.

Our narrow village lanes remain ungritted through frost and snow, unless one of my neighbours flings some salt around themselves, so getting the car to the relative safety of the B-road has meant rolling it slowly, cautiously, in low gear. As an anxious driver I’m not a huge fan of this (I do know to steer into a skid, but tell that to my reflexes) so I ordered a big Sainsbury’s shop to be delivered by their far more confident driver, and have largely been hunkering down and staying put.

And I am glad: glad that the bastard mosquito which bit me five times on the calf in December, for god’s sake, will now, rightly, be dead; glad that the arable, livestock and garden pests, parasites and weeds which should be killed off by winter won’t make it to spring and multiply out of hand; glad for the spring bulbs that require a period of deep cold in order to germinate; glad that the soil’s structure will be broken up and made friable by frost, as it should. Winter is a vital part of the year’s cycle, one which native plants and animals have long become adapted to. We need it as much as we need spring rains and days of summer heat.

Of course, I’ve still been going out for walks and even the odd run, though the field paths too turned treacherous: feet churned the earth to mud and the mud there froze, melted, and refroze again. I’ve had to balance my desire for a PB (and to get quickly back inside) against the very real risk of stacking it, and caution has largely prevailed.

And every time I’ve gone out there have been fieldfares: chchacking from the hedgerow oaks, feeding on the beet fields, flying in small bands overhead. ‘In the bitterest day that ever blew,’ wrote John Clare,

The walk will find some places still and warm
Where dead leaves rustle sweet and give alarm
To little birds that flirt and start away.

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One afternoon I layered up in coat, gloves and knitted hood and headed out at about 3.30: the hour or so before sunset is one of my favourite times to walk, and one of the best times to see wildlife, too. I turned at one point and saw that behind me a vast, dense cloud was building and flattening at its apex so that it loomed over the now-distant tower of the village church like a Hokusai wave. Then, as my route took me slowly back towards the village the light began to change: I was now under the cloud which was turning the sky a strange, bilious colour. I took out my phone to take a snap and found that the screen was struggling to adapt to the ambient conditions, too, cycling manically from bright to dim, warm to cool. The cloud looked yellow to me, but when I filmed it it was bright pink; then an icy wind got up and within moments, flakes of snow began to whirl around me as it let go its cold burden. It was a strange, intense experience.

A day or two later we had about an inch of rain overnight, melting the snow and pushing our little river up and over the banks into its watermeadows. I went out with a friend and her dog, our route taking us across it on the road bridge; on one side the river’s course was no longer legible, lost among silt-brown channels and lakes. We found we couldn’t re-cross it to get home: not at the wooden footbridge, nor at what I still call the ‘cow bridge’, though there have been no cows on that part of the meadows since a year or so after I moved in. We had to walk to the next village and take another road bridge back.

And still it rose: the next morning the watermeadows were a sheet of sky-reflecting silver, the black trunks of trees emerging between scattered grassy tussocks. Mallards floated and a heron turned its back and beat lugubriously away from where I stood with my binoculars; I hoped for visiting waders, even the egret that I often see there, but there must have been richer pickings elsewhere. That night the floodwaters froze, albeit thinly, for what would prove the last time in that particular cold snap; just two more sub-zero nights and freezing days and we might have had the conditions for fen skating, a once-popular winter sport and East Anglian cultural tradition, now lost to modern farmland management – and climate change.

‘Skaters’ days are epic days,’ wrote Adrian Bell in a column for the Eastern Daily Press, probably filed in 1963. ‘As soon as ice will bear, everybody who skates, or has skated, starts to reminisce. Said one to me, “The ice was like green grass, and we could see the water-weeds waving underneath us.” Said another, “The ice was so clear you could see the fish in the lake.” Another, now elderly, remembers a certain Squire X who, when his lake froze, came on it among the villagers wearing a special pair of skates. A portion of the lake was left clear for him, and on this he proceeded to execute pictures with his skates, like one engraving on glass.” (Collected in A Countryman’s Winter Notebook, published by Slightly Foxed)

Even 80 years ago Bell sounded elegiac, yet little was he to know that winters would warm so fast that fen skating – a mania in the late Victorian period when spectators and participants would come from as far afield as the Netherlands when conditions were right – would all but disappear during the course of his son, Martin Bell’s, life. No fen skating championships at all have been held since 2010; meanwhile, the long ‘fen runner’ skates have gone from where they hung in the stables and outbuildings, appearing occasionally in local antiques shops; and the intangible heritage – the skills and knowledge – that made the pastime possible have slowly disappeared.

The new year began, as it always does, with previews of some of the books that will be published in 2026 – including a couple of mentions of my fourth novel, The Given World. The Weekend FT said, ‘The connection between people and place is at the heart of this novel, where the residents and natural features of an ancient valley are struck by uncanny events’, while Alex Preston in The Observer wrote, ‘May is ushered in by the great British nature writer and novelist Melissa Harrison. The Given World is a dark pastoral, where the river misbehaves and villagers share a recurring, uncanny dream. Through multiple voices, Harrison conjures a community sensing that something has shifted, writing about the English countryside and its people with her customary distilled intensity in a book about change and belonging in an apparently unchanged landscape.’

I don’t know about ‘great nature writer’ given how long I spent today trying to identify what I’m still not completely sure was a bar-tailed godwit, but I’m very grateful for the rest. I’m also opening a book on how many times the word ‘uncanny’ gets used in reviews.

Three things that aren’t on screens

Each month I collect together three things that have interested me, for good or ill, and which can be found in the world beyond your phone or laptop:

👉🏼 A nice thing: The cultural historian and mythographer Marina Warner has curated an exhibition at Compton Verney in Warwickshire called ‘The Shelter of Stories’, and it is absolutely wonderful. From textiles to Punch and Judy puppets, storytelling board games to Paula Rego engravings, masks to myth and legend, it is chock-full of magic and inspiration. My favourite piece was Francis Uprichard’s tactile and unsettling sculpture of a siren, with its echoes of bog bodies, but honestly, the whole thing was so brilliant, and so well curated, that it does it a disservice to pick things out individually. Compton Verney also houses a truly wonderful collection of folk art, so if you go, make sure you see that too. The Shelter of Stories is on until February 22.

👉🏼 An interesting thing: I don’t read a lot of nature writing these days; quite honestly, I find much of it unoriginal and sometimes self-indulgent – but when several people I respect tell me I really must read something, I do listen. And when it comes to The Cuckoo’s Lea by Michael J Warren I’m very glad I did: subtitled ‘The forgotten history of birds and place’, it’s an exploration of English place-names and their connection to birds, from cranes to cuckoos, kites to nightingales. Unfolding as a twinned exploration of topography and ecology, it’s written with an archivist’s intellect and a poet’s ear.

👉🏼 A thing that made me go ‘hmm’: On the way back from Compton Verney my friend and I stopped at Nature In Art, a collection housed at Wallsworth Hall in Gloucester. Lacking the vast wealth of Littlewoods heir Sir Peter Moores – which is what makes Compton Verney possible – it’s a very different proposition, so in some ways it feels a little unfair to compare the two. But if a gallery’s rather dated core collection consists of of paintings of lions and elephants, sculptures of rare birds, Victorian botanical watercolours and the like, it seems important that the labels and general curation should engage bravely and directly with species loss, colonialism, climate breakdown and the changing ways in which people understand and relate to nature. Perhaps Nature In Art’s temporary exhibitions and activities do this – at least I hope so – but it should be part of the context of the entire place.

That’s it for the first, free part of this issue of Witness Marks; below the paywall you’ll find the Village News, including an unfortunate event at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, thatch controversy, and a shocking new class at the Village Hall.

If you don’t want to subscribe but you’d still like to support my various endeavours, you can leave me a tip by going here. Thank you!

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And I remember, too, when I first moved to Suffolk: it was November and fully dark by 5pm. The wonky, beamed old cottage I was renting had no overhead lights and the ancient storage heaters ran out at about 3pm, at which point the temperature plummeted and the woodburner needed to be lit. I had no standing lamps and only one desk lamp, no idea where to buy wood or how to light a fire, no ability to split logs to make kindling, and little understanding that once it was dark outside, it was REALLY REALLY DARK.

