Guest review by Laura Parker: THE TATTOOED HILLS - JOURNEYS TO CHALK FIGURES, by Jon Woolcott

 

"Like all the best travelogues about Britain, this also reveals something of ourselves. The story of the chalk figures is a tale of human nature ..."

Laura Parker is the author of Stone on Stone, a journey along Britain’s drystone walls, due to be published in April 2027. She writes features and reviews for Country Life magazine, covering nature, art and the history of the countryside. She has also been published in Little Toller’s online nature collection The Clearing, and arts/nature/culture journal Caught by the River, as well as in Scottish Field and Scottish daily The Courier. Find out more on Laura’s website.

Countryside writers often find a natural feature to hang their words upon: rivers, paths, trees, coastlines. For Jon Woolcott it is geoglyphs: the white horses and giant figures cut into the hillside of southern England. This mostly limits him to the chalk downs that run through Dorset, Wiltshire and East Sussex – Jon admits to being ‘south-minded’ – but there is no shortage of material for a writer who loves to dig in for stories.

In a chapter about the Long Man of Wilmington, for example, he manages to fit in entertaining vignettes variously about William Blake, young men on the grand tour, Benjamin Britten, photographer Lee Miller, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, a weird far-right sect called Woden’s Folk, and Noughties TV stars Trinny and Susannah. This may sound a bit too eclectic for some, but it will appeal to magpie-minded readers who enjoy the company of someone able stitch the fun bits of history skilfully together.

He writes that many hill figures ‘emerge unsteadily from history, badly documented’, and this gives plenty of scope to explore the changing ways we have tried to interpret the past as he introduces Victorian antiquarians, archaeologists and opinionated clergymen.

The Cerne Abbas Giant, for example, the erect exhibitionist etched into a river valley north of Dorchester, has provoked much speculation. Is he a Romano-British Hercules? Or inspired by Oliver Cromwell and only etched out of the turf in the 17th century? Archaeologists using a novel dating technique have now discovered the giant was Saxon. At times revered, at others covered up in embarrassment, the 55-metre high figure has seen some modifications, such as when the National Trust inadvertently created a member increase during a restoration programme.

Woolcott makes most of his visits on foot, with all the frustrations of not being able to find the figures or see them clearly, and it would be surprising if the book did not inspire some readers to pull on their boots and figure-hunt for themselves.

In the book’s portraits of each figure, the timespan can readily shift from ancient days to the era that young people would call history but some of us just think of as fond memories. There are many rewarding diversions into popular culture, including his memories of growing up beneath the image of a giant Panda face, created by students, that appeared overnight near Salisbury. This figure – no longer visible – summons up the absurdities of the 1960s, but also shows how these figures have come and gone. Unlike standing stones, they are largely temporary. Examples of disappearances include the Red Horse of Tysoe in Warwickshire, initially lost to the enclosure movement and finally planted over in the 1950s, and the Black Horse of Bush Howe in Cumbria. Those that have endured have done so for an interesting variety of reasons; from deference (military badges, or the mounted figure of George III riding away from Weymouth) to expedience (the Westbury White Horse was concreted over by a penny-pinching council in the 1950s for easier maintenance). Chalk figures can fade or become overgrown. Often they survive thanks to the care and rechalking organised by the local community, which makes the longevity of the free-running Uffington white horse even more remarkable. This is one of the oldest and most enigmatic of chalk figures, dating back to the late Bronze Age. It, ‘more than any, haunts imaginations.’ The horse’s curiously modernist design appealed to artists such as Eric Ravilious and music idols such as XTC, with the cover of their album English Settlement, and Kate Bush, who made her Terry Gilliam-directed Cloudbusting video there.

Like all the best travelogues about Britain, this also reveals something of ourselves. The story of the chalk figures is a tale of human nature: how we create infeasible works of art, tell old stories and embroider new ones, disbelieve ancestors, celebrate the land, and look after things that are important to us, even if we don’t understand why.

The Tattoed Hills is published by Aurum.

More of Laura's choices:

Land Beneath the Waves by Nic Wilson

The Place of Tides by James Rebanks

BOOKS OF THE YEAR Part 1 - chosen by our contributors

 

This is the first of three round-ups by our reviewers. Each has chosen their own best read of the year (or one of them) which did not necessarily have to be published during 2025. It's also our chance to thank our wonderful contributors for supporting us throughout the year - we couldn't possibly do this without you. Thank you all!

