I’m back on one of the recurring themes of this collection of notes: books about places and the notion of finding or making a place. I have been thinking of Ronald Blythe, who loved the English countryside.
Blythe, who spent decades at Bottengoms Farm on the border of Suffolk and Essex, would pass a wheatfield and mention that country people were still building bonfires in wheatfields on the Twelfth Night in Kilvert’s time. “In Kilvert’s time” meant something to him. The Rev. Francis Kilvert kept a diary from 1870 until his death in 1879. Not everyone reads it, but Blythe was the kind of writer who did. Blythe also was the kind of writer who thought about how pagan traditions like midwinter fires had been incorporated into Christian traditions that he observed. He saw all that when he looked at a wheatfield in winter in the place he called home.
When Blythe passed through Ovington, population 53, he mentioned that all the schoolboys knew the village had once been home to a murderer. He was referring to Lt. John Felton, who assassinated the hated Duke of Buckingham in 1628.
I am reading Blythe’s Next to Nature with delight. But I also despair that I can’t look at the countryside with that sense of history. I’ve been a student of Texas history and am trying to catch up on the history of Georgia, my new home. But I doubt my sense of history will ever be that deep.
I ought to add that Blythe despised efforts to turn rural life into an amusement park. He ridiculed the idea of charging Londoners steep prices for tours to spots where Constable had painted his pictures. Blythe saw English rural life as a living tradition, rather than something that belonged in a museum.
I’m not sure most Americans would see rural life as a living tradition: something viable, something meaningful.
• Sources: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, pp. 17 and 39.
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