I learned some important things very fast, and whether you are visiting friends in rural places this winter, or upping sticks and moving to the country, I would like to share them with you:

Firstly, I’m sorry, but your phone is not a torch. I understand that so far in your life it has convinced you that it is, but it isn’t. You may feel it’s plenty bright for your needs, but I promise you, when you’re stumbling about trying to find your car on a moonless night in a village entirely untroubled by street lamps you will soon realise it is next to useless. You need a proper torch with superbright LEDs, ideally a small one for your bag (like mine, above) and a bigger one for home. Possibly a head torch for outdoor tasks as well. Oh, and a reflective tabard and some of those handy snap-straps, too.

It is a sad fact that what may seem like a sturdy boot in town will soon reveal itself, on a winter walk, to be a complete liability, something Adrian Bell wrote about ruefully in his classic ‘back to the land’ memoir, Corduroy (1930):

“My boots, though, betrayed me, even after tramping over clods… verily they were for ‘mountaineering and tramping holidays’; for picnic lunches on green plateaux, for those walks recommended in the week-end pages of the newspapers, but for this lowly occupation of stumbling to and fro over a fallow behind harrows they were quite unfitted.”

DMs, much as I love them, are not suitable footwear for the countryside in winter. Neither are trainers, or Chelsea boots; wellies are useful when it’s warm but wet, but perishingly cold in temperatures below around 10 degrees; additionally, most of the ‘cool’ ones that you might actually like the look of will split and leak quite fast. For winter walks in the countryside you need deep cleats that will shed mud so you don’t end up wearing clay boots after crossing a field, a gusseted tongue to keep water from seeping in, and a Gore-tex lining to keep your feet warm and dry while preventing trench foot. You’ll thank me later, I promise.

Gloves, I’m afraid, are a similar story. The limp little fashion ones you bought from Accessorize can go in the bin, and you might as well put your elegant leather gloves from Marks or John Lewis at the back of the wardrobe in December and January, too. For outdoor jobs and walks of over about 20 minutes you’ll need something much more heavy-duty, and possibly water-repellent: mine are wool with leather palms and a thermal lining. No, they’re not smartphone compatible, but when it’s -7 (feels like -10) and I need to split logs that’s the least of my worries. Don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules.

We need to talk about knitwear. When I lived in London my warm jumpers often came from Topshop or Zara and I didn’t pay much attention to the fabric or the weight. Why would I need to? My flat had central heating, most Tubes and buses were warm and the office where I worked was often a bit too hot. Knits were a fun layer for winter but they weren’t about survival in the way that they are now.

These days I’m all about 100% wool in winter, and I also own a cashmere sweater purely for the non-bulky warmth, not as a luxury item (it goes underneath things and isn’t even seen). Nearly all the jumpers I brought with me when I arrived in Suffolk have gone to charity because they proved to be utterly useless; I replaced them with second-hand woollens from eBay and Vinted. When it’s really cold, like now, I layer my knitwear: today I’m wearing a long-sleeved thermal top, a wool jumper, and a huge chunky wool cardigan over the top (also mittens). Sometimes the top layer is a wool-blend shacket. Sometimes there’s a Uniqlo down vest underneath.

NB: I do appreciate that lots of rural homes – particularly newer ones – are centrally heated and deliciously warm, but you will still have to go outdoors at some point, and probably much more often than you think.

A word, here, about jeans. In winter it doesn’t really matter what the current jean shape is, whether that’s carrot or balloon, mom, boyfriend, girlfriend, cigarette or wide leg. What matters is whether they can be stuffed into wellies, or cuffed with thick socks so that you can put on your stout outdoor boots; and/or whether you can fit thermal leggings or long-johns underneath. I like a cool jean shape as much as the next woman, but I have learned to reserve them for a) clement weather and b) trips to town.

A few further points:

1. In homes without central heating an electric blanket is not a luxury item but an essential survival aid.

2. You might – against your will – find it necessary to buy a gilet.

3. I cannot guarantee that you won’t one day have to rod a drain.

That’s all for now – I’ll be back with a proper edition of Witness Marks on January 15th. As always, the first part will be free, while the Village News sits below a paywall.

Do let me know about your winter essentials in the comments!

This is just a note to say thank you for supporting my writing on Substack this year. I know that subscriber fatigue is setting in (I feel it myself!) and I really appreciate yo…

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Hi, how are you doing?

Welcome to the December edition of Witness Marks. If you’re new here and would like a quick tour of the village (and the newsletter), start by reading this post here.

Witness Marks goes out on or around the 15th of each month; in between times you can find me chatting away in Substack Notes. The first part is free, while the second part, the Village News, sits below a paywall. A subscription costs £3.50 a month if you pay via Substack Desktop (Apple add a bit on top if you pay via the app). If that feels like a stretch, send me a private message. No questions asked.

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I set out for a run on a day that, despite all the recent wet weather, began in mist and ice. Minus one, and thank the cold, blue heavens for it: closing in on midwinter and only the second proper frost we’ve had. November should be frosty; December should hold us in an iron grip. The bulbs sleeping in the ground need cold in order to wake up; the wildflowers need to be told when to rest. The soil in the fields and gardens needs frost to break up the clods and to kill off pathogens before next year.

Turning off the icy lane I ran on muddy field paths and tracks which the overnight frost had hardened. I had gloves on, and once my pace was up and my breathing had stabilised I felt fine. Mist cloaked the trees and the wet, low-lying fields near the river, and the air felt fresh and still. Here and there, especially in the newly bare branches of poplars, balls of mistletoe were revealed like huge, airy baubles: most were in the same tree as last year and the year before that, back and back to before I came here.

Mistletoe, a parasitic plant which is almost impossible to propagate by hand, is becoming more common, which is interesting given that it’s increasingly harvested in bulk to be sold in Christmas markets. The reason is thought to be connected, in a roundabout way, to climate change: a little bird called the blackcap, which was once a spring and summer visitor, is overwintering here in slowly growing numbers due to our milder weather, and mistletoe berries are one of its favourite foods. Blackcaps eat the pulp but wipe the sticky seeds from their beaks on to twigs and branches, and some of those seeds will germinate. Mistle thrushes (named for their love of the plant) and their visiting cousins the redwings and fieldfares also eat mistletoe berries, but they swallow them whole; the seeds do pass through in their droppings and germinate, but, it seems, at a much lower rate than those fastidiously wiped from blackcaps’ bills.

Now that Suffolk’s woods and copses are unclothed the square flint towers of the village churches can more easily be glimpsed across the fields. In winter it’s clear how many of the older tracks and field paths align with them: ancient arteries of faith and duty, landmarks for travellers moving from place to place.

As I ran the light rose and colour crept into the world. The beet campaign is still underway and I passed a huge red harvester guarding a vast mountain of dirty roots ready to be loaded into lorries later in the day. Only the pea harvesters are bigger, sometimes requiring escort vehicles on the A-roads as they move from farm to farm. On the short stretch of road I take between fields the tarmac was thick with mud from the tractors and trailers going in and out, and I thought of the neighbour who complained to me, last year, about the mud it left on his sports car. I don’t think I managed a particularly eloquent reply, but I suspect the look on my face was enough.

The river was high but back in its channel after the recent flood, and on the wet watermeadows the scrapes recently dug for wintering waders were wide and silver. As I came back into the village the ice had vanished from the lanes and robins and great tits were carolling in a weak winter sun. The ditch beside the road gurgled with water; the world was “all brightness above and glittering reflections below,” as Adrian Bell wrote of a similar Suffolk morning in December 1956: “Full dykes flashed: half-flooded marshlands seemed littered with flakes from the sky.”

Back at my cottage I scattered mealworms for the tribe of sparrows sitting hopefully in the winter jasmine. They were squabbling over them before I’d even closed the door.