Susan Elkin chooses Orbital by Samantha Harvey: Nothing I’ve read this year quite surpasses this 2023 novel. The setting is the International Space Station which orbits Earth sixteen times a day. That means a continuously unfolding display of Earthly sunrises and sunsets, 250 miles below. Two Russians, one American, one Brit, one Japanese and one Italian maintain the vehicle internally and externally, servicing lab mice and plants, obeying a strict exercise routine to prevent muscle loss. Each is instructed by ground crew and there’s email contact with home. “Swimming” round the capsule, they hook themselves into hanging sleeping bags at night like bats.

Meanwhile the profound beauty and wonder rotates beneath them. Orbital is a heartfelt hymn of praise to the glory and wonder of our richly coloured planet and a timely reminder that national boundaries and all the hostility they cause are irrelevant. Succinct, poetic, philosophical and breath-taking, Orbital is a veritable Everest (visible from the ISS, apparently) of imaginative writing.

Susan Elkin's latest publication is a short story collection, Unheard Voices: Tales from the Margins of Literature

Lizzie Enfield chooses Purge by Sofi Oksanen: As a travel writer and novelist, I always seek out fiction set in the places I visit. Novels reveal the emotional texture of a landscape and the hidden histories of those who live there in a way guidebooks cannot. When I travelled to Estonia for the first time this year, Sofi Oksanen’s Purge offered a powerful introduction to a country with a scarred yet optimistic spirit. The novel intertwines the lives of two women - Aliide, an elderly survivor of Soviet oppression, and Zara, a young victim of modern trafficking - whose fates converge amid a legacy of fear, shame and endurance. Oksanen’s taut, lyrical prose captures both the brutality of history and the fragile strength of those who endure it. Reading Purge while exploring Tallinn and its countryside lent every ruined farmhouse and quiet forest a deeper resonance. It’s a haunting, unforgettable story of survival, memory and the resilience of the human spirit - both painful and positive. 

Lizzie Enfield is the author of Living With It. She has also written these BBC articles about Estonia.

Sheena Wilkinson's choice is By Any Other Name, by Jodi Picoult: We’ve all heard the theories that William Shakespeare may not have written all the plays attributed to him. I never wanted to believe this: the myth of the Bard’s humble beginnings and preternatural understanding of human experience at its deepest and widest was so romantic. But I have been entirely convinced by the thesis underpinning Jodi Picoult’s novel By Any Other Name. Building on compelling evidence that some of the plays could have been written by Emilia Bassano, an educated Italian Jew who, at thirteen, was given to the Lord Chamberlain as his mistress, Picoult fictionalises Emilia’s eventful life, setting it in counterpoint to that of a modern-day woman playwright: times have changed, but women still struggle to have their voices heard as loudly as men’s.

Bold, readable, wearing its considerable research lightly, By Any Other Name turned what I thought I knew on its head.

Sheena Wilkinson's latest publication is Miss McVey Takes Charge.  

From Lesley Glaister: I adore eccentric characters and the eponymous narrator of Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, is exactly that. Monstrously selfish, devasted by her twin sister’s chance of happiness in marriage, which she tries to sabotage, she’s melodramatic, pedantic, impatient, witty, really a terrible person, and one of the most engaging and enraging narrators I’ve read for a long time. This claustrophobic novel is darkly funny and shocking in parts. I loved it! Much gentler is an audiobook that kept me spellbound: The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. This family saga set in Sri Lanka, spans the first 77 years of the twentieth century. I found it deeply moving, almost unbearably sad, and with an intriguing theme of medical discovery. A quick round-up of other favourite reads this year: The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller; Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy and Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley.

Lesley Glaister's latest publication is A Particular Man.

Cindy Jefferies' choice is The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn: This novel embraced me, as if I were another child living in that gently crumbling house. I eavesdropped on the adults, listened to stories and was part of the close knit group of children, whose lives were a mystery to their parents. There is a melancholy in being ignored one moment and admonished the next. But childhood is not where this novel ends. Once the dead whale is found, its bones eventually turned into an outdoor theatre, Cristabel, who found it, also finds purpose for herself and the others.

Time moves on while plays are written, costumes made and props obtained. Adults attend, years pass and war comes.

I wouldn’t have missed reading this book for anything. If the hallmark of a good book is that the characters live on after the last page is turned…then this is certainly it!

Cindy Jefferies' latest publication is The Honourable Life of Thomas Cheyne.   

