This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
After emerging from a tunnel near the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, the High Speed 1 railway line passes the Rainham Marshes, a large expanse of wetland between the Thames and the A13 road. No one could call that stretch beautiful, hemmed in as it is by industry, transport corridors and sprawl, but I often take HS1, and find myself intrigued by their gloomy splendour. That area is what the psychogeographers call a “liminal zone”, a space that is neither city nor suburb nor countryside, but something else — a borderland.
It turns out I am not alone in my fondness for the strange loveliness of the Thames estuary. John Lewis-Stempel opens England: A Natural History with a stroll along the river near Tilbury, noting the abundance of bird species — lapwings, redshank, sandpipers and godwits — and the presence of unusual but important plants such as sea buckthorn and scurvy grass, the latter an intermittently reliable treatment for the disease that plagued seafarers until the late 18th century.
His keen eye, trained to examine the natural world over decades as a farmer and naturalist, misses little. He records the curious life of the unglamorous ragworm as meticulously as he describes the more conventionally beautiful kestrels and seals.
Lewis-Stempel is the finest living example of that perennial English type, the countryman-writer. Having written for many years about his own farm in the Welsh borders and the lives of the various animals which frequent it, he has turned his attention to a dozen landscapes all over England which are emblematic of the country and entwined with its history and culture.
His walk along the Essex bank of the Thames evokes Elizabeth I at Tilbury, thinking foul scorn that any foreign prince should invade her realm, as well as Great Expectations and Conrad and pirates hanging in chains as a terrible warning to any avaricious or mutinous mariner in the approaches to London. A skylark serenading his excursion on the Sussex Downs brings forth reflection on the poet George Meredith, whose work inspired Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. On the wild heathland of Dorset, he recalls Hardy’s powerful tragedy The Return Of The Native, which has a kind of savage mythic energy, despite its nominally real-world setting.
Lewis-Stempel doesn’t use the phrase, but the mythic energy of certain places is core to his vision. Several of the locations featured have special personal significance, most obviously his own Herefordshire farm in the glorious Malverns, but always in the background is the sense that they also embody, in some mysterious way, the nation itself. “A farmland made tame but beautiful by our ancestors” is how he praises the rolling hills of his home turf.
The chapters on heath and moorland allude to the fearsome reputation that such stark and inhospitable terrain held in the collective imagination for many centuries, from Beowulf to The Hound of the Baskervilles. At another point he refers, with admirable seriousness, to the fallen of the Great War as dying for England’s green and pleasant land.
There is a striking sincerity to the entire book. Not that Lewis-Stempel is po-faced or humourless; he can do light-heartedness with the best of them. Rather, his affection for the areas he describes is sufficiently profound that his deep learning and his long experience shine through.
The account of foraging for edible berries amidst the heather on Spaunton Moor in Yorkshire combines clear expertise, lightly worn, with historical knowledge — I was entirely unaware that Yorkshire miners picked berries after their shifts well into the 1960s — and a wry self-awareness that nowadays such activity often resembles “a constructed middle-class improving experience”.
Refreshingly, he is not afraid of extended lyrical description, even flights of fancy. Serious-minded moderns tend to fear the dreaded “purple prose”, presumably as a throwback to the bad old days of florid Victoriana, but it has its place. “Nightjars are ventriloquists, the males swivelling their heads as they purr, so their song pours down their backs, and swirls upon itself” is clever and memorable rather than overwrought.
The introduction to England: A Natural History explicitly situates its author in the centuries-old lineage of English lyricism about the natural world, mentioning amongst others John Clare and Richard Jefferies. The latter was also an important influence on another great nature writer, Henry Williamson, best known for Tarka the Otter, so Lewis-Stempel is in good company.
Like most of his predecessors in the genre, he has a strong romantic streak. He enjoys a bracing swim in Crummock Water in the Lake District, which inevitably reminds him of the idyllic free-range childhoods portrayed in Swallows and Amazons, and he clearly regrets the way in which mass tourism has eroded the quiet and solitude of the Cornish coast.
As with the writings of Clare and Jefferies, the book is marked in parts by a wistful mood, the inescapable awareness that nature is always fighting a long defeat against more or less destructive human incursions. For Clare, born in 1793, the enemy was the enclosures and the draining of the Fens; for Jefferies, two generations later, the enormous and rapid expansion of London and other cities in the later 19th century.
Lewis-Stempel is not a purveyor of gloom or pessimism, but cannot avoid noting, as a matter of empirical reality, the many and varied threats to his beloved countryside: habitat loss, pollution, traffic, crowds, urbanisation and industrial farming. On his own farm, traditional hay meadows — disappearing in most of the country since the middle of the last century — have survived.
Almost every page hums with an instinctive and understated but unmistakable patriotism, grounded in a detailed appreciation of the land, its endless variety and its eternal rhythms. Lewis-Stempel would doubtless sympathise with Christoper Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not: “This is England! A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe.”
It would be perverse to read England: A Natural History as any kind of political manifesto. An author who takes delight in watching mayflies dance over the Norfolk Broads, and sits in silence on the high hills to identify the birds soaring overhead, is clearly preoccupied with other, more transcendent matters. And yet in the closing passages, when we take our leave of Lewis-Stempel watching the sun set over the wild Atlantic at Portreath in Cornwall, I was thinking of our fraught and interminable rows about national identity and the meaning of patriotism.
Perhaps once in a while we might put to one side considerations of ethnicity, matters of ideology, the drama of clashing values, and unite around the glories of our flora and fauna and the unique magic of particular places.