As most of you know, this year I launched a free nature connection app for people in Britain and Ireland. It’s called Encounter and you can find it in the usual places: it is a guided nature journal that lives in your phone, and I think it’s absolutely bloody marvellous. Anyway, we’ve just announced our first partnership, something of which I am burstingly proud. It’s with Meaningful Planet, an ethical mobile phone network that restores nature by donating 10% of every bill to environmental restoration projects via The Wildlife Trusts. They run on the EE network and offer unlimited calls and texts, UK support and free EU roaming. Isn’t that cool?

And you know what’s even cooler? If you sign up to Meaningful Planet via our special link or by pressing the button you’ll get a 10% discount on your bills for life, and you’ll also be supporting Encounter with every call. If you’re out of contract, or soon to be, why not check them out and see what they offer? It’s a nice feeling, knowing that your money is doing good work in the world. 👇🏼

Explore plans

And if you’re in Britain or Ireland and haven’t downloaded Encounter already, may I encourage you to do so? We’ll be helping our users stay connected to nature over Christmas, with ideas and inspiration from 12 Days Wild to the New Year Plant Hunt. Search ‘Encounter Nature’ wherever you get your apps – it’s free!

Proofs of my new novel, The Given World, are still going out into the world and being read by friends and peers. Slowly it is becoming separate from me: instead of a place I go to in my head, alone, it is becoming a landscape explored by other people, and a product, too, that in May it will be possible to buy. I need to let go of some of my beliefs about it – including my attachment to the parts that never came to fruition but still live inside me as failures only I know about – and instead start to see it through other people’s eyes.

A couple of recent comments have truly floored me. has called it “an Under Milk Wood for the twenty-first century”, while Francis Spufford has said it’s “a brilliantly acute social portrait of English rural life… the best piece of serious fiction l’ve read this year”. I keep looking at these comments out of the corner of my eye, not quite sure if I can believe them yet.

Meanwhile, on Substack Notes I was given a valuable opportunity to rough out an ‘elevator pitch’ by , who asked me what it was about. “Honestly? Fuck knows,” was my first, flippant reply. “It’s my fourth and I kind of let it have its head. There’s a village in it, and a priory, and a river that may or may not be animate. Oh, and some Tarot. And a dying woman, and Weyland the Smith, and a sad farmer called Alan”. I then spent three days feeling disappointed with myself for undermining my own project, before trying again: “I guess it’s also a kind of fable about the Promethean-patriarchal world view and its attendant thanatophobia and how it might be countered by older and opposing energies on a beautiful but dying planet.” Still not right, but maybe closer to the truth.

I suspect I won’t really know what it’s about until May 14th, when it finds its readers. It’s only then that the process of meaning-making will be complete.

Do you still have any Christmas presents left to buy? Perhaps you’d like something good to read over the festive period? I’ve made a list of 31 lovely books about nature, noticing and the seasons, all of which would make great gifts. You can find them all at Bookshop.org, which supports bricks-and-mortar bookshops with every sale:

Three things that aren’t on screens

Each month I collect together three things that have interested me, for good or ill, and which can be found in the world beyond your phone or laptop:

👉🏼 A nice thing: The Norfolk composer and performer has just released a Christmas album, and it’s just as dark and strange and atmospheric as you’d expect. If you’re happy with Noddy Holder and ‘Last Christmas’, more power to you, but if midwinter to you is more about ice and ghosts and ancient, half-pagan songs, ‘Brightly Shone the Moon’ is what you need. “This is an album not for the party or the tree decorations, but one that carries you, hauntingly, through the passing of time,” says the Guardian. Those who believe in supporting artists can buy it on CD or as a digital download on Bandcamp, though it’s also on Spotify if you really must.

👉🏼 An interesting thing: Strictly speaking, a podcast is probably ‘on a screen’ – but you can listen to them while out walking, so I’m including one here. Anatomy of a Cancellation is an exploration of the furore surrounding Kate Clanchy’s book, Some Kids I Taught And What They Taught Me. I remember watching this unfold on Twitter, and as more and more people self-righteously or sometimes gleefully picked a side I had a growing feeling of absolute terror. Anyone who says that someone hasn’t been cancelled just because they still have a job/column/book deal is being strategically disingenuous: to ostracise or cast another human out ‘beyond the pale’ is an incredibly serious thing to do. Kate is here on Substack for those who want to know more.

👉🏼 A thing that made me go ‘hmm’: This week I learned that there are some kinds of hedgehog house (below) that can actually kill hedgehogs: amazing work, humans, give yourselves a slow handclap. If you’d like to buy a Christmas present for a wildlife gardener (or for yourself), has rounded up the best (non-lethal) hog houses, bird boxes, bee hotels, swift bricks and bat boxes: the ones that will stand up to the weather and actually help wildlife rather than just making you look like a good person. Her excellent list can be found here.

I went to the Christmas brass band concert at our village church, and it was wonderful. The programme began with a medley of 22 festive numbers and moved on to ‘Frosty the Snowman’, ‘The Coventry Carol, ‘Gaudete’, ‘Stop The Cavalry’, ‘In Dulce Jubilo’, ‘Mistletoe and Wine’ and more. There were traditional carols for us to sing along with, too (in all their weirdness: ‘veiled in flesh the godhead see’ and ‘lo, he abhors not the virgin’s womb’ etc) a raffle (which we call a ‘draw’ here in Suffolk), and home-made mince pies handed around in the interval. It was perfect: the ladybirds that hibernate every year in the church window woke up and flew about, there was confusion about how many verses of ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ we were supposed to sing, the musical director made a fart joke (bass trombone-related) and told an off-colour story about sheep-shagging despite the new lady vicar being in one of the pews, and ‘Hark the Herald Angels’ was pitched, as it always, always is, just a little bit too high.

Please enjoy this recording I made of the brass band playing ‘The Christmas Song’, commonly known as ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’, co-written in 1944 by Mel Tormé during a boiling hot summer in Los Angeles. I would have saved it for the Village News, but I wanted everyone to be able to enjoy it. Isn’t it wonderful?

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That’s it for the first, free part of this issue of Witness Marks. Below the paywall you’ll find the Village News, including: Viagra mystery, renegade choir, a ‘blue blob’ in the Nativity, the battle of the pub decorations and accidental egg glut. If you’ve ever longed for a life in the country, it’s for you.

If you don’t want to subscribe but you’d still like to support my various endeavours, you can leave me a tip by going here. Thank you – and merry Christmas to you, wherever you are!

Until next year –

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Hi, how are you doing?

I’ve debobbled my jumpers, taken delivery of a large load of logs, made membrillo and with it, quince syrup for cocktails, and lit my first fire. What about you, are you in winter mode yet?

Welcome to the November edition of Witness Marks, which recently and rather excitingly hit #1 in Substack’s ‘Climate and Environment: Rising’ chart, before being rightly overtaken by more serious publications. If you’re new here and would like a quick tour of the village (and the newsletter), start by reading this post here.

Witness Marks goes out on or around the 15th of each month; in between times you can find me chatting away in Substack Notes. The first part is free, while the second part, the Village News, sits below a paywall. A subscription costs £3.50 a month if you pay via Substack Desktop (Apple add a bit on top if you pay via the app). If that feels like a stretch, send me a private message. No questions asked.

First off, I’d like to share the news that my fourth novel, The Given World, will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann on May 14th 2026.

Bound proofs have recently been wending their way out into the world, which is exciting and terrifying at the same time. Here are a couple of early responses:

‘The Given World is a superb and timely novel, lit and linked by people, place and time. It sings with symbolism and beautifully reflects the frightening and uncanny transitions of our time – natural, personal, national, historical – through the microcosm of a village and landscape that comes to life spectacularly through Harrison’s brilliant mastery of description and detail. Spirited, spirit-filled, strange, resonant, heartbreaking and poignant, The Given World rings through the reader like a struck bell.’ ~ Rob Cowen, author of The Road

‘Melissa Harrison doesn’t just write the English countryside, she decocts, extracts, distills and blends its essences into fiction so real-world adjacent it haunts. The Given World is a masterful portrait of our time and place, which like the unquestionably animate river running through it, will not be contained.’ ~ Amy-Jane Beer, author of The Flow

In the coming months you’ll notice me talking more about the book and encouraging you to buy a copy. This isn’t a comfortable process at all – it isn’t for most writers! – but I hope you’ll forgive me, because I would very much like you all to read it. I’ve been working on it for years now, and it’s time to find out what people think.