Laura Parker chooses Clear by Carys Davies: If you can read a book in one evening, it’s either very short, or very good. Clear is both. It feels timeless, even though it is set in a specific era and in a very particular place. Its historic backdrop is the Scottish Clearances and the formation of the Free Church of Scotland, but, much more urgently, it is about two men on an island: Ivar, who lives in isolation, and John, who is sent to evict him. From the moment Ivar finds John unconscious on the beach, the story moves at a fine pace, yet still manages to be a slow drama of two people getting to know each other and revealing our basic human needs: survival, trust, and love. It deals with several moral dilemmas, and right up to the end, it is impossible to predict what is going to happen. Profound, and deeply satisfying.

Laura Parker's current project has the working title Drystone Country.

Sue Purkiss recommends The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese: a richly textured family saga set in what is now Kerala. It begins with a young girl who is sent to marry a much older man, a widower. Surprisingly, the two gradually come to love each other, and they are at the heart of their small village, Parambil, as it grows and thrives.

Meanwhile, a parallel story tells of a talented young Scottish surgeon, who comes to India to work. His promising career is blighted by a tragic accident. It’s not evident for some time how these stories will link, but eventually they do.

It’s a long book, full of drama and with its fair share of tragedy. And yet it’s also full of warmth and humour – and hope. I found it to be a riveting read – the sort of book you really don’t want to end.

Sue Purkiss runs two blogs: A Fool on a Hill, her book reviews, and Let's Write! with ideas for creative writing.

Catherine Butler chooses 100 Tales from the Tokyo Ghost Café by Julian Sedgwick and Chie Kutsuwada: In 2021, Julian Sedgwick and Chie Kutsuwada published Tsunami Girl, a novel about a quarter-Japanese English girl, Yuki surviving the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and coming to terms with its aftermath. Tsunami Girl, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, was formally audacious, switching between a conventional novel (written by Sedgwick) and a manga (authored by Kutsuwada). Its hybrid telling, reflecting Yuki’s own cultural hybridity, worked unexpectedly well.

Two years later, the same pair produced 100 Tales from the Tokyo Ghost Café. This book plays even more radically with form. Sedgwick and Kutsuwada are not only authors but characters in the story, shepherding a stray child (who may or may not be a ghost) from a yokai-haunted café in Tokyo to his home in Aomori Prefecture, and encountering many creatures and stories (some traditional, some brand new) in the process – including a brief encounter with Yuki from Tsunami Girl. If you enjoy Lafcadio Hearn’s tales of Japan’s spirit world, or a cleverly told story of any sort, I highly recommend this one.

Catherine Butler is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University. Her latest publication is British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture.

Chosen by Yvonne Coppard: Kent Haruf's The Tie that Binds. Haruf never sets out to shock or mystify: his writing is so beautiful there is no need for tricks of the trade. Instead, the reader is folded into his story-telling arms and gently immersed in the sleepy rural town of Holt, Colorado, where the intertwining tale of ordinary folk in extraordinary situations gradually unfolds. It is April, 1977. Edith Goodnough, 80 years old, lies in a hospital bed under police guard. She has lived an apparently drab, quiet life on a farm on the outskirts of town. But Edith is about to face trial on a charge of murder. Her life, and her family’s, will be laid bare.

If you like this, move on to Haruf’s trilogy: Plainsong, Eventide and Benediction. They are all perfect reads to turn to after a run of spooks, spies, thrillers and impenetrable award winners.

Yvonne Coppard has retired from a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship and is now working towards becoming a Lady who Lunches.

Chosen by Miriam Halahmy: The Painter's Daughters by Emily Howe. A 2025 debut novel about the daughters of the 18th century painter, Thomas Gainsborough, this book won the Mslexia prize for unpublished novels. It is always difficult to bring alive great art in fiction. Not every author can achieve it. But Emily Howe has given us a deep and satisfying window into this great artist, as well detailed descriptions of everyday life at the time. It’s a smorgasbord of colour, smell, light, people and landscape.

But this is not the main focus of the story. Peggy, Gainsborough's youngest daughter, lives in fear that sister Molly’s mental health affliction with be discovered. It blights their lives from childhood. When the family moves to Bath and the girls enter society, things get worse. This is a family coping in silence with a stricken child, while the artist struggles to keep his patrons on side. A story of family life in all its complexities, deep sisterly love and severe illness without medical support. I thoroughly recommend it.

Miriam Halahmy's latest title is Pomegranates for Peace, published in November.