In October Wych Farm’s trees turned quickly and all at once, blazing into oranges and reds and burnished golds; with little wind to strip them the woods and spinneys lay on our land like treasure, the massy hedgerows filigreed with old-man’s-beard and enamelled with rosehips and black sloes. Along the winding course of the River Stound the alder carrs were studded with earthstars and chanterelles and dense with the rich, autumnal stink of rot; but crossing Long Piece towards The Lottens the sky opened into austere, equinoctial blue where flocks of peewits wheeled and turned, flashing their broad wings black and white.

At dawn, dew silvered the spiders’ silk strung between the grass blades in our pastures so that the horses left trails where they walked, like the wakes of slow vessels in still water. At last, wintering fieldfares and thrushes stripped the berries from the lanes, and at night the four tall elms for which the farm was named welcomed their cold-weather congregations of rooks.

~ from my 2018 novel, All Among the Barley

Autumn this year has been as beautiful the one I wrote about in Barley: not just here in Suffolk, where the book was set, but up and down the country too. High levels of sunshine in spring and summer upped the sugar content in leaves; a mild autumn has helped the trees hold on to them as they colour. Not every November looks or feels like this one, and we should make sure we see, smell, hear and feel it before winter comes and all this glory disappears.

My friend and I walked across the fields to the nearby town to catch the Saturday market. It was a trip of about four and a half miles each way along paths and farm tracks that would have been familiar to thousands of villagers before us, for year after unchanging year: to go to church, or perhaps the nonconformist chapel; to buy goods, or sell livestock; for hiring fairs and holidays; to visit the bank or the blacksmith, the dressmaker or the inn, or to spend time with relatives. Generations of boots, for hundreds of years, had walked the old route we took.

The lanes were edged in yellow maple, lime and poplar leaves, the trees shaking themselves free in a brisk breeze as we walked as a dog will shake the shining wet from its fur. At a field corner an oak with its old roots in a pond sent drifts of leaves dancing down as we passed beneath it, and we stopped to try and catch them, laughing at our own absurdity. They lay on the weed-green surface of the water like a jigsaw. A red kite wheeled overhead.

About halfway there a little farm squatted in its valley. There were more ponds, for long-gone horses to drink from, and a little copse for firewood; several paths and tracks converged where glossy black hens and tiny, peeping chicks pecked about. There were old poultry and pig sheds and a bright children’s climbing frame, barns and grain stores and a rust-red paraffin tank, and a pantiled cottage emerging from dereliction into the glory of its new yellow render and cleanly repointed end wall.

The path rose again on to flat, open fields across which the church tower and roofs of the market town could now be seen. Many of our fields have been sown to mustard, grown as winter cover: a ‘catch crop’, it helps to mop up extra nutrients after the cereal harvest and may be ploughed back in, and while it’s there it suppresses weeds, stabilises and protects the soil and improves its structure. Yet now the mustard gave way to a different kind of green, and we stopped to gaze at it, puzzled. There were rows and rows of whatever it was, which looked to have been recently cut so that much of it showed only clean stems smoothed down by machinery. However, at the edges of the field some plants had been missed and were still bushy, and I picked a sprig, crushed its curly leaves a little and held it to my nose.

‘Parsley!’ said a dog-walker, breezily, as she passed us. ‘I know, there’s fields of it!’

‘Parsley!’ we repeated, a little dumbfounded. And so it was: acres and acres, stretching all the way to the market town’s margins.

‘It had its second cut yesterday,’ said the dog-walker, over her shoulder. ‘They might even get a third, with this mild weather we’re having!’

Perhaps it was destined for fresh-cut herbs in supermarkets, perhaps for a food processing plant, or the restaurant industry: who knows. But if we’d driven or cycled that day, instead of walked, I’d never have known it was there.

We were late setting out for the return leg home and the air had turned chill, the November sun low in a grey-barred sky. Hares loped in the fields, their dun shapes made more dimensional by their attendant shadows. Starlings, chattering, moved from field to field, and a flock of golden plover lifted and formed straggling Vs and loose shapes, circling and turning on their pointed, angled wings. These gorgeous waders move south from the Scottish uplands to winter in low-lying farmland, largely in East Anglia and the Somerset Levels. I’m not familiar with them and only identified them later, with help from fellow Substacker . I’ll be looking out for them every winter now.

As we walked the sun sank below a reef of cloud and blazed out a valediction to gild the uppermost half of a wood already dressed in reds and golds. Two military helicopters appeared, perhaps part of the ten-day ‘Pinion Titan’ exercise taking place at RAF Wattisham. They passed low and slow over us, the whump of their blades making the air feel briefly solid, and were followed, moments later, by another pair.

Nearing the little farm again in its dip of land we stood aside to let a vintage Ferguson tractor pass us, tiny and trim. As it neared we saw that it was driven by a teenage boy of perhaps fourteen or fifteen, another reclining like a lord in the jouncing trailer behind. We grinned and waved and got a toot on its breathy old diaphragm horn in return, and as they chugged away behind us, laughing, we heard the horn sound again, just for the fun of it; and a few paces farther, distantly then and fainter, it wheezed out like a punchline once more.

On November 8th it was my turn to contribute the ‘Nature Notebook’ column to Saturday’s The Times. I wrote about the elemental strangeness of woodcocks (including the fact that their pin feathers were once used to dissect moth genitals and for painting the coachline on Rolls Royce cars); the return of polecats to the English countryside; and the devastating effects of fireworks on wildlife, especially birds. I particularly enjoyed one comment below my piece which read: ‘Absolutely doing my best to increase the numbers of resident Woodcocks’, signed Dr D Woodcock.

Click here to read it, though apologies if it doesn’t let you in. I’ve long given up trying to understand how the paywall works.

I couldn’t resist showing you this gorgeous short film made by my friend Josie to tell the world about her beautiful new book, Letters From Wonderland. Isn’t it lovely? You can order a copy of Letters by going here. It would make a great Christmas present for anyone with a bit of curiosity and mischief to them, anyone who wants to tune into the world and the seasons, and find joy in each passing day.

And while we’re talking about books for Christmas, here’s a list of titles that I think would make great gifts for anyone you know, of any age, who’s interested in nature. If you buy them from my page I think I get a tiny commission (is that how bookshop.org works?), plus you can nominate a bookshop local to you which will get a cut of the order price – but you can order them anywhere, really. Just not Amazon, eh?

Three things that aren’t on screens

Each month I collect together three things that have interested me, for good or ill, and which can be found in the world beyond your phone or laptop:

👉🏼 A nice thing: The Kindling Cracker, pictured above, was invented by 13-year-old Ayla Hutchinson from New Zealand and is now sold all over the world. I could not live without mine – or more accurately I could, but I’d probably be missing several digits by now. All you do is stick a log in the top and hit it with a mallet, thereby neatly splitting it into two smaller logs or, in a few more blows, kindling. It really is that easy (and satisfying), and with no moving parts to wear out it’ll never need replacing. You can order a Kindling Cracker by going here.

👉🏼 An interesting thing: Bookbanks is a young charity that partners with bricks-and-mortar food banks to distribute books to people who might not otherwise have any. They’re hoping to expand, and are looking for support in the form of donations, volunteers, partners, fundraisers – and books! You can find out more by going here.

👉🏼 A thing that made me go ‘hmm’: One of the stranger symptoms of our growing disconnection from nature is misplaced reverence. Despite the (rightful) Sycamore Gap outcry not every tree needs to be treated as sacred; in fact, woodland management, including felling, is essential for biodiversity. Similarly, foxes (and other wild creatures) do not need hand-feeding, and with the exception of experienced wildlife rehabilitators, people who try to do this put animals at risk by teaching them to override their very necessary caution. If you want to protect landscapes, trees or wild creatures, joining your local Wildlife Trust or doing some environmental volunteering will better scratch that itch.

That’s it for the first, free part of this issue of Witness Marks; below the paywall you’ll find the Village News, including Quiz Chaos, Brontë Controversy, Surprise Sheep, Bridge Revolt and Holy Conkers.

If you don’t want to subscribe but you’d still like to support my various endeavours, you can leave me a tip by going here. Thank you!

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I’m in Brighton for the weekend on one of my frequent visits to look after Scout. Regular readers (and Stubborn Light listeners) will know that when I first moved to Suffolk from London, in 2017, she would spend two weeks with me and two with my ex-husband, Anthony. That arrangement continued when he moved to Brighton, but ended when she became very ill with pancreatitis a couple of years ago. She lives exclusively with him now, but when he travels I go to stay in his house and I hang out with my best girl.

Scout is eighteen now. Eighteen! That is impossibly ancient. She was about a year old when we first brought her home from the Dogs’ Trust, not long before we got married. She was at our wedding, and behaved perfectly: she’s very self-contained, not at all the kind of dog who needs constant management (except when off the lead around small, furry creatures – she is part terrier, after all). She’s had all sorts of adventures: she’s been to France twice, summited Helvellyn several times via Striding Edge (once with a GoPro on her harness, the footage from which ended up on Look North); she’s wild-camped on Dartmoor, swum in the sea, walked coast to coast, tolerated dozens of extremely loud house parties, jumped straight through the glass of an Edwardian French door into the garden of our old flat with nary a scratch on her, she’s outrun a pursuing greyhound through busy South London traffic and chased rabbits, squirrels and full-grown fallow bucks in turn, got a shock from an electric fence and run straight up the trunk of a 700-year-old oak tree. Although she rarely barks, and almost never ‘at’ or ‘to’ humans, she did once try gently to alert us when our shed was being burgled at 2am. Thinking there was a fox in the garden, I sent her back to bed.

Things are different now. She’s deaf, she has cataracts and she’s lost a lot of her peripheral vision. She needs a special low-protein, low-fat diet, her kidneys are slowly failing, and her back legs don’t reliably hold her up. She sleeps for most of the day, and it can be hard to tempt her to eat. Her continence isn’t the best, either. Looking after her is a full-time job, and I am in awe of the care and commitment Ant shows her. He cooks her meals by hand – sometimes more than once if she doesn’t fancy what he’s made – and the washing machine is on constantly, full of the reusable pet mats that go in her bed and on the floor. He can’t go out and leave her for very long, and I don’t think he’s had an unbroken night’s sleep in the last year.

It sounds awful, I know, but somehow it isn’t, and I know he’d say the same. The care we offer her now is simply the measure of our love and gratitude to her for being in our lives for all this time. It doesn’t matter if she does a surprise poo, as long as we can whisk it away and she isn’t distressed by it. It doesn’t matter that a walk to the end of the street and back takes half an hour, as long as she gets to sniff an interesting smell. ‘Every day should have a little bit of joy in it for her,’ Ant says, and I think he’s right. Sometimes that’s seeing a dog she really likes, and wagging her tail just a little bit. Sometimes it’s roasting a chicken and giving her some (she’ll stand in the door to the kitchen if you roast anything in the oven, making it very clear what she expects). On a warm day we might move her bed into the little walled garden so she can lie in a sun puddle for half an hour. Small joys, but god, how they matter. I feel incredibly privileged to be able to do these things for her.

I’m writing this now because I won’t be able to, after. I’ve known this for some time. Last week two dogs I cared about died unexpectedly, one of whom I was ‘dogmother’ to. I absolutely adored her and it has torn the heart out of me, and I know worse is to come. I won’t be able to turn those feelings into ‘content’, so I want to write about Scout now, while she is still here.

Loving an old dog is so different to loving a young one. Her strength, stamina, bravery and endurance were what we admired for so many years: how impossible it was to tire her out, how confident she was with other dogs (though sometimes unsure about people), how game, how willing to do things, go places, have adventures. Those things changed slowly, and it wasn’t until the pancreatitis that we really accepted that she was old, and frail. There was a period a few years ago when she became increasingly anxious and this was because her sight and hearing were going. She would startle very easily because she stopped being able to tell that you were behind her or about to stroke her. The sound of her collar tag unexpectedly touching her food bowl made her, for a little while, frightened to eat. Looking back, we were slow to understand those changes, so invested were we in our shared conception of her as a dauntless, fit, and probably immortal dog – and so reluctant were we to accept our own mortality, too, which is part of what dogs teach us as they age. It didn’t help that for a very long time she still looked young and well-muscled. Even now that she’s skinny and rickety, people who see her in the street can’t quite believe how old she is. ‘She’s eighteen,’ I tell absolutely everyone who stops to pet her, or whose face I see soften at the sight of her wobbling along. She’s a bit of a celebrity in Ant’s part of Brighton, and when I’m there I feel unbelievably proud to be on the other end of the lead.

Some of it is hard, there’s no getting away from it. Scout’s nails overgrow as she isn’t walking much, and clipping or filing them distresses her. Getting her to take her medication is almost impossible: she will find a tablet or capsule, no matter how well disguised or wrapped up it is, and eject it from the side of her mouth. I rarely get a wag when I arrive now, and her face is no longer expressive, perhaps because she can’t see us clearly, so she isn’t reading or reacting to ours. Once she’s upright, her back legs mostly hold her up unless she stops walking, at which point she gently begins to collapse backwards and sideways (this can be particularly risky if she’s having a poo). Evenings are harder than mornings and sometimes she eats dinner from a semi-reclining position, like a Roman patrician. She likes one of us to stay with her while she eats, which can be necessary because often she forgets what she’s doing and needs her attention gently redirected to her bowl. Increasingly often now she’ll have a bad day, or a bad few days, and we wonder if – we wonder –

But she has remade me, and she continues to remake me. In my early thirties, when I was trying to work out whether I should have children, I couldn’t bear the thought of walking down a street at slower than snail’s pace while a small being whose life I was responsible for minutely examined uninteresting things; now, it is one of the great privileges of my life. The decision I made about kids was the right one, but I am so grateful to have been offered an opportunity to experience and express such infinite tenderness. It’s a fierce feeling, too, and as we inch our way along I scan our surroundings for danger. A friendly but boisterous dog could easily push her over. A cyclist on the pavement might make her startle and flinch. I find myself, quite often, burning to protect her. A few weeks ago an impatient driver beeped to hurry her out of the parking spot he wanted. I could have torn him limb from limb.

Eighteen years: the time it takes to rear a newborn to adulthood. The time it takes for Europe and North America to drift 36cm apart. Enough time to marry, build a life together, feel it falter; to eventually, painstakingly, become friends again. Tens of thousands of walks, hikes and strolls with her black-and-white haunches bobbing somewhere ahead of us, leading the way. Worlds end when dogs die; eras come to a close. We three are living at the very end of an age.

It’s November now, and the sun is low in the sky: there won’t be another sun puddle in the garden this year. But the heating is on, and here Scout still is, curled up in her bed right next to me: the dog of my heart, impossibly dear. She sighs, and lets her chin drop on to her blankets. I hear Ant’s car pull up outside.

Welcome to the October issue of Witness Marks. If you’re new here and would like a quick tour, start by reading this post here.

Witness Marks goes out on or around the 15th of each month; in between times you can find me chatting away in Substack Notes. The first part is free, while the second part, the Village News, sits below a paywall. A subscription costs £3.50 a month if you pay via Substack Desktop (Apple add a bit on top if you pay on the app). If that feels like a stretch, send me a private message. No questions asked.

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Home at last, after ten days away. I went to Brighton for a few days to look after dear Scout (who is now eighteen, bless her wobbly legs!); to London to talk about my new novel to book buyers and journalists; and to the Isle of Wight to see my friend Martha, who has helped me create the Encounter app, and to talk about Homecoming at the island’s literary festival. It was good to be away, but even better to come home.

As soon as I could I took myself out for a walk to find out what had changed while I was away: at this time of year, when summer’s held breath has given way to autumn, the fields and woods are different from one day to the next. It was one of those afternoons when the clouds sit low and the air feels very dense and still: there was no breeze at all, and sound wasn’t carrying far.