And finally for this first batch, Celia Rees picks Vianne, by Joanne Harris, the prequel to Chocolat. Vianne is a young woman, barely out of her teens. She is pregnant and alone, after recently losing her mother. She finds herself in Marseille, a city she doesn’t know. She is broke and finds work in a bistrot, even though she can’t cook. The people she meets and recipes they share teach her more than cookery. Vianne learns to love food and through the Provençal dishes she prepares in the bistrot and the chocolates she learns to make, she discovers how to love people because food is made to share. Food is on nearly every page and is described so vividly one longs to share it, whether the salty pungency of pissaladière, or the delicacy of a rose fondant. There is also a sprinkle of magic, as there is in Chocolat, as tantalising and mysterious as my favourite ingredient: xocolatl spice.

Celia Rees's latest novel is Miss Graham's War, first published as Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook.

What's your Book of the Year? Please tell us in the comments, and come back next week for more great recommendations in Part Two!

Guest review by Laura Parker: LAND BENEATH THE WAVES by Nic Wilson

"At one level, this is the story of how the natural world entranced, comforted and sustained her as she developed her expert eye ... there is a lot to learn and enjoy in her observations, and in her intense feeling for the land."

Laura Parker is the author of no books (yet), but she is working on one about drystone walls, and has written a growing collection of articles published by Country Life magazine. Her work covers animals and the art and history of the countryside. She has also been published in Little Toller’s The Clearing, an online journal in which writers explore and celebrate the landscape we live in, as well as in Scottish Field and Scottish daily The Courier. Find out more on Laura's website.

As one might expect from a Guardian Country Diarist, nature runs through this book like the chalk bedrock that unrolls beneath Nic Wilson’s adopted home territory of Hertfordshire. Despite its bold opening statement: ‘I am not a memoirist’, what ensues, initially, are some delicate childhood recollections of birding with her father and being introduced to nature close up: moths, rosebay willowherb, birds’ nests. At one level, this is the story of how the natural world entranced, comforted and sustained her as she developed her expert eye. Trained as a teacher, Nic is a natural educator and there is a lot to learn and enjoy in her observations, and in her intense feeling for the land. There is beautiful, tangible writing: ‘Oak bark knuckles my back, its touch reassuringly solid.’

But Nic’s past – and her present – is clouded with pain, both mental and physical. Some stems from the experience of her mother, struggling with undiagnosed ME in the 1970s, a time when women’s pain and illnesses were ignored to the point of tragedy: Nic and her brother were nearly taken away. The act of writing this book reveals to her the impact of a childhood spent not wanting to worry an ill parent. Counselling helps her to unlock her writing. ‘Can open; worms everywhere’ reads her journal.

A withdrawn but clever child, silent in class, Nic begins to find comfort in reading, and self-expression in drama. At university, she locates soulmates, a partner, and a land she really loves in the north-east of England. Happiness begins to percolate through habitual anxiety and mysterious seizures. But when she and her new husband are uprooted to move to Hertfordshire, the balance again becomes precarious, and she seeks a new anchor. It is her exploration of this unpromisingly (to her) tame landscape, that for me contains the most interesting and thoughtful writing. Through observation, research, and natural curiosity she digs below Hitchin’s historic reputation as a centre for lavender and finds it was also once famous for its nightingales. She learns which Victorian collector planted the giant sequoias, and how the land was worked, and enclosed. The fossils found in the railway embankment lead her to imagine how a Conulus (extinct sea urchin) made its way under Cretaceous oceans. She introduces her small children to nature, discovering plants and insects on the way to school, and starts to grow vegetables. Alongside the quotidian, she seeks to explore what the land means to her and why. ‘And what it could, or possibly should, mean to every one of us.’

The book is laced with personal pain. After suffering post-natal depression, Nic receives a late diagnosis of coeliac disease, and outlines the inconveniences of a diet that not only restricts food choices but inhibits her social life. In flashbacks, she uncovers how her dissociative seizures could have been caused by past trauma, subconsciously triggered by extreme emotion. Gradually, and against her natural instinct, she lays herself open about how these fits make her feel as though she is trapped in an alternative reality, horribly ashamed. Then her health crisis deepens: ‘fatigue and anxiety, my old nemeses, have called on a new accomplice, pain, to complete the unholy Trinity.’

Adenomyosis, an excruciating uterine condition, is tardily diagnosed and unsuccessfully treated, echoing her mother’s story.

She turns to landscape as her salvation, sitting it out in local wooded wetlands. As she hits rock bottom, her busy writer’s mind finds parallels. ‘When you reach that lowest point, it’s worth taking a careful look at the bedrock that caused your fall.’ She identifies with mineral beneath her feet: ‘Though I’d like to be flint…I’m all chalk.’