Along the margins of the lanes leaves were collecting: yellow poplar, birch and broad hazel, drifts of little, lobed hawthorn, ruddy field maple, crumbly horse chestnut fragments craquelured by leaf miners, but few oaks or ash leaves yet. On one verge the stands of alexanders I prevented from setting seed in spring were pushing back through soil they had savagely denuded of competitors, and I slowed on my walk so I could pull some out. Five years is what I calculate it’ll take to control them in the village. The plants are biennial and the seeds short-lived.

As I was crossing the watermeadows there came the cry of a buzzard: three thin shrieks, repeated at intervals. A juvenile has been haunting the village since it fledged in the woods, calling, as they do, to its parents to be fed. Buzzards only recolonised East Anglia in the 1990s; previously, and for a couple of centuries, they’d been confined to western counties and Wales, driven out of other areas by persecution and the widespread use of DDT which affected so many birds of prey in the 20th century.

I heard the harsh bark of a muntjac, too, the sound flatter and deader than it would have been in crisper weather. These big-haunched, omnivorous, non-native deer breed year-round, unlike other species, and are comparatively sedentary: instead of travelling in herds they will simply remain in a copse until they have stripped it of everything edible they can reach, eating saplings, ring-barking mature trees so that they die and destroying the understory with its vital nesting habitat.

Out on the fields tiny cabbage whiteflies whirled over the oilseed rape, their movements as undirected as specks of ash. The sugar beet harvest had begun while I was away, and here and there were hills of muddy tubers waiting to be taken by lorry to one of the local processing plants.

In 2023 the wet weather – including Storm Babet – made harvesting difficult as in many places the huge machines couldn’t operate safely on the waterlogged fields. It was a logistical nightmare for British Sugar, which controls the annual campaign and issues permits to growers carefully timed so that the factories can run continuously and efficiently over winter. That year the campaign had to be extended and farmers given help with transport costs; many beets were dug late but had to wait in piles, slowly losing what sugar content they had, until they could be delivered to a different plant than originally intended. Deer visited the huge monoliths at night, nibbling the muddy beet down to their white insides up to a clear browse line.

A hedgerow oak was alive with invisible linnets, all singing simultaneously but not a single bird to be seen amid the branches, even with patience and binoculars. These lovely little finches will readily band together in winter with other small birds, but my Merlin app assured me it wasn’t a mixed flock. Their chirruping has a lovely musical quality; not for nothing are they called, in France, linotte mélodieuse.

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In a ditch lay the skull of a roe buck clad in a curled and loosening sheath of hide. It will have been shot and gralloched there, the meat taken away, the rest left; its legs were probably not far off, if they hadn’t already been taken by a fox. I picked it up by one short antler, smiling to myself at how odd I must look as, strolling back into the village, I was passed by first one neighbour and then another, in their cars.

At home I left the skull to be cleaned by detritivores and decomposers in my garden, where the largest hornet I have ever seen was piloting itself ponderously around like a flying clockwork toy. I checked how much of last winter’s wood remained in my woodstore and wondered if it was too soon, and too warm still, for autumn’s first fire.

In recent weeks I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at two really well-organised and well-attended book events: the Leiston Book Festival and the Isle of Wight Literary Festival. Both excelled at what is often known as ‘author care’, something which makes authors sound like terrible divas who must be soothed and primped, but in fact means the simple kind of forethought that allows a writer to do the public-facing part of their job well. Things like ensuring there’s something to eat, if you need it; that you’re met by someone who will show you where the loos are and where, backstage, you can take a few moments to collect your thoughts/consult your notes/do any breathing exercises you need to; making sure there’s water on stage, that the mic set-up is explained and the audience will be able to hear you, that you have books to sign afterwards, and a pen and someone to manage the queue, and generally, checking that you’re comfortable.

Because it’s no small thing to speak in front of large and disparate groups of people, nor to answer questions afterwards or meet a queue of total strangers with an open heart, and often it’s the smaller festivals that really do it well. And when it works, I think the audience can feel it: a relaxed writer who feels welcome will come across more engagingly on stage, and will be better at talking to people too. And then everyone goes home with the sense that they were part of something collaborative, something that mattered – rather than simply having sat on a hard chair for an hour watching someone mouth off.

A couple of weeks ago my turn came around to contribute a Nature Notebook to The Times. I wrote about autumn being a good time to find nests, as the leaves fall, and the two I found in my garden; about sparrowhawks and sparrows and how one doing well was not the cause of the other faring badly; and about the common shrew that regularly, and against all zoological wisdom, goes for a swim in my pond. You can read it here.

I also wrote this month about Nicola Chester’s new book, Ghosts of the Farm. The paired story of Miss Julia Maud White, who successfully managed a wartime farm in Chester’s own village of Inkpen, and of Chester herself and her own relationship to farming, it’s a much-needed contribution to the story of agriculture in England. And if you don’t already know of Caught By The River, do check it out: it’s a treasure trove of nature writing, music, art, merch, and other ‘strictly offline pursuits’.

Speaking of rural writing, on my bedside table right now is the poet Alison Brackenbury’s new book, a labour of love called Village. In it she explores the layered histories of six houses in a Lincolnshire village between 1841 and 1971, packing in an absolutely astonishing amount of research, storytelling, anecdotes, rumour and legend. It’s a busy, warm, rabbit warren of a book, full of humour and hardship: a treasure trove for anyone interested in the social history of the countryside.

Three things that aren’t on screens:

Each month I collect together three things that have interested me, for good or ill, and which can be found in the world beyond your phone or laptop:

👉🏼 A nice thing: CAPTAIN TIPTOES ARMOUR PLATED LAPSNACK. Say that again; sluice it around the palate in your brain. CAPTAIN TIPTOES ARMOUR PLATED LAPSNACK. Good, isn’t it? And they taste even better (sesame peanut variety). Honestly, these are like crack to me. In the ‘once you pop you can’t stop’ stakes, Pringles have absolutely nothing on these spicy crunchers. Available here.

👉🏼 An interesting thing: Do you miss synth-pop bands from the 80s like Ultravox, OMD and The Human League, all reverb and dry ice? Or perhaps the post-punk stylings of Joy Division and Echo & the Bunnymen? Of course you do. That being the case, you might also like the new album from Nation of Language, ‘Dance Called Memory’. You can purchase it on vinyl and CD, and frankly you probably should.

👉🏼 A thing that made me go ‘hmm’: Born With Teeth is a play about the relationship between Shakespeare and Marlowe, currently on at Wyndham’s Theatre in London. It stars Ncuti Gatwa as Marlowe and Edward Bluemel as the Bard and can best be described as ‘queer fanfic’, a line I’m stealing from a friend. It was clever (here and there), funny (here and there) and sexy (here and there), but what it wasn’t was moving, and the problem lay in the direction, which was frenetic, physical and never let you sit with a line long enough for it to really land. Under this direction Gatwa, who is incandescently charismatic, couldn’t help but overpower proceedings, with the result that it all felt a bit one-note. Still, it got a standing ovation from lots of the younger people in the audience, which (I think) is who it was aimed at (god knows we don’t want a culture where everything is aimed at me and my ilk). More info here.

That’s it for the first, free part of this issue of Witness Marks; below the paywall you’ll find the Village Newsletter, including cows on trampolines, a miniature music festival, a bad smell, suspicious egg disappearance, a desirable rural property with lots of natural light, and the return of the Gate Joke after a worrying three-day hiatus.

If you don’t want to subscribe but you’d still like to support my various endeavours, you can leave me a tip by going here. Thank you!

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Our barns they are full, our fields they are clear,
Good health to our master and friends.
We’ll make no more to-do but we’ll plough and we’ll sow
And prepare for the very next year.

~ Two Young Brethren (Copper Family version)

Hi, how are you doing?

Welcome to what was very briefly the 11th fastest-rising Substack in the ‘Climate and Environment’ section – and could be again, who knows? If you’re new here and would like a quick tour of the village (and the newsletter), start by reading this post here.

Once again, this post is too long for email (sorry!) so if that’s how you’re reading it you may need to click through to the website or read it on the app.