Parts of this book are cris de cœur, painful to read. And in contemplating the state of nature, Nic Wilson inevitably deals with loss. ‘What have my children done to deserve this?’ She also – not that this is a comfort – finds parallels in the past. The famous nightingales hit a sudden decline in the 1880s. And she asks a question about our relationship with history that resonated with me most:

‘I want to ask how, without an awareness of local landscape history, without some sense of what once existed – those plants, animals, habitats we have disregarded, forgotten and destroyed – we can ever truly assess the legacy we’re leaving for future generations.’

Land Beneath the Waves is published by Summersdale. 

Laura Parker has also reviewed The Place of Tides by James Rebanks

See also Nature Cure, by Richard Mabey, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Guest review by Laura Parker: THE PLACE OF TIDES by James Rebanks

 

"This experience has caused Rebanks to dig much deeper as a writer. His enforced time out has him reaching for greater profundity while maintaining a simple, thoughtful style."

Photograph: Kitty Parker

Laura Parker is the author of no books (yet), but she is working on one about drystone walls, and has written a growing collection of articles published by Country Life magazine. Her work covers animals and the art and history of the countryside. She has also been published in Little Toller’s The Clearing, an online journal in which writers explore and celebrate the landscape we live in, as well as in Scottish Field and Scottish daily The Courier. Find out more on Laura's website.

James Rebanks made his name with two books: one about his life as a shepherd in Cumbria (A Shepherd’s Life) and the other on the changing face of agriculture over three generations (English Pastoral). So he was right to warn his 150,000 X-followers that his next book would be different.

The Place of Tides takes him to Fjaerøy, a Norwegian island just below the Arctic Circle where he sheds his modern existence: no internet, barely any phone, limited power, no running water. For seventy days.

It is his account of ten weeks spent in the company of Anna, a woman of seventy determined to continue an age-old way of existence that she herself took up only later in life. Anna harvests down from eider ducks, gathering a material used for centuries for luxurious warmth, and continuing a tradition which has provided a living for the women of this fishing community since Viking times. It is a way of life that is dying out, not just because of cheaper and more abundant alternatives, but because the ducks themselves are getting scarcer.

Highlighting the fine balance between human intervention and nature, the ‘duck women’ build shelters for the birds as they come ashore to lay their eggs, and protect them from predators such as sea eagles and mink (the latter introduced by humans). In earning the trust of the ducks, their protectors take their reward at the end of the season by gathering the down the birds use to line the nests.

Rebanks discovers there is more to his stay than deploying his farming skills through raking seaweed or repairing shelters. Bewildered, he struggles to contain his impatience as the two women (Anna has brought a friend, Imogen) settle down indoors to knit for their first two weeks on the island. Rebanks is left unmoored, reflecting on the frenetic existence he has left behind, along with his wife and four children. He resolves to be a better husband and father. There are still eight weeks to go.

So far, so satisfying to a nature book reader: being taken to a remote frontier world, guided to closely examine a new habitat – there are many intricate observations of the wildlife and weather on the island – and to be made aware of a diminishing natural resource.

Unexpectedly, it is the deepening human relationships that become the heart of this book. Anna turns out to be different from Rebanks’s first arresting sight of her, a tiny but fierce ‘half-wild’ woman standing proud on the shoreline. She is older, frailer, at first unable to work. Constantly trying to be respectful of her world, Rebanks is frequently unsure how to proceed, a Gulliver in a strange land.

“I had sensed I ought to make myself much smaller, working to their commands, relinquishing responsibility.”

He realises, for the first time in his life, that he is in a place entirely run by women. By ‘paying attention’, he begins to see how men treat women, and he cringes. He also learns a great deal from Anna’s attitude to her work.

“Rarely have I seen anyone so absorbed in each living moment .. This way of living demanded a loss of self, a surrendering to the rocks, rain, wind and tides.”

Amid the poignancy – this is Anna’s last season – there are lessons for him, and for us.

“In this radically pared-back life she had found peace and meaning. She was the waves, the light, and the terns rising and falling on the bay. She was the guardian of this place … powerless against the scale of the natural forces at work and against the issues affecting the oceans, yet fierce in her determination to try.”

This experience has caused Rebanks to dig much deeper as a writer. His enforced time out has him reaching for greater profundity while maintaining a simple, thoughtful style.

Rebanks and the women leave the island with a harvest amounting to 2kg of down, which must then be painstakingly cleaned. It is barely enough to make two quilts. But both he and his readers have gleaned so much more about our threatened world.

The Place of Tides is published by Allen Lane.

See also: James Rebanks' English Pastoral reviewed by Judith Allnatt