Witness Marks goes out on the 15th of each month (or thereabouts); in between times you can find me chatting away in Substack Notes. The first part is always free, while the second part, the Village Newsletter, sits below a paywall. A subscription costs £3.50 a month; however, if that feels like a stretch, send me a private message. No questions asked.

I love the feeling of change that September brings. Many of our fields have now been ploughed and instead of the rich, gold embroidery of their crops they show their clean, brown underskirts; others have had forage rape and turnips drilled directly into the stubble, something I’m inordinately grateful for on my morning runs, as the going is much easier than on freshly turned earth. The first batches of pheasant poults have been released, ready for the shooting season to start on October 1st; they run mindlessly around the lanes and field margins in small gangs, trying as best they can to grasp such new phenomena as dog-walkers, ditches – and cars. Small birds, now out of moult, are beginning to flock together in the fruit- and berry-laden hedgerows, as they will until the breeding season begins again next spring; they shake out and up into the wind like chaff blown from the cover crops, too, which here are full of wildlife-friendly delights like quinoa, phacelia, kale and sunflowers, now starting to set seed.

Although many wildflowers still straggle on in bloom here and there – albeit without spring’s vigour – yellow leaves now line the edges of our lanes: it’s still a little early for true autumn leaf-fall, but the recent dry conditions and windy weather have meant that some trees, especially silver birches and poplars, have been shedding theirs early. We’ve had rain, though – at last! – and the woods and copses are exhaling in relief.

The days following rain are a good time to look for fungi. I wish I was knowledgeable enough to forage for edible mushrooms, as some of my neighbours do. The only one I’d be confident eating is the giant puffball, I think. Nothing else in the world looks like it.

This year’s fig harvest has been absolutely astonishing and despite eating them every day, I’ve ended up putting bowl after bowlful on the verge with a sign saying ‘Help yourself’ because they just – keep – coming. Even the wasps and blackbirds can’t keep up! I try not to think too hard about the fact that my tree grows just downstream from my septic tank. Some things are best ignored, especially as – for me anyway – figs already hover on the border between delicious and disgusting. Something to do with the texture, I think. And the tiny dead wasps.

I’ve managed a few sea swims this summer – not always possible given that the North Sea is rarely celebrated for its welcoming temperatures, and I am not one of those people who like to punish themselves. However, this year it warmed up well (mixed feelings about rising sea temperatures, obviously). It should stay like that well into October, so I’m hoping for a few more dips. There have been lots of jellyfish about this year (also due to the warm water); they’re only moon jellies, and harmless, yet somehow, when I brush against one, it does always make me shriek.

I had one slightly nasty moment when I waded in only to be pushed briskly over by a wave and then, as I was struggling to get up, knocked over again, which left me with a grazed and bleeding knee and a purple bruise on my hip. But then, as I was sitting on the shingle feeling spat-out and sorry for myself, a seal swam past looking like a hopeful labrador, as they always do. AND the beach café does vegan Magnums, which is very exciting and very dangerous at the same time.

Sea swims notwithstanding, it’s autumn, and I love it. I’ve put the duvet back on my bed, taken down the bamboo fly screen at the back door for another year and debuted a new pair of sheepskin slippers, cannily bought on sale in June and stashed away until now. And my chimney has been swept, ready for lighting the woodburner (I don’t have central heating). That probably won’t happen until October, but you never know – and anyway, the local sweeps will be all booked up by then.

I’ve been gathering kindling, too, so it’ll be dry and ready to use when I need it. I cannot understand people in rural areas buying kindling, which is expensive and often comes wrapped in plastic, or in nylon nets. The world, at least where I am, has not yet run out of sticks.

I can’t tell you how much I adored Jenny Uglow’s new book, A Year With Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer. I enjoyed Richard Mabey’s 1986 biography, and – as you probably know – I have read and re-read both the Natural History and White’s Journals; in fact, I wondered what another book on the famous parson-naturalist could realistically offer me, given that Gilbert already looms pretty large in my life. What I hadn’t thought possible was that I could come to love him even more.

I have a soft spot for books structured around a calendar year, and this one uses the seasons really cleverly. Although nominally set in 1781, the midpoint of the Natural History’s gestation, it dips around in his journals and letters to include all his main interests, obsessions and preoccupations at their appropriate seasonal times, while also telling – in parallel to the year’s course from January to December – the story of his life. It’s very clever.

But what it does best is make the man real, all 5’3” of him. Endlessly curious, astonishingly patient, thoughtful, energetic, cheerful and philosophical: there he is, anxiously watching the swallows build, checking on his tortoise, Timothy, measuring the water in the well, writing to his niece Molly, and noting down the weather. Uglow shows him enfolded in his loving family, enmeshed in a bustling village and its rural economy, and in correspondence with a wider, changing world; in these pages he is not described, he simply lives once more, buttoning up his waistcoat, shading his eyes from the low winter sun: noticing, marvelling, questioning.

At the end of the book I felt a strange grief, as though someone I had known and loved had gone. And then I planned another visit to Selborne, to walk in his footsteps again.

Grief, too, at the news that the wonderful Jonathan Main of Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace has died. He got right behind me from the very start, when I published Clay, and I loved popping into the shop when I lived in South London, and chatting on the phone after I moved. He was a good man, someone with principles: endlessly diffident but with a dry sense of humour and a proper, bone-deep belief in books.

The website is open for orders or you can phone up to ask for anything that’s not on there. I know Justine, Karen and the team would appreciate it.

Homecoming didn’t win the illustrative category in this year’s Wainwright Prize, but I had a lovely time at the awards ceremony at FarmEd in the Cotswolds. I met Adam Henson from Countryfile and, even more excitingly, my illustrator Amanda Dilworth – we’d only ever been in touch virtually until then. I also met Helen Scales and David Farrier, and caught up with my friends Jules Howard and Ben Hoare – Ben’s book The Secrets of Bees won the Children’s Non-Fiction prize. The overall winner was Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare, a book I really loved. It feels good when the right book wins.

I’m pleased to say that the re-run of my Countryfile spot, talking about Ronald Blythe, did have the part excised where I said (at their instruction) that he didn’t own a television. Relief! More people seem to have watched it this time than when it first went out, a couple of years ago – going by the neighbours and acquaintances who have stopped me to mention it, anyway.

I wonder if the incapacitating sense of horror that attends seeing oneself on film ever goes away. Making the Stubborn Light podcast stopped me feeling like that about hearing my own voice, which suggests it could dissipate with repeated exposure. Not something I’m planning on, though.

I’ll be at the Leiston Book Festival in a few days, on September 20th, alongside a great line-up of countryside and nature writers. I think some tickets are still available here; they include all six events, plus lunch. How civilised!

Three things that aren’t on screens

Each month I collect together three things that have interested me, for good or ill, and which can be found in the world beyond your phone or laptop:

👉🏼 A nice thing: Secrets of the Thames, the mudlarking exhibition at Museum of London Docklands, is, as I’d hoped, a banger. I used to love fossicking around on the foreshore near Tate Modern, often with my goddaughter, and I still have a stash of common finds such as clay pipe stems and bowls, pigs’ teeth, medieval pottery sherds and ships’ nails. Since then there’s been a crackdown on ordinary folk having a go at larking, which is a shame – but at least you can go and see some of the treasures other people have found. It’s really well curated: the explanatory labels are good, there isn’t too much of each type of thing (nobody needs to see 300 hand-axes, or all the Doves type that’s ever been mudlarked), there’s stuff for kids without it feeling entirely directed at them and the city’s history emerges gradually as you go around. As a way of drawing people to the new museum site I think it’s a smart move. It’s on until March 1st next year.

👉🏼 An interesting thing: Ecotalk is a mobile network that puts its profits into restoring nature. Chris Packham’s on board, which is a good look for them, and coverage is via EE so should be reliable. I’m thinking of switching, but in my (rural) area the main provider is O2 (we have a mast nearby) so I need to do a bit of asking around first to check EE will really work. If you know EE is fine where you are it could be a good thing to do: you can keep your number, they’re promising no price rises and while roaming isn’t free they’re hinting heavily on their socials that it’s about to be. Meaningful Planet are doing something similar, also via EE and with free roaming – but without the flashy Insta ads.

👉🏼 A thing that made me go ‘hmm’: I wish Gilbert White’s house, The Wakes in Selborne, Hampshire, wasn’t shared with the Oates Museum. No shade on Captain Oates or his explorer uncle Frank, obviously, and it was an incredibly generous gesture for Robert Washington Oates to buy the house and pay for it to be converted to a museum. It’s just that I want to go there and think about my beloved Gilbert, and it’s a bit hard when there’s Antarctic memorabilia all over the place. Sorry!

While you’re there: Louis VI, whose upcoming Barbican show was my ‘interesting thing’ for last month, was a guest on Jamz Supernova’s 6 Music show on September 6th. You can listen back here.

That’s it for the first, free part of this issue of Witness Marks. Behind the paywall you’ll find the Village Newsletter, including Ixenford In Peril, trouble at the Easthithe village fair, a new Gate Joke in Comedy Corner, and an update on the naked cyclist (!)

If you don’t want to subscribe but you’d still like to support my various endeavours, you can leave me a tip by going here. Thank you.

As Jon always wrote at the end of his Bookseller Crow emails: keep fighting evil!

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The Ixenford Village Fête is over for another year, and from what I can tell it was a great success – though we await news, as always, as to whether ours raised more than Easthithe’s. Last year our takings were ahead by quite some margin, but it was quite hard to gloat enjoyably as it rained solidly all day for theirs, which was held – somewhat unwisely – on the already-sodden watermeadows. Parts of it were too wet even for wellies and all the second-hand books got mouldy. It wasn’t a fair fight.

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Hi, how are you doing? Welcome to Ixenford, a rural village in East Substack. I’m glad you made it here.

Substack feels to me like a bustling city during the Enlightenment: full of debate, its busy coffee houses, theatres and salons all fostering learning, the arts and innovation. But during the Enlightenment there were also sleepy little villages where quieter lives were lived, where someone might have kept a journal noting the arrival and departure of the summer birds, their local curiosities, the doings of their neighbours, and the progress of the crops.

I’m a writer with a particular interest in rural communities. I wrote about a contemporary village in At Hawthorn Time; a small Suffolk district in 1934 in All Among the Barley, and my own village in a podcast, The Stubborn Light of Things. I have a new novel coming out in 2026, set in a valley, ‘a green crease sunk into England since forever’. It’s called The Given World.

I live in the heart of a Suffolk village I’ll call Ixenford, in a small, brick-built cottage with a huge fireplace, a chimney lintel bearing old apotropaic marks, and a worn and dipped brick floor that sits directly on the earth. Once one of several cottages in which the local poor were housed (stemming from a bequest made a villager back in the sixteenth century), my cottage began life as a tiny one-up, one-down and shared a pump, well and privy with two neighbours. Over the years it’s gained a kitchen and bathroom and two extra rooms, the privy is now my shed, the well dreams quietly under my woodstore, and the pump, which has lost its handle, lives on, slightly wonkily, outside my back door. The cottage’s beams look to have been reused from another dwelling, while at least one of its old iron windows is older than the house itself; the stairs were made within living memory by the brother of my neighbour, Bill.

Ixenford is home to fewer than 200 souls. There is a flint-faced Norman church (St Edmund’s) where a manticore and a wodwose haunt the weathered stone spandrels of the porch; close by stand a long, low, predictably haunted pub with a famously out-of-proportion chimney, a village hall, and a small recreation ground called Coronation Field. There are several farmhouses, three in the village itself and more within walking distance. These are almost all now private dwellings, their barns and outbuildings either demolished, turned into housing, used for agricultural purposes by farmers based elsewhere, or converted to what’s called ‘post-ag’ use. Although there are several modern homes and bungalows, and a row of ex-council houses, we’re not on mains gas or sewerage and there are no street lights for miles: on clear, dark nights the Milky Way arches over this little huddle of houses and the 21st century all but disappears. It’s enough to take your breath away.

Among Ixenford’s older buildings lie the traces of a post office and shop, a forge, another pub, and the windmill that once ground our flour; two of the narrow lanes bear the names of local farming families whose graves crowd the churchyard. The descendants of one of these families still live on here. There’s a stand that sells eggs called the Egg Box, the mobile library calls once a month and Steve parks his grocery van up by the church once a week. There are some second homes and a couple of Airbnbs, but this isn’t the Cotswolds: the village is a mixture of middle- and working-class people, and as well as retirees there are children, too. It’s neither a rich person’s holiday destination nor a rural museum piece, but a living, working place.

The slow, winding River Ixen passes close by, crossed by several road- and foot-bridges and bordered by wide, flat watermeadows that often flood in winter. On the other side of the river lies another village, Easthithe, where my friend Alice lives. Although only a very short walk away, Easthithe has its own church, village hall and pub, which is also named – like ours and several others hereabouts – The Plough (for a long time people didn’t travel far, so it wasn’t necessary to distinguish them). A switchbacking B-road runs between fields and takes drivers to a small market town, where the junk and antique shops are full of old scythes, thatching tools, milk churns and iron tractor seats turned into bar stools: relics found in barns and during farm sales, evidence of the district’s agricultural past.

Around Ixenford and Easthithe lie a patchwork of irregularly sized arable fields, some very sandy, some set on clay, others scattered, all year, with flints. They’re mostly sown to wheat and barley, but at times they also grow sugar beet, oilseed rape, field beans and stubble turnips for sheep. Sections of these fields are increasingly planted with colourful conservation mixes: these feed pheasants, partridges and wild birds, and are also great for insects. There are otters and water voles, badgers and foxes, hares and rabbits, stoats, weasels and both polecats and polecat-ferret hybrids; there are far too many roe, fallow and muntjac deer, while as well as the usual suite of owls, raptors, common and smaller birds there are yellowhammers, linnets, corn and reed buntings, skylarks, the occasional water rail and kingfisher, herons and little egrets, and a few tree sparrows; and in spring, if you know where to look and listen, you might be lucky enough to encounter cuckoos, nightjars, nightingales and turtle doves. As you’d expect for an arable landscape there are large numbers of rooks and wood pigeons, and pheasants are reared for shooting in some of the woods.

Dotted around and between the cereal fields are old ponds, many of which would have watered the heavy horses once used to work the land. There are pastures, some cut for hay and some grazed (there are small numbers of sheep, beef cattle and even a hobby herd of longhorns nearby); while here and there are deep declivities left where sand was dug out sand to make house bricks, like the ones from which my cottage was built. Our hedges are a mixture of blackthorn, hawthorn, field maple and hedgerow oaks, trimmed for much of the year by wild flowers and embroidered with dog roses in June and July. There are also lots of woods and small copses like the Fairy Wood – largely oak, ash and hazel, with alder, poplar and crack willows near the Ixen, some pine stands for timber, and a couple of willow plantations on the wet watermeadows, all of it criss-crossed by an excellent network of footpaths on which I daily tramp about. Although there are fens nearby, this isn’t fen country, and there are small hills and rises, creating an undulating effect. Now and again there is even a modest view.

While it is, on the one hand, a quite ordinary, working landscape, it’s also etched everywhere you look with what watchmakers call ‘witness marks’: traces left by people and processes in the past. These marks are what I’m interested in as a writer, and are largely what led me here: from the frank archaeology of the foundations of old tied cottages, lost now among brambles, to the shapes made by our ancient village lanes; and, more ephemerally, the badger dung full of cherry stones in cherry season, and the trails left by nighttime creatures in the meadows’ long grass.

There it is: a little, living village held within its sheltering fields. I hope you can hold this picture in your mind as you read each new edition of Witness Marks.

Witness Marks goes out on the 15th of each month; in between times you can find me chatting away in Substack Notes. The first part of the newsletter is always free; the second part, a Village Newsletter full of all the doings from Ixenford from nature notes to the farming calendar to village gossip, sits below a paywall. A subscription costs £3.50 a month.

Thank you for reading, and for supporting my work.

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